Row over eau de cologne 'settled'
An ongoing row over who invented eau de cologne seemed to have been settled Monday after a researcher discovered an 18th-century note in a Paris library confirming that the perfume was created by Paolo Feminis.
Feminis (1666-1736) emigrated to Cologne, Germany from a tiny village near Santa Maria Maggiore in Piemonte, and the town has always claimed it was he who invented the perfume - a mix of neroli oil, bergamot, lavender and rosemary.
The town says Feminis then passed his secret recipe on to a fellow villager, Giovanni Maria Farina (1685-1766), who had also emigrated to Cologne and may have been related to Feminis.
But Farina's heirs have always insisted that he was the real inventor and that the idea that Feminis discovered the perfume was based on ''legend and gossip''.
In 2007 Farina's family - now in the eighth generation of perfume makers - demanded that Santa Maria Maggiore council remove a claim on its website that Feminis, not Farina, discovered the scent, saying this was not true.
However, a member of the Farina family has now spoken from beyond the grave to nix his heirs' claims.
Researcher Silvia Ceccomori told ANSA she uncovered leaves of paper once attached to eau de cologne bottles in which Farina's grandson Giovanni (1718-1787) attests that the perfume ''was invented by Paolo Feminis, Italian and distiller of Cologne''.
Santa Maria Maggiore's Deputy Mayor, Claudio Cottini, said he was satisfied that the dispute could finally be put to rest and that he hoped Farina's German descendants would accept the new evidence.
Cottini added that a perfume museum will open in the town this year to celebrate the 300th anniversary since Giovanni Maria Farina set up his successful perfume business in Cologne.
Farina opened his perfumery a year after writing to his brother in 1708 that he had ''found a fragrance that reminds me of an Italian spring morning after the rain''.
The Farina family also founded a perfumery in Paris that was later acquired by Roger & Gallet.
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Who invented eau de cologne?
This is an easy one .
The Giovanni Farina (1718-1787) mentioned in the article is Johann Anton Farina. While a member of the genuine cologne-producing family (he is the son of one of Johann Maria Farina the Elder's brothers) he was never involved in the family business, i.e. Farina gegenüber dem Jülichsplatz. Rather, he ran a cologne business of his own in Düsseldorf and he claimed to be using the original Feminis formula (the existence of which has never been documented - we do not know whether his acqua mirabilis, a generic term for all kinds of waters, had anything to do with what later became Eau de Cologne), thus presenting his product as older or more genuine than the Cologne company's. So I'm afraid this is old and irrelevant news.
Farina Gegenüber claims that Johann Maria Farina invented a genuinely new product. Fact is that there is no evidence to disprove this and all historical evidence of older Eau de Colognes in Cologne is manufactured (e.g. an approbration of Feminis' water by a doctor of the University of cologne, who, as the university's rolls show, never existed). Feminis produced Acqua Mirabilis, but we do not know its formula. As a historian I doubt one can pinpoint a genuine inventor of such products (it is like the telephone or phonograph - dozens of people were working on it independently of each other). What is beyond doubt, however is that Farina invented the name Eau de Cologne and made it a succesful product with a consistently high quality achieved through complex blending processes and a highly complex formula (he is, in other words no less than the Edison of EdC). The production volume, reputation, quality and price of his product, which started to become a bestseller in the 1750s-1760s was simply disproprotionally higher than of the small-time imitators and plagiarizers who usually went bankrupt rapidly. 4711 only overtook Farina in the 20th century in terms of size, but they became a mass market brand, while Farina remained what you would today call niche - too expensive even for middle class consumers of the day. So to summarize: by the available historical evidence Johann Maria Farina is the inventor of Eau de Cologne.
No evidence of the "new papers"
EAU DE COLOGNE is not an invention, but rather a trademark for a scent.
Feminis died in 1736. The name EAU DE COLOGNE first appear in 1742 on the market for the scent of J.M.Farina. There is no evidence of any link.
EAU DE COLOGNE is not an
EAU DE COLOGNE is not an invention, but rather a trademark for a scent.
Feminis died in 1736. The name EAU DE COLOGNE first appear in 1742 on the market for the scent of J.M.Farina. There is no evidence of any link.
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