Pursuits: Can we really be surprised that the fake has replaced the real?

Here are some smells that you think you know well: vanilla, musk, and sandalwood. And how about these flower fragrances: lily of the valley and gardenia? Or this slightly more exotic smell: truffle.

My guess is that these are smells that you are familiar with. And if you live in the middle-east then you probably know the smell of oud as well. Certainly, you will find stalls selling fragrances based on oud at every single mall in Dubai.

 

But here’s the thing: I am not sure you really know these fragrances at all.

 

   Let’s start with vanilla. It is the smell of childhood innocence, of ice-cream, cookies and caramel custard. And now, it is the fragrance in thousands of perfumes and millions of scented candles. Unfortunately, the vanilla most of us remember is synthetic. It has nothing at all to do with real vanilla.

 

   When the Europeans discovered the New World, they found vanilla in Mexico and parts of south America. They were so excited by the smell and the flavour that they took vanilla plants back to Europe with them and tried to cultivate the crop in their orchards, gardens and farms.

 

   But try as they might, the vanilla flower would not transform itself into the pod that contained the flavour and the aroma. They thought it had something to do with the bees that pollinated the flower in Mexico. But even when the bees were exported from Mexico to Europe and to such colonies as Madagascar and Reunion, the flower refused to pollinate.

 

   By the time the problem was solved – in Reunion, where they learnt how to manually pollinate the flower – it no longer mattered. Scientists had identified a chemical called vanillan which could be extracted from wood pulp. Vanillan mimicked the smell and flavour of vanilla so well that they stopped worrying about pollination and bees. To this day, over 90 per cent of the products that claim to smell of vanilla actually smell of synthetic vanillan. And that includes the cookies your mother used to bake and the ice-cream you ate as a child.

 

   Over the last decade and a half, there has been a move back to real vanilla but it is so expensive that many perfumers prefer to stick with vanillan and other synthetic substitutes. It also helps that most people think of vanillan as being the real smell of vanilla and are baffled by the more complex fragrance of vanilla pods.

 

   Take another example: musk. In the old days, musk was extracted from a deer. But it has been a long time since anyone did this and it is, in any case, now illegal to kill deer for this purpose. For over a century, perfumers have used synthetic musks created in laboratories. Each year, scientists invent newer, more complicated musk fragrances. But for most of us it doesn’t really matter. We have never smelled real musk in our lives.

 

"So predominant is the use of laboratory molecules that consumers now refuse to accept real oud. The smell of synthetic oud has become imprinted in our consciousness as the only oud that matters."

   In the case of flowers, perfumers face unique problems. Some flowers such as rose or jasmine are easy enough to turn into perfume because their essential oils are simple to extract. But others, such as gardenia and lily of the valley, refuse to give up their fragrances. So, perfumers have no alternative but to make synthetic versions of the smell of lily of the valley and gardenia and many other flowers.

 

   All of the famous fragrances based on the smell of lily of the valley (Diorissimo is probably the best known) amount to nothing more than a perfumer’s idea of what the lily of the valley should smell like. They have been so successful in transmitting this idea that most of us no longer recognise the smell of the flower itself but are only familiar with the synthetic version.

 

   Sandalwood presents another problem. Everyone agrees that the world’s best sandalwood comes from India. And there was a time when sandalwood oil was cheap and plentiful. The indigenous Indian attar industry was based on sandalwood oil. And many great French fragrances relied on Indian sandalwood.

 

   Then, smuggling and illegal felling ensured that sandalwood became scarce in India. Now, no perfumer can base a fragrance on Indian sandalwood because supplies are so unreliable and erratic. Some perfume houses have found similar sandalwood in other countries. For instance, Chanel appears to buy all the sandalwood available in New Caledonia.

 

   But for other fragrance houses, it is much easier and cheaper to simply substitute the original Indian sandalwood oil with a synthetic molecule. There are so many synthetic sandalwood fragrances on the market now that most people under 40 have never smelt real Indian sandalwood.

 

   What does a perfumer do in this situation? I spoke to Thierry Wasser, the nose at the French fragrance house of Guerlain about the problem. Wasser says that the perfumer’s job is more difficult because many people now insist on the synthetic note and refuse to accept the real thing even when it is available. He gave me two examples. One of them is oud, currently a fashionable ingredient in Western perfumery and the mainstay of the Arab fragrance tradition. Because real oud is so expensive and so hard to come by, the vast majority of oud fragrances (including those sold in Dubai) rely on synthetic molecules. So predominant is the use of laboratory molecules that consumers now refuse to accept real oud. The smell of synthetic oud has become imprinted in our consciousness as the only oud that matters.

 

   Wasser also gave me the example of truffle oil. This is usually fragranced with a synthetic molecule extracted from petroleum. If you are familiar with the smell of white and black truffles then you will know that truffle oil smells nothing like the genuine ingredient. But because truffles are so rare, the synthetic smell of truffle oil has been accepted all over the world as the true fragrance of the truffle.

 

   It is a funny old world we live in where genuine ingredients are so difficult to procure and new synthetics are invented every month. So, can we really be surprised that in this age of mass marketing and consumption, the fake has replaced the real and that the synthetic rules over the natural?