Napoleon's Seventy-Two-Bottle Cologne Order Survives

French military and political leader Napoleon Bonaparte kept a standing order with the perfume house Chardin for 50 bottles of Eau de Cologne every month. A surviving invoice from 1808 shows that he ordered 72 bottles in a single month. Napoleon splashed the cologne on his neck and shoulders several times a day, although the smaller 19th-century bottles contained fragrance with only about 2 percent perfume and essential oils.

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