OlfactionaryThe Perfume Name Fight That Took a Century and an Act of Parliament to Settle
A stranger bought the rights to a famous perfumer's surname from an unrelated man of the same name, and it took Germany's first trademark law to finally sort out who was allowed to sell "Farina."
If you've ever bought a bottle labeled "4711" or seen "Farina" on a cologne label and assumed it was just a fancy Italian-sounding brand name, there's a genuinely strange two-century legal saga behind it, one that took an actual act of the German parliament to finally settle.
The story starts with a real person: Giovanni Maria Farina, an Italian perfumer who settled in Cologne, Germany and created what he called "Eau de Cologne" in the early 1700s. It was a light, citrus-forward splash that became famous across Europe. His descendants kept making it under the Farina name for generations, and the product name and the family name became more or less interchangeable.
A name for sale to strangers
The trouble started in 1803, when a Cologne businessman named Wilhelm Mülhens (no relation to the famous perfumers) tracked down a completely different, unrelated man who also happened to be named Farina, and bought the rights to use the "Farina" name from him. Mülhens opened his own factory, started selling his own "Farina" eau de cologne, and even licensed the name out to roughly twenty other manufacturers, none of whom had anything to do with the original family.
The real Farina family fought back for decades. In 1835, legal action finally voided all of Mülhens' licenses and shut the imitators down. Mülhens' son simply tracked down yet another unconnected Farina and started over. Jean Marie Farina, a genuine descendant of the original perfumer, spent from 1836 onward petitioning Prussian authorities for real trademark protection, a fight that only got resolved when Germany passed its first-ever national Trademark Protection Act, effective May 1, 1875.
Locked out, so they invented a new name
In 1881, Wilhelm Mülhens' grandson Ferdinand was finally, permanently barred from ever using the Farina name again. Rather than give up the business, he simply renamed the product after the one thing that was unquestionably his: the street number of the family's factory on Glockengasse in Cologne. That number was 4711, and it's remained on the bottle ever since.