Thursday 26 November 2009

Perfume Shops

There are stalls here in Amman, often just a cubbyhole in the side of a building, lined with sparkling glass jars of perfume oils.

The essential oils can be mixed to order, diluted with alcohol to the desired strength, and packaged in whatever bottle the customer chooses. These shops can mix oils to imitate major brand-name perfumes. They cost only a few dinars, much more affordable than designer perfumes. Here's one my roommate's father had made for her, it's an imitation of a Saudi Arabian perfume called Daloo'ah:

I can sometimes smell people's perfume from across the street. There is even a perfume section in the baby aisle.
A very old perfume shop in one of the downtown souqs went up in flames only a month before I arrived here. It was probably an electrical fire; unfortunately the oil combined with cloth in neighbouring stalls burned very well, and the souq was largely destroyed. Here's an article from the Jordan Times about it.

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