Perfumes: Chemistry in 17th-Century French Courts

by Sandy Stai

The setting for this module is 17th-century France, the subject: perfumes. Students will be situated in small investigative groups. Each will develop an original perfume (or a cologne - to keep things gender balanced!) from plant materials, while learning about the process of distillation. Students will also be introduced to 17th-century European chemical hypotheses as they relate to distillation.

More complex topics can be explored in a more advanced chemistry class, such as the nature of specific organic chemicals (terpenes, esters, aldehydes, etc.) and Dalton's Law of partial pressures.

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