Making Scents

The World's Smelliest Molecule

It was with some trepidation that I carried my highly potent sample of the world’s smelliest molecule out to the end of the (appropriately named) perfume garden. I needed to open the bottle and doing so in my lab was simply too risky – the slightest nudge that resulted in a spill would render the place unusable. I was actually opening grapefruit mercaptan, or for the more technically minded, para-Menthen-8-thiol. It is found in - surprise surprise – grapefruit, and it smells like.. well.. grapefruit.

Do I use this is perfume? No. It is for academic interest only and I have to say that on that front it packs a pretty punch. The detection threshold is 0.1 ppt (parts per trillion). Coffee has some fairly smelly components in it too, but nothing to compare with this – wow!

But why is it that we are so sensitive to some molecules and not to others? It’s a good question and again we find ourselves coming back to the old problem of how the nose works to find an explanation. Luca Turin (the vibrationist) will tell you that it is zinc at the receptor sites that controls threshold values. Any other ideas?

Mercaptans in general are of course used in others areas due to their low threshold values. They are added to natural gas for example to allow us to detect even small leaks.

Anyway my smelly sample is now stored on my shelf in the relatively safe concentration of 0.00000001% in ethanol. Even at this level I treat it with some considerable respect.

April Fool

Oops. This year’s April Fool was obviously a bit too believable! We sent out an email to our subscribers saying that the Council had decided to convert Bourton on the Water into a water park, and without consultation had flooded the village centre. Visitors now had to take gondola taxis from the car park to the village attractions in future.

Our beautiful 300 year old shop had been flooded and was re-located on the first floor – inaccessible for wheelchairs. We doctored a picture and pretended it was on our live webcam showing the centre of the village and asked for people to write in so that we could forward their letter to the council – and they did – lots and lots of them!

Fortunately most people took it with good grace when they were told that it was in fact an April Fool joke, but one or two did not and were genuinely angry – some saying they would never shop with us again! Spaghetti trees spring to mind…  Ah well, you can’t win them all.

The letter and picture are now in our archive section if you want to have a look but be warned – it’s not real OK?

April Fool Newsletter

Review of "Perfume"

Well I’ve have never had a private cinema viewing before. The nearest I’ve come to that is some second rate film that everyone else but me has obviously read the reviews! But this time is was fun – just 4 of us reviewing “Perfume” for the Times in the 20^th Century Fox - Luca Turin, Linda Pilkington (Ormande Jayne) and Janine Roxborough Bunce (Fragrance Foundation). My cries of disapproval raised a smile when I protested that with so few people in the cinema, the Times reporter still managed to place himself directly between me and the screen!

My opinion of the film changed little on the second viewing. The book takes a lot of following and many said it would be impossible. Under the circumstances not too bad a job although some parts were still highly suspect. I always worry when I find myself laughing in places that the director intended to be highly dramatic, and the scene where the impact of Grenoulle’s perfume turns an angry mob into public sex orgy was one of them. Flashes of the Lynx advert.

Unlike the book, the film had a few technical mistakes which was a shame. Our reporter was keen to know those! There was the usual one where the process on enfleurage was depicted incorrectly with the flowers laid in the fat. Where does this myth come from? If the flowers are laid in the fat, then when they are exhausted in 2-3 days time and thrown away, you would throw away the odour laden fat too! After a couple of months there would be nothing left.

The flowers should be spread onto the clean side of the glass and the fat side is upside-down, facing but not touching the flowers in the chassis below. As the flowers give off their aroma it is passes through the trapped air and is then absorbed into the fat. It’s the whole principle of enfleurage and the reason why it can only be used with flowers that continue to create their perfume after they are picked – like Jasmin and Tuberose. In fact the yield from enfleurage is higher than by solvent extraction – demonstrating this very point.

Other technical details were the neatly trimmed rows of lavender where the arched harvester had run down the rows and forced the plants into their regimented shape – not something that would have been around at the time. You could argue about the main character. Not the image I painted in my mind after the book but…

The script was quite a let down and in places was toe-curlingly bad. It is a long time since I read the book, but I don’t remember it being that bad.

We were asked various questions about the impact the film would have, and whether it had any serious message with regard to human pheromones. Luca and I locked horns on that one when I pointed to bourgeonal as being one of the few known human pheromones (it is claimed to be given off by the female egg and has been shown to attract sperm). Granted, although it is a likely candidate, it hasn’t actually been found in the female egg yet – I mere detail! Luca said I would live to regret that statement, but we’ll see. I’ll remind him when they find it.

On the claim that the sense of smell is more emotive than other senses and the most difficult to describe, Luca’s view is that all senses are impossible to describe. We are crap at describing touch, sound and sight too, it’s just that we are more crap at describing smell. Good point. Now, better pay that penalty I incurred on the congestion charge!

Patrick Suskind's book "Perfume"

As a great fan of Patrick Suskind’s “Perfume”, I was keen to see how anyone would cope with translating this wonderful book into a film. So I was first in the queue and saw it on Boxing Day – the day it was released!

The Times now want to talk to people in the industry about the film and they contacted Linda Pilkington – owner of Ormande Jayne. She kindly suggested myself and Luca Turin (the famous vibrationist) as suitable critics and a viewing has been organised for the three of us in London tomorrow. I haven’t seen Luca for a long time – we have a great deal of gossip to catch up on.

Oh – and the film? Well not a bad attempt at all but I’m afraid it doesn’t really do the book justice. There were moments when I found a smile creeping across my face when it clearly shouldn’t have been. Shades of the Linx advert sprang to mind, but maybe that’s a little unfair. We’ll see – a second viewing might help.

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.

In the beginning...

As I write this first posting of my first blog I can hear in the background the laser printers eating their way through thousands of letters to be sent out for our Mother’s Day mailing. It is made particularly significant by the fact that the accompanying letter is telling customers to look at the new blog that will be launched in February 2007!

I will put my cards on the table and confess I have a commercial interest in perfumery, and own my own small company – The Cotswold Perfumery in Bourton on the Water,England that employs just 6 people. I create perfume compounds, contract pack for customers, have a retail shop, operate a mail order service and teach perfumery both to members of the public and also to schools and universities. It is a fairly unique business.

People always ask how it began. It was started by my father. He considered himself to be a bit of an entrepreneur and had many businesses – everything from insurance broker and TV repairs to off-peak strawberries and African Violets. They all failed because he (a) he was never prepared to put any work into a project and (b) he was a compulsive gambler.

Eventually his debts caught up with him. The bailiffs came and took possession all our worldly goods – including the house – and we moved in with my grandparents. Whilst the court cases continued the grandfather on my mother’s side died and left her enough money to buy a small shop in Bourton on the Water where we resurrected the last business that failed – perfumery.

The court cases ended and my father was imprisoned for fraud. I was at university at the time and my mother had never worked before, but now needed an income. I made some extremely crude shop fittings and somehow the shop generated just enough income for my mother to live on until she died in 1975 and I took over. There was much to be done – the products needed upgrading, the shop fittings had to be renewed and the business had to be put onto a sound financial basis. There are some fundamental problems in creative perfumery that have to be addressed and I will be covering some of these here – obtaining raw materials, MOQ’s, finding your first customers and so on.

So the blog has started. Please feel free to make any comments you wish. I will be covering a number of other topics too including the Classification of perfumes, the structure of the industry, problems that face small companies, how the nose works, myths and so on.