George William Septimus Piesse
English chemist and perfumer
George William Septimus Piesse (30 May 1820 – 23 October 1882), known as Septimus Piesse, was an English chemist and perfumer. Piesse was a leading author and innovator of modern perfume ideas, inventing the concept of notes in perfumery that are still used universally today. He was the co-owner of Piesse and Lubin, a perfume house that created some of the most popular scents of its day.
Education
Piesse studied at University College London.
The Art of Perfumery, and Method of Obtaining Odors from Plants
Piesse's The Art of Perfumery is an important early book about the methodology behind extraction methods and blending in perfumery. It is considered Piesse's "opus magnum". In the book, Piesse introduces the idea that olfaction can be described in ways that correlate to the musical notes on a diatonic scale. He is credited with creating an "odaphone," or a scale related to categorizing and ranking the notes by octave.
The Art of Perfumery is also notable in that, in an 1862 edition, Piesse introduced ideas relating to synesthesia and smound. He suggested that sounds and scents are linked in the brain: "Scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain definite degrees."
One of The Art of Perfumery's most enduring legacies is Piesse's popularization of the use of synthetic materials.
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This entry incorporates text from “George William Septimus Piesse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.