Making Scents

Starting up

A comment was left on an earlier posting by Catherine who wanted to know the supplier of the fantastic citrus oils I had sourced. Regrettably I had to reply that I do not disclose this information for competitive reasons – which she accepted but playfully retorted that she was only just starting in business and hoped that in a couple of years time she would be a serious threat to me!

I liked the pluckiness probably because it reminded me of me. In the early 70’s when I was trying to source new materials to increase my shelf I found it really hard to persuade suppliers to sell me small quantities. But one company – H E Daniel – sent me a price list that quoted materials down to 250gm. Delighted I wrote out a long list and placed the order, only to hear back a few days later that they had sent me their export list by mistake – their UK list started at 5Kgs.

After some discussion they were prepared on this occasion to honour the order and I wrote them a letter thanking them and saying that they might regret this when I was a multinational about to take them over. Alas things didn’t quite turn out that way but I used those materials to create some fragrances that, looking back, created the financial backing essential to allow the business to grow. So to H E Daniel, you’re probably safe now – but don’t get complacent!

Allergens

I have just finished the paperwork for 3 new fragrances I created for a customer who is launching a range of perfumes for young, sporty teenagers. It takes me nearly as long to do the paperwork for a perfume compound these days as it does to make the fragrance in the first place. One of the services I offer is to create the copy for the labels – a daunting task for anyone new to the industry.

As I typed out the lists I felt a little sadness. This customer had come to me several months ago with an exciting new concept. Her enthusiasm was genuine and she had thought long and hard about the image of the fragrances and their place in the market. She had also taken the trouble to look at the competition – sound homework.

Part of her brief to me was that she did not want a long list of “potential allergens” on the ingredients list, and therefore she wanted it to be as natural as possible – 100% natural would be ideal. All laudable aims - but of course mutually exclusive. Our friends in Brussels have - through some very dubious scientific research – listed potential allergens that cover virtually every natural material known to man. In fact I have only 3 natural materials on my shelf (out of over 1,000 ingredients) that do not contain any allergens. So my customer had a choice – she could either have a long list of allergens plastered all over her product, or have the perfume 100% synthetic and have no list. She struggled over that decision – and I sympathised.

This is a dilemma I predicted some time ago when I wrote an article on this very subject. It’s a great pity it has come true. David Burfield of Cropwatch is campaigning against this and the next raft of legislation which is on its way – the 40^th Amendment that will take up even more time with paperwork that in all likelihood no-one will ever read. What have we done? We have created a monster that now has a will of it’s own.

Dragon's Den

It makes a change to see perfume on the Dragon’s Den and it makes it all the more special that funding was successful too, so well done David Pybus for convincing the dragons that his recreated fragrances from the past are a worthwhile risk. His new company is called Scents of Time.

I spoke to David today and congratulated him on his success. His feet haven’t really touched the ground since the deal was done. He had the fragrances made by Quest (Givaudan) from his brief, and I have to admit a level of jealousy, particularly over the Titanic fragrance – I would dearly love to be able to smell the original perfume.

Looking solely at the storage conditions of the perfume, they would have been perfect, and any deterioration would have been slowed down considerably. People often ask me how you can stop perfume deteriorating and the simple answer is that you can’t. Perfume compounds are extremely complex mixtures. Each essential oil will have hundreds of components so you only have to add a few together to get thousands. A perfume with 50-60 ingredients could have tens of thousands of components.

It is true to say that at the time of the Titanic, aroma chemicals were in use (the first was coumarin used by Paul Parquet of Houbigant in 1882), but nothing like the range we have today. Most fragrances would still have had a very high proportion of naturals, making them highly complex. The complexity includes all the functional groups, so there will be alcohols, aldehydes, esters, acids and so on. The number of possible reactions is enormous. All perfumes settle down a lot in the first month, although the biggest change takes place in the first 24hrs.

Reactions will continue to take place over time – for years – but as any chemist will tell you, if a reaction is going to take place, it will do, and there is nothing you can do about it. You can however slow it down, and you can do this by (a) keeping it cool so that the reactions take place more slowly (b) keeping it in full containers so that the headspace is minimal. This keeps the oxygen to a minimum and finally (c) removing any source of light. Ultra violet light is brilliant (no pun intended) at getting reactions going. You can ruin perfume in an hour in direct sunlight.

So, getting back to our Titanic perfume, it would have been very cold, in full bottles because they were new and in complete darkness – perfect. You can also be fairly sure that no-one would have been tampering with them over the past few decades either! I want to smell them!

Suppliers

The two biggest differences in the pattern of my raw material purchasing over the past 40 years has been the number of companies I deal with and the MOQ's. Unfortunately for small companies, the days of being able to purchase 250gms of anything under £1,000/Kg have long since gone. The number of companies has shrunk beyond recognition too. In the 60's I used to buy from a beautiful little family business in Grasse called Antoine Chiris, but they were taken over by the conglomerate UOP fragrances, who were swallowed up by Givaudan Roure, who became Givaudan who then closed all accounts for anyone spending less that £150K per annum. Good bye then..and the story is the same for countless others.

True there are still some exquisite small companies remaining that produce some wonderful materials, but the odds are stacked against them surviving. The big boys are always circling overhead and legislation from Brussels is heaped upon them by the day.

It was against this background that I was recently bowled over by the most wonderful citrus extracts I have ever smelled. Produced by a small Italian company using a new process they have developed, the quality is quite simply out of this world. I was sent mandarin, lemon, bergamot and blood orange. As I sat in my lab, all I could think about was the effect on existing formulations of replacing all the citrus oils with these, but of course you can't because of consistency. They will certainly be used in future compounds though. Fantastic.

Compounding

When I first started making perfume, I realised fairly early on that you cannot run a compounding room on the turnover of one shop – simply because of the number of ingredients required. You are therefore more or less forced to sell your compounds outside to other finished goods manufacturers. Fortunately, almost without exception, none of the finished goods manufactures have perfume departments – it’s just too specialised – so they need to source the perfume concentrates from perfume manufacturers and then simply add the required amount to their base product.

For the perfumer, there is a fundamental decision about which market to aim for – you can aim at the cheap end and make fragrances for shower gels, soap, pot pourri etc., but then you have to buy the ingredients by the tonne in order to compete; or you can go for the fine fragrance market where the ingredients are much more expensive and minimum order quantities smaller. I went for fine fragrances and typically this means supplying fragrances to small perfumeries that have their own packaging and their own shops or websites. For me these have all ended up being European and have resulted in a turnover of raw materials that justifies a compounding side to the business.

A perfumer who owns his/her own company is becoming a rare animal these days. There have been so many takeovers that perfume manufacturers are becoming fewer and fewer. Those that remain are giants – IFF, Givaudan, Firmenich, Takasago, Quest and Symrise – and dominate the world market. In fact these “big six” are soon to become the “big five” as Symrise becomes the next victim of the hungry multinationals.

It’s remarkable in many ways that we have survived, but it just goes to show that there is a market out there even for small perfumeries. It is getting more difficult by the day of course – mainly with the mountains of paperwork and legislation I have to deal with, and I certainly wouldn’t want to start up now. Minimum order quantities increase in a seemingly unstoppable march and with raw materials that (in the main) deteriorate with age, you would need to start trading very quickly indeed.

I suppose our key advantage is the usual one that small companies have – service. Human beings answer the phone, you deal with same person over a period of time, someone actually listens to what you are saying, and we don’t insist on 6-figure orders from the start. The surprising part is that the giants survive! How can you be successful when you don’t do any of the above things? It’s a mystery.