Cookie Schaechter, aged 7, of Valley Stream, for her question:

What are Perfumes made of?

The woods and summer gardens are full of sweet smells. But it is very hard to catch these scents and put them into bottles. Flowers make their perfumes in tiny, tiny pockets. These scent sacs are part of the petals. Fragrant trees and shrubs have scent sacs in their leaves and sometimes in their stems. Oranges and lemons make their scent in sacs buried in the rind.

Fruits, flower and plant perfume is made or.‑precious oils. Each scent sac holds hardly enough to notice. Hut the petals of a rose have enough sacs of perfume oil to let some of the scent waft around in the air. It takes two whole tons of fragrant rose petals to make one pound of precious rose oil. One teaspoonful of this perfume oil mixed with ten teaspoonsful of fine alcohol make a rich, expensive e rose perfume.

Some flowers give up their perfume oils in steam. Boiling vats send steam through piles of petals, The ail is then distilled, or separated, from the steam. Lemon rinds swell up and burst their perfume sacs in water. The soggy peels are squeezed into a sponge. The water runs away. The perfumed lemon oil stays in the sponge.

Violets, gardenias and jasmine refuse to give up their perfume in steam. In olden days, their petals were left to wilts near pure fat. Fat tends to gather smells. An onion in the icebox tends to flavor the butter. So, day by day, the petals were piled between glass sheets covered with pure fat. At the end of the flower season the fat was sold as pomade ‑ the precious scent for making perfume.

There is now a modern way to treat flowers that will not dive up their scent in steam. They are soaked in refined gasoline. Later the gasoline is evaporated. The precious perfume oil remains.

Expensive perfumes are usually mixtures of a number of oils. Many contain some gum or resin from the pine tree family. This tangy resin holds its perfume longer than the delicate flower oils. It makes the scent of the perfume last longer. Some animal fats are used to make the perfume last longer. These are odors given off by the glands of certain animals. By themselves they small horrible. But they improve the perfume when blended with sweet smelling flower oils. The musk deer, the civet cat, the beaver and the sperm whale give us these substances for‑making good perfumes.

The chemists have discovered cheap shortcuts for making perfumes. Most of their scents come from coal tar. They can make violet, lemon and hyacynth scents almost as good as the real thing.

Maybe a young lady of 7 is too young to use an expensive perfume. Chances are, she uses toilet water. This is weaker than rear perfume. Three to five teaspoonsful of perfume oils are mixed with 97 to 95 teaspoonsful of fine alcohol. One of the oldest toilet waters is Eau de Cologne ‑ or water of Cologne. This is a delicate blend of citrus and flower oils.