Perfume may lead to depresssion

Perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils and aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents used to give the human body, objects, and living spaces a pleasant smell. The word perfume used today derives from the Latin "per fumum", meaning through smoke. Perfumery, or the art of making perfumes, began in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt but was developed and further refined by the Romans and Persians. Although perfume and perfumery also existed in East Asia, much of its fragrances are incense based. The world's first recorded chemist is considered to be a person named Tapputi, a perfume maker who was mentioned in a cuneiform tablet from the second millennium BC in Mesopotamia.

Recently, archaeologists have uncovered what is believed to be the world's oldest perfumes in Pyrgos, Cyprus. The perfumes date back more than 4,000 years. The perfumes were discovered in an ancient perfumery factory. At least 60 distilling stills, mixing bowls, funnels and perfume bottles were found in the 43,000-square-foot (4,000 m²) factory. In ancient times people used herbs and spices, like almond, coriander, myrtle, conifer resin, bergamot, but not flowers.

LONDON: ladies, beware! Too much of perfume may mean depression for you. Researchers have carried out a study and found that women who wear strong perfume are clinically depressed as they gradually become insensitive to smell, The Daily Telegraph reported here on Saturday. "Our scientific findings suggest that women who are depressed are also losing their sense of smell, and may overcompensate by using more perfume," lead researcher Prof Yehuda Shoenfeld of Tel Aviv University was quoted as saying.

According to the researchers, certain diseases cause the body to attack the olfactory system which in turn governs the ability to detect smells. "This means an impaired sense of smell could be a pointer to other serious conditions."

Prof Shoenfeld has suggested that depression could have a biological cause rather than a psychological disorder. "We also believe that depression has biological roots and may be an immune system response to certain physiological cues."
In fact, the team looked at the links between depression and autoimmune conditions such as lupus, arthritis and rheumatism before coming to the conclusion.

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