Making Scents

Obituary

It is with great regret that I have to announce the death of my good friend Dr Dave Kelly of Cardiff University at the tender age of just 53. An organic chemist of outstanding ability, my contact with Dave centred around the Semiochemical Network over the past 15 years to which he made such a great contribution in so many ways - not only with his extensive knowledge of chemistry but also with his fabulous sense of humour.

The Semiochemical Network looks into chemical signals in vertebrates and Dave was a leading light in keeping us up to date. His passion for pheromones was never far from the surface, as was his rigor for scientific professionalism.

My last posting "The Smell of Money" was about his latest research and I said at the time that I would not reveal his name, but that's all irrelevant now.

If you are listening Dave - thank you for some of the most stimulating debates, the laughs and the beneifit of your knowledge over the years. We will all miss you terribly.

The Smell of Money

Sometimes fragrances can have some very bizarre applications. A friend of mine, Pete – not his real name because I don’t want him approached - who is a renowned organic chemist was approached by HM Customs & Excise. They wanted to know if it was possible to add a fragrance to money in such a way that dogs would be able to tell if a passenger was carrying more than the allowed limit through customs. An interesting problem on several fronts – health and safety, environmental, technical, practical etc.

Pete had to decide which chemical to use. The chemical has to be detected by ions. Most negative ions are explosives and most positive ions are drugs so the challenge was to find a positive ion that wasn’t a narcotic. Dogs are already trained to detect narcotics and you couldn’t risk an overlap.

Customs and Excise gave Pete the figures on the number of notes in circulation and the average life of a note. He already knew the approximate level of odour necessary for a dog to reliably detect it and this gave a tonnage of the chosen chemical per annum. He considered that one metric tonne would be sufficient and from an environmental point of view he would have to be sure that this level of odour released into the atmosphere every year was acceptable.

Money is something that comes into skin contact with everyone so whatever the chemical used, it would have to be safe. An interesting (but irrelevant) statistic that emerged was that 95% of all US paper money contains traces of cocaine! From a technical point of view, the odour release would of course need to be very cosistent over the life of the note so that a set level of odour always represented a set level of money.

Once the chemical had been chosen (which is confidential at this stage) the next step was to look at the delivery system. He planned to use chemical tube-like structures embedded in the cotton (yes, money is not made from paper, it’s made from cotton fibre and linen rag), then the fragrance could be embedded inside these tubes. If the tubes ran in parallel lines across the note, and the odour could only escape from the end, then the note would only smell on the edge. This would mean that the amount of odour emanating from a wad of cash would be in proportion the amount of money. If the odour came off the face of the note, a wad of notes would smell as strong as a single note.

The project is underway at the moment and if successful will result in dogs effectively being able to count money! Oh, and the amount you’re allowed to carry? I think it’s €10,000.

Floods...

Floods? We never heard of them before July 21^st. It rained solidly for 2 days – not flash flooding, just heavy continuous rain. All the same, I thought we’d got away with it and when I saw the shop on the Saturday morning it was dry – apart from a small puddle of water on the floor. Mind you, the village was flooded and the water outside in the street was about an inch from the door. The puddle, I assumed, was splashed in through the door by passing traffic – I was wrong – it was rising up through the parquet floor from the pressure of a rising water table, and the more we mopped up the puddle the more the water came through.

Fortunately our site is on a slope, it only affected the front part of the shop, and here it only rose to about ¼”. Even so, that’s enough to wreck a wooden floor so we will be closing in January for a few weeks while the floor is replaced.

Many others in the village came off far worse. It was quite a sight to experience - some streets with so much fast flowing water that you couldn’t walk across them without your feet being taken from under you. But being well up river the problem was short lived and within 4 hours the water table had dropped and by the evening you would never know that anything had happened – until you looked inside the houses!

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!