The perfume business is almost a branch of chemistry these days

I was at a mall in Saket the other day, when a pushy salesman grabbed my attention.

His shop sold imported fragrances and toiletries, he said. There were bath oils, soaps, shampoos, body lotions, pure fragrances and the like. All of it seemed vaguely

interesting without really holding the attention but because the salesman seemed so passionate, I feigned some interest.

 

   His products reminded me of Lush, I said, referring to the fast growing soap and shampoo chain whose conceit is that its toilet products look and smell almost edible. The salesman had obviously heard the comparison before because he said, at once, “The difference is that everything we sell is 100 per cent natural. Nothing is synthetic.”

 

   Ah yes, the old natural versus synthetics debate!

 

   Sometime in the late 1980s, the world began to rebel against the idea of toilet and fragrance products that used chemicals. The first chain to capitalise on this trend was the British Body Shop which made much of the fact that its products were made only from natural ingredients. (Later, this claim was quietly buried in favour of the safer boast that no Body Shop product had been tested on animals).

 

   The way Body Shop told it, all its fragrances and body butters and bath oils were made from wild flowers that grew naturally in the countryside and were gathered on bright sunny days by groups of cheerful peasants who sang as they plucked the leaves. No factories were ever mentioned. Nor for that matter was the distinctly environmentally-unfriendly plastic in which the products were packaged.

 

   Other chains capitalised on the idea. These days, after frequent changes of ownership and management, Body Shop is ubiquitous rather than trendy but L’Occitane occupies the same space with its lavender-festooned shops.

 

   Ironically, even as the noble-minded ladies were flocking to Body Shop and others like it in the 1990s to register their displeasure at the growing influence of synthetics and chemicals, they were also buying more synthetic fragrances than ever before – without realising it.

 

   Let’s take the example of L’Eau de Issey, the hit fragrance introduced by Issey Miyake in 1992. The original campaign capitalised on the Body Shop-type of sentiment. Miyake had wanted a fragrance that smelt of water, we were told. (But surely water has no smell? Never mind; nobody bothered to make this point.) He was fed up of the alcohol that distinguished perfumes. (Eh? This makes no sense. All fragrances including Miyake’s are diluted from the original perfume with alcohol). He wanted a white perfume that used only white flowers. And so on.

 

   As a publicity campaign, it was terrific. The world was tired of the big fragrance companies and Miyake managed to suggest that he had personally wandered around a Japanese garden collecting white flowers and then grinding the petals into pure spring water. The fragrance was an extension of his light, airy, quirky clothes etc. etc.

 

   In fact, the distinctive characteristic of the Miyake fragrance was a synthetic molecule called Calone. This was discovered in 1966 and used in fragrances in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Dune in 1991, for instance). It was Calone’s newly invented mixture of melon and aquatic notes that gave the Miyake fragrance its distinctive smell. (Polo Sport for Women has lots of Calone too and now, it is almost a cliché ingredient in commercial perfumery).

 

   As elegant women ooh and aahed about the ‘freshness’ of L’Eau de Issey (was it the white flowers?), they missed the point: the reason the fragrance smelt so different was because it used a new note, one that chemists had created in laboratories.

 

   Almost all of the fragrances of the 1990s then upped the synthetic notes in their formulas and even as the world claimed to be going green and natural, the fragrance business was actually going chemical.

 

   What the fragrance companies try to hide, with their fancy ad copy and their packaging, is that the perfume business is almost a branch of chemistry these days. When the ‘noses’ invent new perfumes, the formulas are usually written in terms of the chemicals used. When a new fragrance hits the market, rival manufacturers will put it under the spectrometer, a device that discovers its chemical composition. Nobody in the perfume world is at all embarrassed by this reliance on chemistry.

 

   As far as parfumiers are concerned, synthetics serve two purposes. The first is as substitutes for natural ingredients. Most synthetics are cheaper than natural products, so most fragrance companies use as many of them as they can. The second is as a source of new notes (such as Calone) which offer the perfume-makers more scope when they sit down to create new fragrance.

 

"Don’t be fooled by all that nonsense about how natural is always better than synthetic. There is not a single great perfume in the world that does not use some synthetic ingredients."

   Neither purpose is particularly novel. Contrary to what you may think, synthetics are not new. In 1868, scientists synthesised coumarin, the main component of the smell of tonka beans. Soon afterwards came heliotropin, which smells a little like vanilla.

 

   Next came vanillin, which gave you the smell of vanilla. This was the main ingredient behind the success of Jicky, the classic perfume, launched in 1884. (But by 1930, an even cheaper source of vanillin was found in by-products of paper-manufacturing). In 1888, scientists created synthetic musk. In 1893, they recreated the smell of violets in molecules called ionones. Later they invented synthetic sandalwood, a process that continues to be perfected to this day.

 

   Perfume houses treat synthetic substitutes for natural smells with respect. Sometimes they can be harsh and lack the subtlety of the real thing. But often, if used judiciously, they can smell as good and can be more reliable than say, natural flowers which may smell different from month to month.

 

   These days, everybody uses synthetic alternatives. Some houses (Chanel for instance) use them only when they have to, preferring natural ingredients but often parfumiers have no choice: you can’t get natural musk or Mysore sandalwood oil these days, so you have to use synthetics. (The musk deer is a protected species and the Indian government has banned the export of sandalwood oil).

 

   Besides, many smells cannot be procured from flowers. Let’s take Lily of the Valley (muguet in French) which is often used in perfumery. The flower does not give up its smell so any fragrance that claims to smell of Lily of the Valley is, by definition, a reconstruction, using some natural smells and some synthetic molecules to recreate the scent. One of the best Lily of the Valley fragrances is Diorissimo, created in 1956 by the great Edmond Roudnitska (who also did Eau Sauvage and Diorella) – but it does not have a single Lily of the Valley flower among its many ingredients.

 

   The second purpose to which synthetics are often put to is to expand the perfume-maker’s palate. The best example of this is, of course, Chanel No. 5.

 

   There are many legends surrounding the origin of this great fragrance. The most common is that Coco Chanel asked parfumier Ernest Beaux to produce several samples for a fragrance she could launch under her own name. Beaux came up with many formulations, some of which used aldehydes, synthetics that smell harsh on their own but which, when fused with other ingredients, can make the fragrance smell more memorable. (In that sense, they are to fragrance what aji-no-moto is to Chinese food). One of Beaux’s technicians got it wrong and upped the aldehyde count in one sample.

 

   When Chanel smelt all the samples, she liked the one with the higher aldehyde count (it was sample 5, or so the story goes, hence the name) and picked it for her signature perfume. It went on to become the world’s best selling fragrance.

 

   Chanel No. 5 is a good example of how snobbery about synthetics can be pointless. Nobody disputes that it owes its success to aldehydes. Yet Chanel goes to great lengths to maintain the quality of the natural ingredients in the formula, growing its own jasmine and rose in the south of France. Synthetic molecules and natural ingredients triumph side by side.

 

   These days synthetics are responsible for nearly all the great success stories of recent times. It’s not just the Miyake fragrance. Even the hugely influential Cool Water owes its appeal to man-made molecules. Eau Sauvage, one of the greatest men’s fragrances, gets its freshness from hedione. And the woody feel of recent aftershaves comes from dihydromyrcenol, a laboratory synthetic.

 

   Though fragrance companies will not openly admit it, most perfumes are made of 90 per cent synthetics. The other ten per cent will consist of expensive natural ingredients but whenever a company can get away with a cheaper synthetic, cost will remain a great incentive to replace natural with laboratory made.

 

   Some general rules. One: don’t be fooled by all that nonsense about how natural is always better than synthetic. There is not a single great perfume in the world that does not use some synthetic ingredients. Two: but remember that if a perfume houses uses chemicals to replace natural ingredients that are easily available (say rose or jasmine), it is just being cheap, not creative. And three: if you care about the ingredients used then stick to the boutique houses (Annick Goutal, L’Artisan, Serge Lutens etc.) or a handful of big companies (Chanel, Guerlain, Hermes etc.)

 

   But on the whole, don’t worry too much about the ingredients. If you like how the fragrance smells then that’s more than enough.