Magazine · Arabian perfumes · craft
How a Perfume is Born: From First Idea to Last Drop
Some perfumes are born as a tribute to a rare ingredient; others start with a memory or the image of a particular place. The road from idea to finished bottle, however, runs through botany, chemistry and long months of trial and error.
It starts with a brief
Imagine the task: the scent should evoke a garden at night, with roses and jasmine in bloom, incense smoke drifting in from somewhere and the stone still giving off the day’s warmth. What should that smell like?
In the trade, such a task is called a brief. It is prepared by the brand or its creative director and may specify the character of the scent, the price, the intended wearer and the technical requirements. Sometimes it is very concrete; sometimes it works with an emotion alone. The perfumer must then translate it into the language of raw materials.
From plant to phial
Many ingredients begin life far from the laboratory – in rose gardens, citrus groves or fields of herbs. How the scent is drawn out of them depends on what the plant can bear.
The best known is steam distillation. Steam passes through the plant material, carries off the volatile aromatic compounds and, once cooled, the essential oil separates from the water. Lavender and sandalwood, for example, are treated this way. Citrus fruits are not distilled: the oil is cold-pressed from the peel, because heat would damage their fresh scent.
Fragile flowers such as jasmine or tuberose cannot stand hot steam. A solvent draws out their scent instead, yielding a waxy mass called a concrete and, once that has been washed with alcohol, what is known as an absolute. In the past, fat was used for this, with the flowers laid into it – that method, enfleurage, is now something of a rarity. The newest technique is extraction with supercritical carbon dioxide, which works at low temperature and leaves no solvent residue.
Molecules from the laboratory
The idea that the best perfume is entirely natural is widespread, but it misses how things are actually done. Most of today’s fragrances combine natural extracts with synthetic molecules. These can imitate a natural material, bring out one facet of it or create an impression that nature does not offer in usable form – sea air, for instance.
Musk is a good example: the animal kind is hardly used any more and has been replaced by synthetic musks. Oud is a similar case. The natural oil is rare and expensive, so in many perfumes its part is played by a constructed accord. That need not make the perfume any worse; what matters is what the perfumer does with the material.
Top, heart, base – and one caveat
Fragrances are usually described as a pyramid. The top is the first impression, often citrus and light spice. The heart consists of flowers, fruit or spices that emerge after a few minutes. The base – woods, resins, vanilla, musk – lasts longest.
It is a useful aid, not a precise timetable. The ingredients do not switch on one after another; many are present from the first second, and what changes is only how strongly we perceive them. The more volatile materials simply leave sooner.
The first trial is only the beginning
In the laboratory the formula is weighed out to fractions of a gram and every version is recorded. The perfumer assesses it on paper blotters and on skin, watching the first impression, the development, the strength and the staying power. Then come the adjustments – sometimes changing the ratio of two ingredients is enough; sometimes a whole accord has to be reworked. There may be dozens or hundreds of versions, with evaluators and the brand’s team weighing in on the choice.
Alcohol, time and a filter
The approved fragrance concentrate is diluted with alcohol. The ratio determines the name on the box: an eau de toilette (EDT) tends to contain roughly 5–15% fragrance materials, an eau de parfum (EDP) 15–20% and an extrait 20% or more. These are conventions, though, not legal limits, and brands interpret them in their own way.
Then comes the waiting. The concentrate usually rests on its own first, which is called maturation, and again after being mixed with alcohol, known as maceration; manufacturers do not use these terms uniformly, however. Amouage states the duration for each perfume: Interlude Man has 29% fragrance oils and matures for six weeks. Longer does not automatically mean better – the time depends on the composition.
Finally, the mixture is chilled and filtered so that it is clear and stable.
The rules you do not see on the label
Some fragrance materials, natural and synthetic alike, can irritate the skin or trigger an allergy. The fact that an ingredient comes from nature says nothing about its safety. The industry therefore follows the Standards of the International Fragrance Association (IFRA), which prohibit some materials, set maximum levels for others according to the type of product, or lay down purity requirements. In the European Union there is also the Cosmetic Products Regulation, which among other things requires selected allergens to be listed among the ingredients.
Only then is the perfume filled into bottles. Behind every drop are growers, distillers, chemists, perfumers, laboratory technicians and the people who watch over quality.
The most important moment, though, comes only when someone takes the first sniff. Perhaps they will find exactly what the perfumer intended. And perhaps something quite different – because we bring our own memories to a scent ourselves.
