This article was taken from the October issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
It may be a mature £16 billion industry -- but there’s still scope for innovation in the world of fragrance. All you need is a large chunk of R&D spending, the imagination to uncover as yet untapped sources of new scents -- and ideally a professional “nose” who can bring decades of intuitive skills to formulating the perfect blend.
With the exception of Hermès, Guerlain and Chanel, most fragrances on the market are made by a few international firms including Firmenich of Switzerland, Germany’s Symrise and Takasago of Japan. Swiss company Givaudan is the world’s largest, with 19 per cent market share and a market cap of 8.2 billion Swiss francs (£4.95 billion). Last year, Givaudan spent 326 million francs on research alone. For all the industry’s focus on image and brand positioning, it relies to a large extent on hard science -- for instance, on scent-extraction techniques such as supercritical CO 2 extraction, whereby the gas, under immense pressure (greater than72.9 atms), is converted to liquid. Blasted at the scent, it strips away the odour molecules, and then reverts to gas, depositing them as oil.
Increasingly, perfumers are moving beyond replicating nature, and developing entirely new synthetic molecules, called captives, that can be patented. This science is taken very seriously: Ryoji Noyori, a chemist at Takasago, shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2001 for his work in synthesising captives. But the quest for new scents can still involve traditional real-world inspiration. To create Hugo Boss’s new Bottled Night men’s fragrance, researchers from the company went on a “scent expedition” to the Amazon rainforest, where they came across a tropical hardwood louro amarello. According to records, this had never been used in a fragrance. Because of export restrictions on tropical hardwoods, they used “headspace” technology to capture the odour compounds in the air around the wood, creating an airtight seal inside a hollow dome, then sucking out the air inside. The largerodour molecules were caught by a filter of polymer beads. “We’re using it to try to capture the smell of experiences and events,” says Will Andrews, fragrance scientist at Procter & Gamble: he has even employed the technique at Lord’s cricket ground. “It’s an area of the industry that drives creativity,” Andrews says. “Everyone is looking for a new angle.”
Once the samples are collected, they are analysed using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. The result is a “recipe card” of the compounds, including their molecular components and their weight. The process of manufacturing a fragrance typically begins with a fashion house or celebrity creating a brief. Perfume manufacturers pitch for the brief, suggesting combinations of their patented molecules. The successful firm confects the fragrance from its own captives and ships it to the production facility. The client names the fragrance and puts it into bottles of its own design. Crucially, the manufacturer retains the formula.
Chanel’s fragrance-and-beauty division is headquartered in an ordinary-looking, glass-fronted office building in western Paris. Here, Jacques Polge, creative director of fragrance and head perfumer, oversees the company’s penthouse laboratory. A distinguished-looking 67-year-old, Polge has directed the fragrance portfolio since 1978 and is only the third person to hold the position. Until the appointment of Jean-Claude Ellena at Hermes in 2004 and Thierry Wasser at Guerlain in 2008, Polge was the only in-house perfumer in the business.
Unlike those in the larger companies, perfumers like Polge still follow processes of separation, purification, recombination and fixation through both traditional and modern means. In its laboratory, Chanel uses a fractional molecular-distillation system for selecting oils that will later be reassembled. “We use it to separate the various aspects of essential oils, keeping aspects we want and getting rid of the others,” Polge says. The process works by separating compounds by their boiling point, akin to “throwing the mat a hot plate”, causing evaporation and condensation. Chanel focuses on essential oils, whereas larger companies specialise in synthetics. Masks, for instance, are all synthetic today. They used to come from the anal sacs of the musk deer until Leopold Ružička, a biochemist working with Swiss perfume house Chuit, Naef&Firmenich, mapped their chemical structure in the 20s, earning a Nobel Prize. Ambergris came from sperm whales’ vomit, castoreum from the abdominal glands of beavers, civet from a pouch under the civet cat’s tail.
In 1921, Ernest Beaux, Chanel’s first perfumer, took the synthetic fragrance molecule 2-methylundecanal and created Chanel No 5. Although he popularised synthetics, aldehydes -- organic compounds incorporating a carbonyl functional group, which come under “soft floral” on the fragrance wheel -- had first been synthesised in the 1850s.
And in perfume “synthetic” doesn’t mean bad. “Entire olfactory families have been created synthetically,” says Eddie Roschi, independent perfumer and Le Labo founder. “If we were to do perfumery using ‘old’ ingredients, scents would smell like your great-grandmother.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
