Primary Scents: Can consist of one or a few main ingredients for a certain concept, such as "rose". Alternatively, multiple ingredients can be used together to create an "abstract" primary scent that does not bear a resemblance to a natural ingredient. For instance, jasmine and rose scents are commonly blends for abstract floral fragrances.

Modifiers: These ingredients alter the primary scent to give the perfume a certain desired character: for instance, fruit esters may be included in a floral primary to create a fruity floral; calone and citrus scents can be added to create a "fresher" floral. The cherry scent in cherry cola can be considered a modifier.

Blenders:
A large group of ingredients that smooth out the transitions of a perfume between different "layers" or bases. Common blending ingredients include linalool and hydroxycitronellal.

Fixatives:
Used to support the primary scent by bolstering it. Many resins and wood scents, and amber bases are used for fixative purposes.

The top, middle, and base notes of a fragrance may have separate primary scents and supporting ingredients.

Fragrant Bases

The perfume's fragrance oils are then blended with ethyl alcohol and water, aged in tanks for a minimum of 14 days and filtered through processing equipment to remove any sediment and particles before the solution can be filled into the perfume bottles.

Instead of building a perfume from "ground up", many modern perfumes and colognes are made using fragrance bases or simply bases. Each base is essentially modular perfume that is blended from essential oils and aromatic chemicals, and formulated with a simple concept such as "fresh cut grass" or "juicy sour apple". Many of Guerlain's Aqua Allegoria line, with their simple fragrance concepts, are good examples of what perfume fragrance bases are like.

The effort used in developing bases by fragrance companies or individual perfumers may equal that of a marketed perfume, since they are useful in that they are reusable. On top of its reusability, the benefit in using bases for construction are quite numerous:

1. Ingredients with "difficult" or "overpowering" scents that may be more easily incorporated into a work of perfume when tailored into a blended base.
2. A base may be better scent approximations of a certain thing than the extract of the thing itself. For example, a base made to embody the scent for "fresh dewy rose" might be a better approximation for the scent concept of a rose after rain than plain rose oil.
3. The concept of a perfume can be relatively quickly roughed out from a brief for purposes of feedback by cobbling together multiple bases and presented. Smoothing out the "edges" of the perfume can be done after a positive responses to the perfume concept.

Reverse Engineering

Creating perfumes through reverse engineering with analytical techniques such as GC/MS can reveal some of the formula for a particular perfume but most perfumes are difficult to analyze because of their complexity, particularly due to presence of essential oils and other ingredients consisting of complex chemical mixtures. However, "anyone armed with good GC/MS equipment and experienced in using this equipment can today, within days, find out a great deal about the formulation of any perfume... customers and competitors can analyze most perfumes more or less precisely.

Recreating perfumes in this manner is very expensive, unless one has access to the same complex ingredients as the original formulators.

Furthermore the deliberate addition of inert ingredients to obscure the formula makes identification of components difficult. Antique or badly preserved perfumes undergoing this analysis can also be difficult due to the numerous degradation by-products and impurities that may have resulted from breakdown of the odorous compounds. However, these ingredients and compounds can usually be ruled-out or identified using gas chromatograph (GC) smellers, which allow individual chemical components to be identified both through their physical properties and their scent.

History of Perfume and Perfumery

The word perfume used today derives from the Latin "per fume", meaning through smoke. Perfumery, or the art of making perfumes, began in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt but was developed and further refined by the Romans and the Arabs. Although perfume and perfumery also existed in East Asia, much of its fragrances are incense based.

The world's first chemist is considered to be a person named Tapputi, a perfume maker who was mentioned in a cuneiform tablet from the second millennium BC in Mesopotamia.

Recently, archaeologists have uncovered what is believed to be the world's oldest perfumes in Pyrgos, Cyprus. The perfumes date back more than 4,000 years. The perfumes were discovered in an ancient perfumery factory. At least 60 distilling stills, mixing bowls, funnels and perfume bottles were found in the 43,000 square foot factory. In ancient times people used herbs and spices, like almond, coriander, myrtle, conifer resin, bergamot, but not flowers.

The Persian doctor and chemist Avicenna introduced the process of extracting oils from flowers by means of distillation, (the procedure most commonly used today). He first experimented with the rose. Until his discovery, liquid perfumes were mixtures of oil and crushed herbs, or petals which made a strong blend. Rose water was more delicate, and immediately became popular. Both of the raw ingredients and distillation technology significantly influenced western perfumery and scientific developments, particularly chemistry.

Knowledge of perfumery came to Europe as early as the 14th century due partially to Arabic influences and knowledge. But it was the Hungarians who ultimately introduced the first modern perfume. The first modern perfume, made of scented oils blended in an alcohol solution, was made in 1370 at the command of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary and was known throughout Europe as Hungary Water. The art of perfumery prospered in Renaissance Italy, and in the 16th century, Italian refinements were taken to France by Catherine de' Medici's personal perfumer, Rene le Florentin. His laboratory was connected with her apartments by a secret passageway, so that no formulas could be stolen en route. France quickly became the European center of perfume and cosmetic manufacture. Cultivation of flowers for their perfume essence, which had begun in the 14th century, grew into a major industry in the south of France. During the Renaissance period, perfumes were used primarily by royalty and the wealthy to mask body odors resulting from the sanitary practices of the day. Partly due to this patronage, the western perfumery industry was created. By the 18th Century, aromatic plants were being grown in the Grasse region of France to provide the growing perfume industry with raw materials. Even today, France remains the centre of the European perfume design and trade.

Health Issues

Some perfume ingredients can cause health problems. Evidence in peer-reviewed journals shows that some fragrances can cause asthmatic reactions even when the participants could not actually smell the fragrances. Many fragrance ingredients can cause allergic skin reactions. There is scientific evidence that some common ingredients, like certain synthetic musks, can disrupt the balance of hormones in the human body (endocrine disruption) and even cause cancer (especially in the case of the ubiquitous synthetic polycyclic molecules, assigned to the musk odor group). Some research on natural aromatics have shown that many contain compounds that cause skin irritation, However many of the studies, such as IFRA's research claim that opoponax is too dangerous to be used in perfumery, are still incomplete and lack scientific consensus. It is also true that sometimes inhalation alone can cause skin irritation. Much remains to be learned about the effects of fragrance on human health and the environment.

In some cases, an excessive use of perfumes may cause allergic reactions of the skin. For instance, acetophenone, ethyl acetate and acetone while present in many perfumes, are also known or potential respiratory allergens. Persons with multiple chemical sensitivity or respiratory diseases such as asthma may be responsive to even low levels of perfumes.

The perfume industry is not directly regulated for safety by the FDA in the US. Instead the FDA regulates the ingredients in the perfumes themselves and require that they be tested to the extent that they are Generally Recognised As Safe (GRAS). Protection of trade secrets prevents the listing of ingredients that might or might not be hazardous in perfumes. In Europe, the mandatory listing of any of a number of chemicals thought to be hazardous has just begun. Nevertheless these listing may themselves be misleading, since the harm presented by many of these chemicals (either natural or synthetic) are dependent on environmental conditions. For instance, linalool, which must be listed as an irritant, only causes skin irritation when it degrades to peroxides, and the use of antioxidants in perfumes could prevent this. European versions of some old favorite perfumes, like chypres and fougeres, which require the use of oakmoss extract, are being reformulated because of these new regulations.

Natural Aromatics

Perfume composed only of natural materials can be more expensive due to the cost of some of these materials.

Some natural aromatics contain allergens or even carcinogenic compounds.

The use of some natural materials, like sandalwood or musk, can lead to species endangerment and illegal trafficking.

Natural ingredients vary by the times and locations where they are harvested.

Natural ingredients have aromas that are highly complex and are difficult or have been impossible to obtain through modern-day synthetics.

Synthetic Aromatics

The production of synthetic materials may contribute to environmental problems, since their production involve known carcinogens such as aromatic hydrocarbons.

Use of synthetic aromatics can make some perfumes available at widely-affordable prices. However, synthetic aromatics as a group are not necessarily cheaper than natural aromatics.

The excessive use of some synthetic materials like nitro-musks and macrocyclic musks has led to pollution problems.

There are many newly-created synthetic aromas that bear no olfactory relationship to any natural material.

Synthetic aromatics are more consistent than natural aromatics.

Natural Musk

Musk was traditionally taken from the male musk deer Moschus moschiferus. This requires the killing of the animal in the process. Although the musk pod is produced only by a young male deer, musk hunters usually did not discriminate between the age and sex of the deers. Due to the high demand of musk and indiscriminate hunting, populations were severely depleted. As a result, the deer is now protected by law and international trade of musk from Moschus moschiferus is prohibited:

Due to the rarity and high price of natural musk, as well as for legal and ethical reasons, it is the policy of many perfume companies to use synthetic musk instead. Numerous synthetic musks of high quality are readily available and approved safe by IFRA. However, many synthetic musks have been found in human fat, mother's milk, and the bottom of the Great Lakes.

IFRA & RIFM

IFRA's main purpose is to promote the safe enjoyment of fragrances worldwide. And it represents the regional and national fragrance associations worldwide for that purpose.

Membership in IFRA is on a voluntary basis only and not mandatory. SMEs, as well as large companies, belong to the regional and national associations that are members of IFRA. Information on IFRA, its Standards and Code of Practice are disseminated worldwide to all interested parties, 24/7 via its web site. IFRA has established self-regulation practices and implemented a Code of Practice and safety standards with the objective of protecting consumers' health and our environment. The approach is to collaborate with the policy makers and all the other stakeholders in order to obtain the best possible regulatory framework – one that protects both the consumers and the environment without limiting the creativity of the perfumers and the development of the industry. Therefore R&D, real scientific findings, health, safety and environmental concerns, are all at the heart of IFRA's policies.

Together with their scientific arm the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM) they ensure usage standards for fragrance materials are put into practice according to all available scientific knowledge, and that all member companies comply with those Standards.

Standards regarding use restrictions are based on safety assessments by REXPAN, the independent Panel of Experts that reviews the findings of the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM) and are then also carefully reviewed by the IFRA Scientific Committee. Composed of international scientific authorities, the Panel of Experts includes toxicologists, pharmacologists, pathologists environmental scientists and dermatologists who have no commercial ties to the fragrance industry, and whose work involves the safety evaluation of fragrance materials under conditions of intended use. Their evaluations are based on existing data or, where insufficient data exist, on testing performed by independent labs commissioned by RIFM. The credibility of the Panel of Experts is further strengthened by the publication of its findings and conclusions in a peer-reviewed and accredited scientific journals.

IFRA is always open to collaborating with any serious and responsible organization that bases its statements on scientific elements, is ideologically free and whose main objective is to promote the safe enjoyment of fragrances by all without detriment to the environment.

As you can see selective reporting may give you a distorted picture and while it is true some fragrances may cause irritation there will always be someone, somewhere, somehow and for some reason have reactions to fragrances; sometimes other than due to the fragrance itself – such as those caused by the general health of the person, any medication the person is taking or the misuse of a product.

15 October 2007