The historical reconstitutions of smell or odors have the obvious advantage of promoting olfactory education and culture among the general public, and making people aware of the sensory component of history by highlighting it. They also highlight the richness of our olfactory heritage, as well as the expertise of the perfumers who manage to preserve it or to present interpretations of it. The fact remains, however, that they involve very different approaches, depending on the historical sources on which they are based, the historical period concerned and the means used. Remaking a vanished perfume for which we have the formula, recreating an ancient perfume through archaeological analysis, or drawing inspiration from literary or visual sources to recreate the smell of a place or an era are operations which, however interesting they may be, are no less dissimilar, both in their aims and in their methods.