Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume repulsed many with its description of 18th-century Paris: a world redolent of flesh, rot, manure and reeking stews, where even the king "stank, stank like a rank lion". And yet the fragrance industry has never turned up its nose at the riper aspects of human, and inhuman, existence. Many classics contain more than a glimpse of "something nasty in the woodshed".

— Columnist Hannah Betts talks about the "feral underbelly" of fragrance ingredients in Let us spray at the Guardian.