Attar v/s Concentrated Perfume Oils (CPOs)

What is the difference between attars and concentrated perfume oils?

For thousands of years flowers, herbs and oleoresins were distilled to extract their essence. These natural oils were used for medicines, as well as, in perfumery. An attar is such a natural extract that people used to perfume themselves.

According to Wikipedia, ‘the word ‘attar’, ‘ittar’ or ‘itra’ believed to have been derived from the Persian word itir, meaning ‘perfume’, which is also believed to be derived from Arabic word itr.

Essential oils are typically derived from botanical sources such as flowers, resins, woods, spices, etc. Most commonly these oils are extracted via hydro or steam distillation methods using deg and bhapka arrangement. Many a times the attar composers run co-distillations for a desired effect.

Traditionally these essential oils are ‘pulled’ into sandalwood or other appropriate carrier oils at the end of the distillation apparatus. The resultant product is then separated from floral waters. The oil part, which floats, is filtered into a separate container and allowed to stand for few days. This oil component is called as an attar.

With the demand for good quality perfume compounds, the availability of quality raw is on the decline which directly helps escalate costs in the open market. To keep a tab on the rising demand perfume houses decided to turn towards nature identical and artificial perfumery raw materials.

Perfumers today have more options to work with than ever before in the history of perfumery. With the stretching palate, perfumers have been able to reduce the cost and over dependence on natural raw materials as inputs to their perfume products.

Another problem to tackle was to ensure consistent quality which is a huge issue in natural perfumery where every batch has it’s own unique quality and no two batches will have an identical scent profile.

With the above issues in mind, perfumers created concentrated perfume oils (CPOs). These are 100% parfum category where alcohol has not been used to dilute the perfume. These CPOs are available in tiny bottles with a glass applicator or a roll-on.

Since, these are highly concentrated, you only have to use a minuscule amount to satisfy your needs of smelling good. Also, if you use an alcohol based perfume, a some amount of it goes wasted while spraying, not so with a CPO.

Most CPO’s are designed to be used on skin directly, some may prefer to apply it on their clothes.