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Category: How Perfume Is Made

  • Why Perfumes Get Reformulated

    Why Perfumes Get Reformulated

    Four reasons, in rough order of frequency: a raw material got restricted or banned, a raw material got expensive or unavailable, a captive molecule was discontinued, or someone decided the formula cost too much. Regulation gets the blame for all four. Only the first is actually regulatory.

    Which rules actually bind, and which do not?

    This distinction is the whole subject, and almost every popular account gets it wrong.

    The EU Cosmetics Regulation, Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, is law. Its Annex II lists substances prohibited in cosmetic products. Its Annex III lists substances subject to restriction — concentration limits, conditions of use, or labelling requirements. A product containing an Annex II substance cannot legally be sold in the EU regardless of who made it or whether they belong to any trade body.

    IFRA Standards are not law. They are the International Fragrance Association’s self-regulatory program, binding on IFRA members and, in practice, on anyone whose customers demand an IFRA certificate — which is most of the supply chain. The Washington Post reported in 2021 that an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the perfume industry are IFRA members and follow its standards. The practical effect approaches that of law without being it: a non-member artisan in the United States selling direct is not bound by an IFRA Standard, while a supplier shipping concentrate to a multinational effectively is.

    In the United States, fragrance-specific allergen rules do not yet exist. The Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act directs the FDA to issue regulations identifying fragrance allergens requiring label disclosure and to set disclosure thresholds. As of early 2026 the FDA had not issued them. So the reformulations American consumers notice are almost always driven by EU law or IFRA Standards applied globally, because brands would rather run one formula than two.

    The two systems also do different things, which is a distinction worth holding onto. IFRA sets maximum use concentrations by product category. The EU’s allergen provisions in Annex III mostly set labelling obligations, not concentration caps: as one industry analysis puts it, “the final concentration of these fragrance allergens in the finished product is not restricted” by the Regulation itself. So when a fragrance gets weaker in a specific note, the cause is usually an IFRA ceiling, not an EU cap.

    What has IFRA actually restricted or banned?

    IFRA Standards come in three kinds: prohibitions, restrictions with a maximum use level by product category, and specifications setting purity or composition requirements on a material. The whole set is revised in numbered Amendments.

    The 51st Amendment, notified on 30 June 2023, added 48 new Standards and revised 11. Of the 48 new Standards, exactly one was a prohibition: 3-acetyl-2,5-dimethylfuran, CAS 10599-70-9, on genotoxicity grounds. Thirty-two were restrictions for dermal sensitization, eleven were restrictions derived from the second-generation quantitative risk assessment methodology, two used a threshold of toxicological concern approach, one addressed depigmentation, and one was a specification.

    Milestone Date Applies to
    51st Amendment notified 30 June 2023 All IFRA members
    Compliance with new Prohibition Standard 30 August 2023 New creations
    Compliance with Restriction and Specification Standards 30 March 2024 New creations
    Compliance with new Prohibition Standard 30 July 2024 Existing creations already on sale
    Compliance with Restriction and Specification Standards 30 October 2025 Existing creations already on sale
    52nd Amendment consultation opened 12 December 2025 Industry consultation
    52nd Amendment consultation closed 12 June 2026 Industry consultation
    End of Consultation Letter published 31 August 2026 Industry
    52nd Amendment notification expected January 2027 All IFRA members
    52nd Amendment compliance, new creations 11 months after notification New creations
    52nd Amendment compliance, existing creations 30 months after notification Existing creations

    The 52nd Amendment is the one currently driving reformulation work. IFRA’s End of Consultation Letter, published 31 August 2026, describes 48 new Restriction Standards addressing dermal sensitization — 37 of them with a systemic toxicity evaluation — plus 15 revised restriction standards and the withdrawal of two proposed standards. Notification is expected in January 2027. That means fragrances on shelves in 2027 and 2028 will be reformulated against rules that were already settled in 2026, which is the ordinary rhythm of this industry: the change reaches your nose two to three years after the decision.

    What has the EU actually banned?

    Instrument What it did Dates
    Commission Regulation (EU) 2017/1410 Added HICC (Lyral), atranol and chloroatranol to Annex II; deleted HICC’s Annex III entry 79. Based on the SCCS opinion of 26-27 June 2012 that these were the fragrance allergens causing the highest number of contact allergy cases Not placed on the EU market from 23 August 2019; not made available on the EU market from 23 August 2021
    Commission Regulation (EU) 2021/1902 (Omnibus IV) Added butylphenyl methylpropional (BMHCA, Lilial, CAS 80-54-6) to Annex II as entry 1666, among substances classified as CMR under Delegated Regulation (EU) 2020/1182. The reproductive-toxicity category 1B classification comes from the CLP entry; the regulation itself does not name a sub-category in its recitals. It had previously been an Annex III labelled allergen Applies from 1 March 2022, with no sell-off period
    Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 Expanded individual fragrance allergen labelling. The recitals state that 24 allergens were previously individually labelled and that the SCCS identified 56 additional ones; the annex replaces 17 Annex III entries and adds 45 new entries (327-371), of which 21 are plant oils or extracts. Thresholds 0.001% leave-on, 0.01% rinse-off. Labelling only, not concentration caps Placing on market from 31 July 2026; making available on market from 31 July 2028
    REACH authorisation decision Musk xylene banned, announced 18 February 2011, on environmental persistence grounds. IFRA had already banned it under its own program 2011

    Two things about that table are worth stressing. The Lilial ban was a reproductive toxicity classification, not a skin sensitization decision — a completely different regulatory pathway from the one that catches most fragrance materials, and one with no sell-off period, which is why some products vanished from shelves rather than being reformulated. And 2023/1545 was a labelling measure, so it forced disclosure rather than removal. Its effect on formulas was indirect but real: brands that did not want a long allergen list on the box reduced or removed materials to stay under threshold.

    Was oakmoss banned?

    No. This is the most persistent error in fragrance writing, and getting it right matters because the actual mechanism is more interesting.

    Oakmoss extract itself is restricted, not prohibited. The IFRA Standard for oakmoss extracts — covering CAS 90028-68-5, 68917-10-2 and 9000-50-4 — is a combined restriction and specification. The version currently published in IFRA’s Standards Library is the Amendment 49 text of 2020, which means neither the 50th nor the 51st Amendment revised it. It sets maximum use levels by product category, and for fine fragrance, IFRA category 4, the limit is 0.10 percent in the finished product. Other categories run from 0.016 percent for underarm products up to no restriction at all for category 12, which covers non-skin-contact products such as candles.

    The specification half is the part that changed the smell. The Standard requires that “levels of Atranol and Chloroatranol should each be below 100 ppm in Oakmoss extracts.” Separately, the EU prohibited atranol and chloroatranol as substances under Regulation 2017/1410. So a supplier can still sell oakmoss extract, and a perfumer can still use it in a fine fragrance up to 0.10 percent, provided the extract has been purified to remove two specific naturally occurring constituents below detectable levels.

    The accurate summary: oakmoss was not banned, it was capped and cleaned. Purified low-atranol oakmoss is a commercial product. It does not smell the same as unpurified oakmoss, which is why classical chypres changed — but “IFRA banned oakmoss” is wrong in both the verb and the agent, since the substance ban came from the European Commission and applied to constituents, not to the extract.

    How do raw material supply and cost force reformulation?

    More often than regulation does, and with no announcement whatsoever.

    Vanilla is the documented case. A peer-reviewed analysis of vanilla price bubbles records prices around $20/kg in the 2008-2010 period, about $80/kg in 2014, rising to roughly $600/kg by 2017 and a record near $600/kg in May 2018, subsequently trading between $600 and $750. The 2014-2018 spike is attributed to rising demand, falling supply, speculation and Cyclone Enawo, which hit Madagascar’s vanilla-growing regions in March 2017. A thirty-fold move in a base material does not leave formulas untouched, and nobody puts out a press release about it.

    Political disruption does the same thing faster. The Washington Post reports that Chanel No 19 was reformulated after the 1979 Iranian revolution cut off galbanum supplies — a supply-driven reformulation four decades before the current regulatory wave, and a useful reminder that reformulation is not a modern phenomenon.

    Slow-growing woods are a structural version of the same problem. Sandalwood and agarwood cannot be scaled up on a product timetable, and trade in agarwood-producing genera is CITES-regulated. When a brief calls for oud in a globally distributed fragrance, the answer is reconstruction, and the reconstruction changes whenever its components do.

    Then there is straightforward cost engineering. A brand under margin pressure can ask for a formula to be re-costed downward, and the fragrance house will deliver a version that smells as close as it can at the new price. No regulation is involved, no announcement is made, and this is very likely the single most common cause of the changes enthusiasts notice.

    What happens when a captive molecule is discontinued?

    A captive is a molecule made by one fragrance house and available only in that house’s formulas. It is a competitive asset: a rival cannot match an effect they cannot buy.

    The vulnerability is obvious. If the house stops producing it — because the plant is repurposed, the volume no longer justifies the line, a feedstock became unavailable, or a new safety assessment made the risk unattractive — every fragrance built on it has to be rebuilt, and no substitute will be exact, because the whole point of a captive was that no substitute existed.

    Here the honest answer is that houses do not disclose this. Captive discontinuations are not announced, are not listed, and are visible to outsiders only as an unexplained change in a fragrance that no regulatory change accounts for. Any specific claim that a named fragrance changed because a named captive was withdrawn is, in the absence of a statement from the house, a hypothesis.

    How can you tell a reformulation from your own nose or a degraded bottle?

    Usually you cannot, with certainty. But the failure modes have different signatures, and the pattern of what changed narrows it considerably.

    Cause What you would notice What points away from it
    Regulatory reformulation A specific material class is quieter or gone — the mossy-bitter green in a chypre, the muguet in a floral — while the overall structure survives. Timing clusters near an amendment compliance deadline The whole fragrance is weaker rather than one facet; or the change predates any relevant deadline
    Cost reformulation Naturals thin out. Less texture, shorter arc, more obviously synthetic-smelling body. Often accompanied by packaging or size changes One specific note is gone while everything else is intact
    Supply-driven reformulation One expensive natural recedes and a reconstruction takes its place; often follows a documented crop failure or price spike Nothing correlates with a known supply event
    Oxidized bottle The top notes are the problem: citrus goes sour, waxy or turpentine-like, while the base is roughly intact. Worse in a part-used bottle, a warm bathroom, or one stored in light A brand-new sealed bottle behaves the same way
    Your own nose and expectation You cannot reproduce the difference blind. The old bottle smells different when you do not know which is which Two people who have never smelled the old version independently describe the same specific absence

    The single most useful discipline is the one perfumers use on themselves: smell blind. Have someone else spray two blotters from an old bottle and a new one, unmarked, and see whether you can sort them. Most people, most of the time, cannot — and that result is information, not a failure.

    The second most useful discipline is to distrust the note list. A published note pyramid is marketing copy and is frequently carried over unchanged through several reformulations, because it was never a description of the formula. See what a published note pyramid is really for.

    How reformulation actually happens, step by step

    1. A trigger arrives. An IFRA amendment is notified, an EU instrument is published, a supplier raises a price, a crop fails, or a brand asks for a cheaper version.
    2. The house screens its portfolio. Regulatory systems flag every formula carrying the affected material above the new limit — for an amendment touching dozens of materials, thousands of formulas per house.
    3. Affected formulas are triaged. Some need a dose reduction and nothing else. Some need the material replaced. Some cannot be saved in their current shape.
    4. A perfumer rebuilds. Usually not the original perfumer, and often decades later. The target is to match the existing product, not to improve it.
    5. The new version is compared against a retained reference. Houses keep samples of the original as the benchmark, which is why reformulations are usually close rather than arbitrary.
    6. The brand approves, or does not. A brand that dislikes every option may accept a change it would rather not, because the alternative is not selling in that market.
    7. The new formula phases in. Old stock continues to sell alongside new stock, which is why two bottles bought the same week can differ.
    8. Nothing is announced. There is no regulatory obligation to disclose a formula change, and the note list on the box usually does not change.

    Which reformulation claims are wrong?

    “IFRA banned oakmoss”

    What is claimed: IFRA prohibited oakmoss, destroying the chypre family.

    What the evidence shows: The IFRA Standard for oakmoss extracts is a restriction plus specification. Fine fragrance (category 4) may contain up to 0.10 percent, and the specification requires atranol and chloroatranol each below 100 ppm in the extract. Separately, the European Commission prohibited atranol and chloroatranol as substances under Regulation 2017/1410.

    What people wrongly conclude: That oakmoss is unavailable and that IFRA banned it. Purified oakmoss is a commercial product; the substance ban came from the Commission and applied to two constituents, not to the extract.

    “IFRA is a law and IFRA limits are legal limits”

    What is claimed: IFRA Standards have the force of regulation.

    What the evidence shows: IFRA is the industry trade association’s self-regulatory program, binding on members. The Washington Post put member coverage at an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the industry. Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 is the binding law in the EU. In the US, the FDA had not issued MoCRA fragrance allergen regulations as of early 2026.

    What people wrongly conclude: That an IFRA limit is enforceable by a government, or that a small non-member producer is breaking the law by exceeding one. Neither is true, though exceeding an IFRA limit will usually end a commercial relationship.

    “The EU limits how much allergen a perfume can contain”

    What is claimed: Annex III caps allergen concentrations.

    What the evidence shows: For the declared fragrance allergens, Annex III mostly sets labelling thresholds — 0.001 percent leave-on, 0.01 percent rinse-off — and industry analysis notes that the final concentration of these allergens in the finished product is not restricted by the Regulation itself. IFRA sets the concentration ceilings.

    What people wrongly conclude: That a long allergen list on a box means the product is near a legal limit. It means those substances are present above a disclosure threshold, which for a leave-on product is one part in a hundred thousand.

    “Lilial was restricted for causing allergies”

    What is claimed: Lilial went the way of Lyral, as a sensitizer.

    What the evidence shows: Butylphenyl methylpropional was added to Annex II by Regulation (EU) 2021/1902 on the basis of a CMR category 1B classification for reproductive toxicity, applying from 1 March 2022 with no sell-off period. It had previously been an Annex III labelled allergen, but the ban came through the CMR route.

    What people wrongly conclude: That all fragrance restrictions run through skin sensitization. They do not, and the CMR route is faster and harsher: no transition, no sell-off, products off shelves.

    “My bottle was reformulated”

    What is claimed: A fragrance that smells different from memory has been changed.

    What the evidence shows: Top notes are the least stable part of a composition, and oxidation in an opened bottle reliably degrades them first, which reads as exactly the same symptom people attribute to reformulation. Reformulations do happen and are not announced, so the claim is often correct — but a part-used bottle stored warm is the more common explanation, and almost nobody tests it blind.

    What people wrongly conclude: That the difference proves a formula change. It proves a difference. Blind comparison against a fresh bottle is the only way to separate the two, and even then you are comparing two bottles, not two formulas.

    The honest limits of this article

    You cannot verify a reformulation from outside. Houses have no obligation to announce formula changes and generally do not; the note list on the packaging is marketing copy and usually survives unchanged; and even a gas chromatography trace of two bottles would show differences caused by age and storage as well as by formula. So every claim of the form “fragrance X was reformulated in year Y because of Z” is inference unless a house has said so. The named examples here — Chanel No 19 and galbanum, Guerlain Mitsouko and Thierry Wasser’s reworking — come from newspaper reporting rather than company statements, and should be read at that level of confidence. Regulatory dates and limits, by contrast, are drawn from the instruments themselves and from IFRA’s notification documents, and are as solid as anything here gets.

    What to do with this as a buyer

    Three practical conclusions.

    Stop treating reformulation as a moral event. A formula that has been rebuilt to survive a category limit is not a cheapened product, and a formula rebuilt to hit a lower cost target might be. Those are different things with the same symptom, and the only signal that distinguishes them is which part of the fragrance changed: one missing facet points to regulation or supply, uniform thinness points to cost.

    What our own catalogue shows

    You can watch the vocabulary shift in our own listing copy, with a caveat attached. Of the 3,832 bottles we list, about 43 mention oakmoss. Lyral, hydroxyisohexyl 3-cyclohexene carboxaldehyde and lilial appear in none — a fact about copywriting, not chemistry. Restricted materials were never the sort of thing marketing copy named, so their absence tells you nothing about any formula. What the oakmoss count shows is that a material can stay in the language of perfumery long after its use has been capped, which is how a note list survives a reformulation unchanged.

    How much of what is on sale today predates these restrictions is a question we cannot answer from our own catalogue. A product listing records a name, a size, a price and a code — never a release year. Any figure would have to be assembled from marketing prose, which is exactly the kind of number this article argues you should not trust. A great many fragrances sold now under a pre-2000 name have been rebuilt at least once, and the bottle will not tell you.

    Bottles to try this on

    Buy the current version if you like the current version. Chasing a vintage bottle means buying an unknown storage history, and an oxidized original is objectively further from the perfumer’s intent than a compliant reformulation. If you want to hear how a classical chypre-adjacent structure reads now, Guerlain Shalimar and Chanel No 5 are both current-production references built on materials that have been through several regulatory cycles, and both still work.

    Recognize which fragrances are structurally exposed. A fragrance whose identity rests on one restricted natural is fragile; one built on synthetics with stable supply is not. A woody-amber composition such as Terre d’Hermès or Dior Sauvage Eau de Parfum is comparatively insulated, because the materials carrying it are manufactured to specification. An oud-led fragrance like Tom Ford Oud Wood depends on a reconstruction whose components can be revised at any time. And a single-material fragrance such as Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 is the extreme case in both directions: nothing to cheapen, and nowhere to hide if that one molecule is ever restricted.

    Related reading

    Common questions

    Why do perfumes get reformulated?

    Four main reasons: a raw material was restricted or banned, a raw material became expensive or unavailable, a captive molecule was discontinued, or the brand asked for a cheaper formula. Only the first is regulatory. Cost-driven reformulation is probably the most common and is never announced.

    Did IFRA ban oakmoss?

    No. The IFRA Standard for oakmoss extracts is a restriction with a specification, and the version published in IFRA’s Standards Library is still the Amendment 49 text of 2020. Fine fragrance may contain up to 0.10 percent, and the extract must contain atranol and chloroatranol each below 100 ppm. Separately the European Commission banned those two constituents as substances in 2017. Purified oakmoss remains a commercial material.

    Is IFRA a law?

    No. IFRA Standards are the fragrance industry’s self-regulatory program, binding on members and in practice on anyone whose customers require an IFRA certificate. Reporting in 2021 put member coverage at an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the industry. The binding law in the EU is Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009.

    What is the current IFRA amendment?

    The 51st Amendment, notified 30 June 2023, is the one in force; its final compliance deadline for existing creations was 30 October 2025. The 52nd Amendment’s consultation closed on 12 June 2026 and IFRA published its End of Consultation Letter on 31 August 2026, with notification expected in January 2027.

    Why was Lilial banned?

    Through the CMR route rather than the skin-allergy route. Butylphenyl methylpropional was added to Annex II of the EU Cosmetics Regulation by Regulation (EU) 2021/1902 as entry 1666, among substances classified as CMR, and the ban applies from 1 March 2022 with no sell-off period. That is why some products were withdrawn rather than reformulated.

    Does the EU limit how much allergen a perfume can contain?

    Mostly no. For the declared fragrance allergens, Annex III sets labelling thresholds of 0.001 percent in leave-on and 0.01 percent in rinse-off products. Industry analysis notes the final concentration in the finished product is not restricted by the Regulation. IFRA Standards set the concentration ceilings.

    How can I tell if a perfume has been reformulated?

    From outside, usually you cannot be certain. Look at what changed: one missing facet suggests regulation or supply, uniform thinness suggests cost, and a sour or turpentine-like top with an intact base suggests an oxidized bottle. Then test blind, because most people cannot sort unmarked blotters reliably.

    Is a reformulated perfume worse?

    Not necessarily. Houses rebuild against a retained sample of the original, so the target is to match rather than to change. A regulatory reformulation can be close; a cost reformulation is usually thinner. An oxidized vintage bottle is often further from the perfumer’s intent than the current compliant version.

    What is a captive molecule?

    A molecule made by one fragrance house and available only in its own formulas, which prevents rivals from matching a particular effect. If the house stops producing it, every fragrance built on it has to be rebuilt with no exact substitute. Houses do not announce captive discontinuations, so outsiders cannot track them.

    Do brands have to say when they change a formula?

    No. There is no obligation to announce a formula change, and published note lists are marketing copy that usually survives unchanged through reformulations. Ingredient labels list declarable allergens above threshold, which can shift, but they do not describe the formula.

  • Who Actually Makes Your Perfume?

    Who Actually Makes Your Perfume?

    Almost no fragrance brand composes or manufactures its own perfume. A small group of business-to-business suppliers does that work: Givaudan, dsm-firmenich, IFF, Symrise, Takasago, Mane and Robertet. A brand writes a brief, several suppliers submit competing trials, one wins, and the winning perfumer is usually not named on the box.

    This is the single most useful fact in fragrance, and it reframes nearly every argument about price and quality. The name on the bottle is a brand, a licence and a marketing budget. The liquid inside came from a laboratory that also supplies the brand’s competitors, and quite possibly the shampoo under your sink.

    What is a fragrance house, and how is it different from a perfume brand?

    Two different industries share the word “house,” which causes most of the confusion.

    A perfume brand is the name on the bottle: Dior, Versace, Lattafa, Le Labo. It owns the trademark, the bottle design, the advertising and the distribution. In many cases it does not even own itself in beauty terms; Coty holds the fragrance licence for Burberry, Hugo Boss, Marc Jacobs, Chloé and other prestige names, while Inter Parfums holds licences for Montblanc, Jimmy Choo, Coach, Lacoste and Ferragamo. Inter Parfums states plainly in its own filings that it does not own manufacturing facilities and acts “as a general contractor,” sourcing components from suppliers.

    A fragrance house, in the industrial sense, is a supplier of fragrance compounds. It employs the perfumers, owns the raw-material library, holds the patents on captive molecules, and manufactures the concentrate that gets diluted into alcohol and filled into the bottle. The NYU Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law describes the position bluntly: these companies “have functioned as ghostwriters, creating and manufacturing products ultimately sold as emanations of their customers.” The same paper notes that by the late twentieth century, five fragrance and flavor companies supplied over half the world fragrance market.

    So a bottle of designer perfume typically passes through three companies before it reaches you: the brand that owns the name, the licensee or beauty division that operates the business, and the supplier that composed and compounded the juice.

    Who are the suppliers that make most of the world’s fragrance?

    Seven companies dominate fine fragrance creation. Their fragrance-segment revenues are public, and they are far larger than most of the brands they serve.

    Supplier Founded Headquarters Fragrance/scent segment sales, 2025 One documented fine-fragrance credit
    Givaudan 1895 (Léon and Xavier Givaudan) Vernier, Geneva, Switzerland CHF 3,830m Fragrance & Beauty, of which Fine Fragrance CHF 882m; Fine Fragrance sales up 18.3% like-for-like Yves Saint Laurent MYSLF Absolu (Daniela Andrier, Antoine Maisondieu, Christophe Raynaud)
    dsm-firmenich Firmenich 1895 (Philippe Chuit and Martin Naef); merged with DSM May 2023 Kaiseraugst, Switzerland / Maastricht, Netherlands €3,760m Perfumery & Beauty; 3% organic growth for the segment; Fine Fragrance win rate described as a historical high in prestige and niche Prada Paradigme (Nicolas Bonneville, Bruno Jovanovic, Marie Salamagne)
    IFF 1958, from the merger of Polak & Schwarz and van Ameringen-Haebler New York, USA $2.479bn Scent segment; double-digit Fine Fragrance growth Tom Ford Oud Voyager (Dominique Ropion, Carlos Benaïm, Pascal Gaurin)
    Symrise 2003, from the merger of Haarmann & Reimer (1874) and Dragoco (1919) Holzminden, Germany €1,901m Scent & Care; Fine Fragrances high-single-digit organic growth Balmain Beauty E@bène (Maurice Roucel)
    Takasago 1920, as Takasago Perfumery Company Ōta, Tokyo, Japan Not separately disclosed by segment in English-language releases Burberry Her Intense (Aurelien Guichard)
    Mane 1871 Le Bar-sur-Loup, France Privately held; not disclosed by segment Jo Malone London Beach Blossom (Mathilde Bijaoui)
    Robertet 1850 Grasse, France €843.9m group revenue; Fragrances division 37.4% of revenue Byredo Desert Dawn and Rare Beauty Eau de Parfum (Jérôme Epinette)

    Two things stand out. First, the supplier is often older than the brand: Robertet was founded in 1850, seventy-one years before Chanel No. 5 launched and seventy-four before Parfums Chanel was formed. Second, the same supplier serves competitors. Givaudan’s credits in a single awards cycle span L’Oréal-operated brands and Estée Lauder-operated brands at once.

    How does a brand actually commission a fragrance?

    The process runs on a document called the brief. IFF describes it in its own words: “Every fragrance begins with a brief. Whether it comes from a global beauty brand or a niche house, the brief defines the target audience, emotional intent and olfactive direction.” A brief typically covers the consumer, the price position, the packaging, the launch date, the territories and the cost-per-kilo ceiling for the concentrate.

    How many suppliers a brief goes to is not published by anyone, and this article will not pretend otherwise. What is documented is competition. Inside a house it is explicit: Perfumer & Flavorist describes larger fragrance houses as “competitive environments, where multiple perfumers will be tasked with the same brief.” Between houses, the evidence is the industry’s own vocabulary rather than a disclosed process: dsm-firmenich publishes a document for each of its master perfumers called a “Major Win List” and reported that “in Fine Fragrance, our win rate reached a historical high in prestige and niche market segments” for 2025, while Symrise attributes its fine fragrance growth to “new wins, notably in North America and Latin America.” A house that reports a win rate is describing contests it sometimes loses. That is strong circumstantial evidence for competitive pitching, and it is not the same thing as a documented process.

    Inside each competing supplier, a perfumer works with an evaluator, a role the Grasse Institute of Perfumery describes as the perfumer’s advisor, whose job is to “understand the client’s brief and translate it to the perfumer” and to “present the product submissions, meet customers and take into account comments and transmit them to the creators.” Trials go back and forth, sometimes dozens of them, until the client selects one. The losing submissions are shelved, occasionally to be reworked into a later brief for a different client.

    No major supplier publishes how many houses receive a typical brief, how many trials a project consumes, or what a win rate is in absolute terms. Numbers quoted for this are estimates.

    Can you find out who composed a specific fragrance?

    Sometimes, yes, and the most reliable public record is the Fragrance Foundation Awards, which credit three parties for every winning fragrance: the brand or parent company, the supplier, and the perfumer or perfumers by name. This is the clearest published evidence of how the industry is actually structured. The table below mixes the 2026 and 2025 award cycles; the Foundation’s site shows only the current year, so the earlier rows come from trade reporting of the 2025 winners.

    Fragrance Brand Company operating the brand Supplier that composed it Perfumer(s)
    Oud Voyager Tom Ford Estée Lauder Companies IFF Dominique Ropion, Carlos Benaïm, Pascal Gaurin
    Born in Roma Donna Extradose Valentino Beauty L’Oréal dsm-firmenich Honorine Blanc, Amandine Clerc-Marie
    Paradigme Prada Beauty L’Oréal dsm-firmenich Nicolas Bonneville, Bruno Jovanovic, Marie Salamagne
    MYSLF Absolu Yves Saint Laurent L’Oréal Givaudan Daniela Andrier, Antoine Maisondieu, Christophe Raynaud
    Beach Blossom Jo Malone London Estée Lauder Companies Mane Mathilde Bijaoui
    Her Intense Burberry Coty Takasago Aurelien Guichard
    E@bène Balmain Beauty Estée Lauder Companies Symrise Maurice Roucel
    Portrait of a Lady Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle Estée Lauder Companies IFF Dominique Ropion
    1 Million Eau de Toilette Rabanne Puig Givaudan Michel Girard (rendered “Michel Gerard” in the award citation), Olivier Pescheux, Christophe Raynaud
    Sunkissed Goddess Kilian Paris Estée Lauder Companies Givaudan Calice Becker

    Read that table twice. Tom Ford and Jo Malone London sit under the same parent but use different suppliers. Prada, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent all sit under L’Oréal, and two of the three used dsm-firmenich while the third used Givaudan. Portrait of a Lady, a fragrance sold explicitly as the work of a named perfumer, was composed by an IFF perfumer, exactly like the Tom Ford in the row above it. If you like the density of Portrait of a Lady, you are responding to Dominique Ropion’s hand and to IFF’s rose and patchouli materials, not to a workshop behind a Paris storefront.

    Why is the winning perfumer so often uncredited?

    For most of the twentieth century, brands treated the perfumer as a trade secret alongside the formula. The reason is commercial rather than mysterious: a brand that names the supplier and the perfumer invites the reader to notice that the same pair also made a competitor’s bestseller.

    Legal structure reinforces the habit. Fragrance formulas are protected as trade secrets rather than by copyright. France’s highest court held that although composing a perfume may involve creative thought, that thought “cannot be broadly communicated because it cannot be sufficiently perceived.” With no copyright to assert, secrecy is the protection, and the supplier normally owns the formula, not the brand.

    The convention began to break in 2000, when Frédéric Malle founded Editions de Parfums on the principle that “the world’s greatest noses composed exclusive, creative fragrances that would be sold under their creators’ names.” Brands now name perfumers when it helps the story and stay quiet when it does not.

    Which brands compose in-house instead?

    A small number of houses employ their own perfumer, who works on that brand alone. This is genuinely different from the supplier model, and it is rare.

    House Current in-house perfumer Since Came from Predecessor
    Guerlain Thierry Wasser 2008 Firmenich Jean-Paul Guerlain
    Chanel Olivier Polge Joined 2013, head perfumer 2015 IFF Jacques Polge (1978–2015)
    Hermès Christine Nagel Joined 2014, sole in-house perfumer 2016 Firmenich, then independent work in Italy Jean-Claude Ellena (2004–2016)
    Dior Francis Kurkdjian, perfume creation director October 2021 Maison Francis Kurkdjian François Demachy

    Note the pattern in the fourth column. Every one of these in-house perfumers trained and built a career inside the supplier industry before crossing over. Olivier Polge composed Lancôme La Vie Est Belle and Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb at IFF before he composed Bleu de Chanel Parfum. Thierry Wasser came from Firmenich before he took over Guerlain Shalimar. In-house does not mean untouched by the supplier world; it means the brand bought the perfumer instead of renting the formula.

    There is also a third model with a long history: the independent laboratory. Edmond Roudnitska founded Art et Parfum in 1946 and, from that small firm, composed Rochas Femme, Dior Diorissimo in 1956, Dior Eau Sauvage in 1966 and Eau d’Hermès in 1951. Several of the most admired fragrances of the century came from a business with no advertising budget at all.

    How to find out who made a fragrance you own

    1. Check whether the brand names the perfumer on its own site or press material. Brands that want the credit make it easy to find.
    2. Search the Fragrance Foundation Awards archive for the fragrance name. If it was a finalist or winner in any year, you get brand, supplier and perfumer in one line.
    3. Search the supplier’s own perfumer pages. dsm-firmenich publishes a “Major Win List” per master perfumer; Givaudan and IFF maintain perfumer biographies with named creations.
    4. Check who operates the brand in beauty, not who owns the fashion house. A Burberry fragrance is a Coty product; a Valentino fragrance is a L’Oréal product; a Rabanne fragrance is a Puig product.
    5. Treat perfumer databases as leads, not evidence. They are useful for finding a name to verify, and they carry errors, disputed attributions and missing co-perfumers.
    6. Accept that for many fragrances, especially older ones and most house-brand or private-label products, the answer is not public and never will be.

    What does this mean for the designer-versus-niche quality argument?

    It mostly dissolves it. The argument assumes two separate production systems, one cheap and one careful. There is one production system.

    The same suppliers and frequently the same perfumers work across designer, niche, indie and Middle Eastern brands. Dominique Ropion composed both a Tom Ford ultra-luxury launch and a Miu Miu prestige launch in the same awards cycle. Marie Salamagne composed a Ralph Lauren men’s prestige fragrance and a Yves Saint Laurent Le Vestiaire exclusive. Jérôme Epinette composed for Byredo and for Rare Beauty. A niche brand does not get access to a better laboratory; it buys from the same one.

    What genuinely varies is the raw-material budget per kilo of concentrate, the batch size, the concentration, the packaging cost and the marketing load. Those are real differences and they can produce real differences in what you smell. They are not, however, differences in who did the work or how skilled they were. The most expensive material in a €250 niche bottle and the most expensive material in a €90 designer bottle very often come from the same drum.

    A practical consequence: if you love Dior Sauvage Eau de Parfum and want something less ubiquitous, the productive question is not “what niche brand is better” but “which perfumer and which accord am I actually responding to.” That question has answers you can act on.

    Myths worth correcting

    “Chanel and Dior make their own perfume from start to finish.” Both employ their own perfumer, which is unusual and meaningful. Neither produces its own aroma materials at industrial scale, and both buy captive molecules and naturals from the same suppliers everyone else uses. Chanel’s long-standing partnership with the Mul family farms near Grasse, established in 1987, is a genuine exception on the agricultural side, covering jasmine, rose and iris for specific fragrances rather than the entire portfolio.

    “Niche brands use better perfumers.” They frequently use the same perfumers. Calice Becker composed Dior J’adore and Kilian Sunkissed Goddess. Carlos Benaïm composed a Maison Margiela Replica and a Tom Ford.

    “The perfumer named in the marketing did all the work.” Modern fine fragrance is often composed by two or three perfumers together, as the awards credits show, plus an evaluator, a technical team and a client-side marketing group with veto power. Single-name credits flatten a group effort.

    “If a brand won’t say who made it, something is wrong.” Non-disclosure is the industry default, not a red flag. Most fragrances ever sold have no public perfumer attribution.

    “Fragrance suppliers are small artisanal workshops.” Givaudan reported CHF 7,472 million in group sales for 2025 and employed 17,580 people. dsm-firmenich reported €12,521 million. These are large listed chemical and ingredients companies.

    The honest limits of this article

    Supplier attributions here come from award citations and company publications, which cover a tiny and self-selecting slice of the market: fragrances that were entered, shortlisted and won. For the overwhelming majority of the roughly 4,500 products in a large fragrance catalogue, nobody outside the supply chain knows which house composed them. Raw-material budgets, batch sizes, cost-per-kilo ceilings and win rates are commercially sensitive and are not published by any of the seven suppliers. Where a brand composes in-house, the supplier relationship for individual materials is also undisclosed. And segment revenue is not the same as fine fragrance revenue: only Givaudan and IFF gave any quantified fine-fragrance commentary for 2025, and neither published a fine-fragrance sales line. Treat any precise-sounding claim about “who makes what” that is not traceable to an award citation, a brand statement or a supplier publication as unverified.

    What our own catalogue shows

    It is worth grounding all of this in what a retailer’s shelf actually looks like. We list products from more than 460 distinguishable brands — 466 by our count, and that is a floor, because about 277 listings (7%) carry no brand name in the title at all. The ten largest by number of references are Lattafa (about 127), Demeter (126), Armaf (91), Paco Rabanne (82), Versace (78), Carolina Herrera (72), Calvin Klein (66), Hermès (58), Burberry (57) and Al Haramain (50). Read that list against the supplier tables above: several of those ten are licensed designer names whose fragrances are composed, and often manufactured, by companies whose names appear nowhere on the bottle, while three are Gulf houses that do their own manufacturing. The brand on the front is the least reliable guide to who made what is inside.

    A count of how many of these bottles are made under licence is not something we can produce. Licence arrangements are commercial contracts between a brand owner and a fragrance company; they are not printed on the bottle and they are not in any retailer’s product data. They also move — a brand can shift from one licensee to another without a single listing changing. The tables above name specific, documented arrangements one at a time, which is the only honest way to do it.

    Bottles to try this on

    Pairs worth smelling side by side to hear a single perfumer’s hand across two brands: Giorgio Armani Acqua di Gio and CK One, both composed by Alberto Morillas at Firmenich two years apart; Mugler Angel and Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue, both by Olivier Cresp at Firmenich; and Terre d’Hermès against Bvlgari Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert, both by Jean-Claude Ellena fourteen years apart, one for an in-house role and one as a supplier perfumer.

    Related reading

    Common questions

    Who actually makes Dior and Chanel perfume?

    Both employ their own perfumer, which is unusual. Chanel’s is Olivier Polge, head perfumer since 2015, who came from IFF. Dior’s perfume creation director is Francis Kurkdjian, appointed in October 2021. Both houses still buy their aroma materials, including patented captive molecules, from the same large suppliers that serve other brands.

    Is Givaudan the same thing as a perfume brand?

    No. Givaudan is a listed Swiss supplier that composes and manufactures fragrance compounds for other companies. It reported CHF 7,472 million in group sales for 2025 and does not sell perfume under its own name at retail. You will never see Givaudan on a bottle, but you have almost certainly worn its work.

    Do several fragrance houses compete for the same project?

    Inside a house, certainly: Perfumer & Flavorist describes larger houses as competitive environments where multiple perfumers are tasked with the same brief. Between houses the evidence is indirect. dsm-firmenich reported that its Fine Fragrance win rate reached a historical high in prestige and niche for 2025 and publishes a “Major Win List” for each master perfumer, and Symrise credits growth to new wins. No supplier publishes how many houses receive a given brief.

    Why isn’t the perfumer’s name on the bottle?

    Because naming the perfumer invites customers to notice that the same person made a competitor’s bestseller, and because formulas are protected as trade secrets rather than copyright. Frédéric Malle broke the convention in 2000 by selling fragrances under their composers’ names. Brands now credit perfumers selectively, when it supports the story.

    Does the same company make designer and niche fragrances?

    Frequently yes, and often the same perfumer. In one Fragrance Foundation awards cycle, Dominique Ropion of IFF was credited on a Tom Ford ultra-luxury fragrance and a Miu Miu prestige fragrance, and Jérôme Epinette of Robertet on both a Byredo and a Rare Beauty launch. Category is a market position, not a separate factory.

    How can I find out which fragrance house made a perfume I own?

    Check the brand’s own press material first, then search the Fragrance Foundation Awards, which credit brand, supplier and perfumer together. Supplier sites publish perfumer biographies with named creations. If none of those covers it, the information is probably not public, which is the normal situation rather than the exception.

    Who owns the formula, the brand or the supplier?

    Usually the supplier. Fragrance formulas are held as trade secrets, and courts in France have declined to grant perfumes copyright protection on the grounds that the creative thought cannot be sufficiently perceived to be communicated. That is a large part of why brands cannot simply take a formula to a cheaper manufacturer.

    Are there perfumers who don’t work for a big supplier?

    Yes, though they are a minority. Edmond Roudnitska composed Dior Diorissimo, Eau Sauvage and Eau d’Hermès from Art et Parfum, the independent laboratory he founded in 1946. Independent perfumers and small consultancies still serve indie brands, and a few brands employ perfumers directly.

    Does knowing the supplier tell me whether a fragrance is good?

    No. All seven major suppliers produce excellent and forgettable work, because the brief, the budget per kilo and the client’s decisions shape the result as much as the perfumer does. Supplier knowledge is useful for tracing why two fragrances feel related, not for predicting quality.

    Is a fragrance made by a big supplier lower quality than an artisan one?

    There is no evidence for that. The large suppliers hold the research libraries, the captive molecules and the analytical laboratories, and they train most working perfumers. Small independent producers can offer materials or concentrations the big system rarely funds. Neither arrangement is inherently better than the other.

  • What a Perfumer Actually Does

    What a Perfumer Actually Does

    A perfumer writes formulas. They receive a written brief from a brand, compose a list of materials with a weight against each, have technicians weigh each trial, smell the result blind, revise, and resubmit, often hundreds of times and usually in competition with perfumers at rival houses. Most work for a fragrance supplier, not for the brand on the bottle.

    What does a perfumer actually do all day?

    Less smelling than you would expect, and far more arithmetic and record-keeping.

    The work is document-centered. A formula is a table: material name, dose, and the dilution the material is used at. Published descriptions of perfumers’ practice note that “each formula is recorded with precision: the name of each material, the dosage as a percentage, the final concentration in alcohol.” The perfumer writes a version, hands it to a laboratory technician who weighs it, and gets back a small bottle a few hours or a day later. They smell that, compare it against the previous version and against whatever benchmark the brief named, and write the next version. Olfactory fatigue sets a hard ceiling on how much smelling is even possible in a day, which is one reason the job is structured around paper rather than around the bench.

    Alongside the creative work sits a permanent constraint check. Every formula has to price under a cost-per-kilo ceiling, comply with IFRA Standards for the product category it is destined for, satisfy the law in every market it will ship to, and survive the packaging. A beautiful formula that costs three times the brief’s ceiling is not a submission.

    What is a brief, and who writes it?

    A brief is a written specification produced by the brand, usually by marketing, in collaboration with an evaluator or creative fragrance director at the fragrance house. IFF describes it as defining “the target audience, emotional intent and olfactive direction.” In practice it also carries the commercial constraints: cost ceiling, IFRA product category, target markets, concentration, packaging, and frequently a competitive benchmark — an existing fragrance the new one should perform against.

    Briefs are competitive, though the public evidence is stronger for competition inside a house than between houses. Perfumer & Flavorist describes larger fragrance houses as “competitive environments, where multiple perfumers will be tasked with the same brief.” That several houses also pitch the same brief is implied by the industry’s own language of “wins” and “win rates” in supplier results, but no supplier publishes how many houses receive a given brief. The scale is visible in Givaudan’s 2025 integrated report, which refers to “more than 300,000 briefs we receive each year” — a company-wide figure across all its businesses, not a fine-fragrance count. Most submissions are never sold, and a perfumer’s career is built substantially on losing.

    What is the perfumer’s organ, and what is on it?

    A tiered semicircular workbench of bottles, so named because its stepped shape resembles the pipes of a church organ. Descriptions of professional organs put the contents at between 1,000 and 3,000 materials, arranged either by olfactive family or by volatility — top, heart and base notes in bands.

    The palette is larger than any one perfumer uses regularly. IFF describes its perfumers drawing from “a palette of over 1,000 natural extracts and aroma molecules,” and says perfumers must memorize “more than a thousand perfume ingredients.” The Givaudan Perfumery School has students memorize “around 500 ingredients” during training. Most materials on the organ are stored at dilution — commonly 10 percent, sometimes 1 percent for very powerful molecules — because a neat material at full strength tells you very little about what it does at 0.3 percent in a formula.

    How is a perfume formula written?

    In weights, normally as parts per 1,000 so the total is a clean number and scaling is trivial. A trial is weighed on a balance reading to at least 0.001 g, because the materials that matter most are often the ones present in tenths of a gram.

    The table below is a teaching illustration, not a formula. It is not derived from, approximated from or reverse-engineered from any real fragrance, and the doses were invented by the author purely to show how a formula is shaped. Do not read it as the composition of any product, and do not use it as a recipe. The material functions in the middle column are documented; the numbers in the right-hand column are not data.

    Material Function in the formula Parts per 1,000 (invented for illustration; not data)
    Bergamot oil, expressed Top lift; sets the first three minutes 90
    Hedione Transparent floral volume; makes the whole thing feel larger without adding weight 180
    Linalool Bridges citrus to floral; softens the top edge 45
    Iso E Super Dry woody body; carries the middle without a character of its own 200
    Jasmine absolute Floral depth and indolic realism at low dose 12
    Ambroxan Warm mineral-woody base; long substantivity 60
    Coumarin Hay-sweet warmth in the drydown 25
    Vanillin, 10% solution Rounds the base; smooths woody sharpness 30
    Dipropylene glycol Solvent and diluent; carries the balance to 1,000 358

    Two features of that table are the real content. First, the biggest numbers are often the least characterful materials: the woody-amber and the transparent floral do the structural work, while the expensive natural sits at 12 parts and provides identity. Second, a large fraction of the formula is solvent. Neither of those facts is visible from a note pyramid.

    What is an accord, and why do perfumers build with them?

    An accord is a sub-blend that behaves as one material. A perfumer does not add twenty individual compounds to make a muguet note; they build a muguet accord once, keep it, and dose it as a unit. The Givaudan Perfumery School curriculum explicitly includes “learning essential accords” alongside raw material study.

    The reason is practical. A formula with 200 line items is hard to revise, because changing one thing changes several relationships at once. A formula with 40 line items, eight of which are accords, is revisable: you can adjust the floral accord’s dose without disturbing its internal balance. This is also why perfumers can work fast on a familiar brief and slowly on an unfamiliar one — the accord library is the accumulated capital of a career.

    How many trials does a fragrance take?

    IFF’s own account is that “dozens, sometimes hundreds, even thousands of versions may be created before one feels complete,” with trials compounded by perfumery assistants and then smelled blind by the perfumer and the creative team. Blind smelling matters: a perfumer who knows which bottle is their own latest version is not evaluating it.

    The number of versions tracks how far the brief is from the perfumer’s existing library. A brief that lands near an accord they have already built may resolve in twenty submissions. A brief for something genuinely unfamiliar can run for years. And the revisions do not stop at creative approval: consumer testing, stability testing, packaging compatibility and regulatory clearance can all send a formula back for another round.

    How do you become a perfumer?

    Two routes, and both are narrow. The in-house route is training inside a fragrance house. The academic route is a specialist school, most often ISIPCA, followed by trying to get hired into a house.

    Route Length Intake Notes
    Givaudan Perfumery School Four years Three students per year (Nez; Givaudan itself says only “a handful of prized places”) Founded 1946. Students memorize around 500 ingredients; curriculum includes accords, analysis of classic fragrances, internships and origin visits
    Symrise in-house school Five years (three in Germany, two at design centres worldwide) Five to six students per year The largest in-house intake among the houses with published figures
    Mane in-house school At least two years Not published
    Robertet in-house school At least two years Three candidates per year
    ISIPCA, Versailles MSc Scent Design and Creation, three years Capacity 15-20 students ISIPCA states it was established in 1970 “on the initiative of Jean-Jacques Guerlain”. Tuition around 10,250 euros per year
    ISIPCA MSc Creation and Development Two to three years Not published Around 8,200 euros for the first year
    Grasse Institute of Perfumery 12 months plus a six-month internship Twelve students maximum Around 12,900 euros. Normally requires a chemistry background

    Only three of those houses have a published annual intake: Givaudan at three, Symrise at five to six, and Robertet at three. Mane’s programme length is published but its intake is not. Add the three published figures and you get roughly 11 to 12 trainee perfumers a year between them — that addition is mine, and it covers only the houses that publish a number, so the real pipeline is larger and unquantified. A profession whose largest in-house schools admit around a dozen people a year between them is not a career you enter by applying.

    The Givaudan school states that it “can claim to have trained the perfumers responsible for approximately one third of the fragrances on the market today,” which is a company claim rather than an independently verified statistic, but it indicates the concentration involved.

    How many working perfumers are there?

    Nobody publishes an authoritative number, and the houses that could do not.

    Givaudan’s 2025 integrated report gives 17,580 full-time employees, 65 creation and research centres, 167 sites, CHF 551 million in research and product development spend, and CHF 881 million in fine fragrance sales. It does not break out perfumers as an employee category. Its fine fragrance page says its perfumers are based in seven creative centres but gives no headcount. The other majors are similarly silent.

    What can be said with sources is the shape rather than the size: the three in-house schools that publish an annual intake admit roughly a dozen people a year between them; the profession is organized around a small number of large suppliers; and a single one of those suppliers handles more than 300,000 briefs annually. Figures in the low hundreds to low thousands circulate widely for the global total, but none of them trace to a census, so this article does not assert one.

    What is the difference between a perfumer and a creative director?

    The perfumer writes the formula. Everyone else shapes what the formula has to achieve.

    Role What they do Who employs them Usually credited?
    Perfumer Writes and revises the formula; chooses and doses every material A fragrance house, occasionally a brand directly Sometimes, and only since relatively recently
    Evaluator / creative fragrance director Translates the brief, works alongside the perfumer, decides which submissions go to the client The fragrance house Rarely
    Brand creative or artistic director Guides and approves the work; supplies brand identity and aesthetic direction The brand Often, and sometimes as the sole named creator
    Laboratory technician Weighs every trial to milligram accuracy The fragrance house Almost never
    Consumer insight team Runs testing panels that shape which submission survives The fragrance house or the brand No
    Regulatory and product safety Checks the formula against IFRA Standards and destination-market law The fragrance house No

    Givaudan’s own description of the creative fragrance director role uses a music analogy: the CFD is the producer, the perfumer the musician, and “a music producer doesn’t need to know how to play all the musical instruments, but he or she does need to understand how to put them together to meet the audience in the most effective way.” Cynthia Salem of Mane describes evaluators as co-pilots: “We really play the role of co-pilots alongside the perfumer, which implies a great deal of trust between us.”

    The credit question is genuinely contested inside the industry. Frederic Malle began naming perfumers on his bottles in 2000, which was unusual at the time. Reporting by the olfactory magazine Nez notes that some designers maintain what it calls the “couturier-perfumer” fiction, keeping the formulation team invisible, and raises the idea of film-style credits for fragrance. When a designer’s name appears alone on a bottle, that is a branding decision, not authorship.

    The job, step by step

    1. Receive the brief. A written specification of audience, direction, benchmark, cost ceiling, category, markets and packaging.
    2. Interrogate it with the evaluator. Establish what the brief actually wants, which is often not what it says.
    3. Sketch a structure. Decide the accords that will carry it and the one or two materials that will give it identity.
    4. Write version one. A list of materials and weights per 1,000, costed before it leaves the desk.
    5. Have it weighed. A technician compounds the trial; the perfumer does not weigh their own.
    6. Smell blind. On blotters first, then on skin, over hours, against the previous version and the benchmark.
    7. Revise. Change a few materials by a few parts. Repeat, tens to thousands of times.
    8. Submit in competition. The evaluator selects which versions go to the client, against rival houses’ submissions.
    9. Survive testing. Consumer panels, stability, packaging compatibility, IFRA and market regulatory clearance — any of which can send it back.
    10. Hand over. The approved formula is compounded at scale. The formula usually stays the property of the fragrance house.

    Which claims about perfumers are wrong?

    “The designer whose name is on the bottle made the perfume”

    What is claimed: A fashion house’s founder or creative director composed the fragrance.

    What the evidence shows: Formulas are composed by perfumers employed by fragrance suppliers. Nez reports that some designers maintain a “couturier-perfumer” fiction and keep formulation teams hidden, and that Frederic Malle’s decision to credit perfumers by name from 2000 was a notable departure.

    What people wrongly conclude: That a designer fragrance reflects that designer’s nose. It reflects their brief and their approval.

    “Perfumers are born with a magic nose”

    What is claimed: The job depends on exceptional innate olfactory acuity.

    What the evidence shows: The training is about memory and vocabulary, not sensitivity. Givaudan’s school runs four years and has students focus on memorising around 500 ingredients; IFF says perfumers memorize more than a thousand. Symrise’s programme runs five years. What is being built is a searchable internal library and the ability to name what you are smelling.

    What people wrongly conclude: That you either have it or you do not. What is actually scarce is not noses; it is places. The three in-house schools that publish an annual intake — Givaudan, Symrise and Robertet — offer around a dozen between them each year.

    “A perfumer works alone in a studio”

    What is claimed: Fragrance creation is a solo artistic act.

    What the evidence shows: The documented team includes an evaluator or creative fragrance director acting as co-pilot, laboratory technicians who weigh every trial, consumer insight teams, and regulatory staff who clear the formula. Nez’s reporting on credits lists laboratory assistants, sampling labs, technical labs and the chemists who develop the synthetic molecules as uncredited contributors with sometimes decisive roles.

    What people wrongly conclude: That a single name explains a fragrance. Even where the perfumer is named, the submission that won was selected by an evaluator and validated by panels.

    “Perfumers can identify every ingredient in a fragrance by smell”

    What is claimed: A trained perfumer can read a formula off a blotter.

    What the evidence shows: Trained perfumers identify materials they know well and describe structures accurately, which is genuinely impressive. But the industry’s own tool for determining what is in a competitor’s fragrance is gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, not a nose. If noses were sufficient, benchmarking labs would not exist.

    What people wrongly conclude: That a confident ingredient breakdown from any source, including a perfumer, is a reliable list. Formulas are trade secrets, and published note lists are marketing copy rather than composition. See what a note list is actually describing.

    The honest limits of this article

    The private parts of this job are private. No house publishes a real formula, a cost-per-kilo ceiling, a submission win rate, a perfumer headcount, or the internal structure of the accord libraries that constitute a perfumer’s working capital. The illustrative formula above is a teaching skeleton assembled from materials whose functions and typical roles are documented; it is not derived from any real fragrance and should not be read as one. Training intakes are drawn from a specialist olfactory magazine’s survey rather than from the schools’ own admissions statistics, and could have changed since publication. The four-house intake total of about fourteen per year is my arithmetic on those figures, and covers only houses that publish a number — the real training pipeline is somewhat larger and unquantified. Where a figure is a company claim rather than an independently verified statistic, this article says so.

    What this changes about how you read a bottle

    Three concrete habits follow.

    Look for the perfumer’s name, and notice when it is absent. Houses and brands that name the perfumer are making a verifiable claim; brands that present a designer as the sole creator are making a branding claim. Neither tells you whether the fragrance is good, but the first tells you something true.

    Stop reading the note list as a formula. If the structural load in a modern woody fragrance is carried by a transparent floral and a woody-amber, and the identity comes from a natural at 12 parts per 1,000, then “top notes: bergamot, pink pepper” describes the smallest and shortest-lived part of the composition. A material-forward fragrance like Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 makes the point by having almost nothing to list.

    What our own catalogue shows

    The invisibility is measurable, at least on our own shelves. Of the 3,832 bottles we list, about 323 — just over 8% — say anything at all about who composed the fragrance. Nine in ten give you a brand, a size and a price and no author. We cannot tell you how many distinct perfumers those 323 listings cover, because the names sit inside sentences of marketing prose rather than in a field we could count, and we are not going to estimate it.

    The pattern is not evenly spread, and the split is instructive. Among the twenty brands we carry most of, Hermès names a perfumer in 16 of its 58 listings and Carolina Herrera in 10 of 72, while Armaf names one in none of 91 and Al Haramain in none of 50. Lattafa, the single largest brand in our catalogue at around 127 references, names a perfumer once. The houses that sell authorship sell it consistently; the houses that sell a scent at a price do not mention the author at all. This rests on prose in listing copy rather than on a structured credit field, so read it as a strong tendency rather than a measurement.

    Bottles to try this on

    Use benchmarks the way a brief does. Perfumers work against a named competitor, and you can too: if you want to understand what a house does, smell one of its fragrances immediately against the obvious rival. Terre d’Hermès next to Dior Sauvage Eau de Parfum is a lesson in two different answers to a similar woody-fresh brief. Chanel No 5 next to Guerlain Shalimar is a lesson in what a classical brief looked like before either word existed. And Tom Ford Oud Wood shows what happens when the identity material is one that cannot be supplied at scale, so most of the effect has to be built.

    Related reading

    Common questions

    What does a perfumer actually do?

    Writes and revises fragrance formulas against a written brief. The formula is a list of materials with a weight against each; technicians weigh each trial, and the perfumer smells it blind against the previous version and a benchmark, then revises. IFF says dozens to thousands of versions may be created before one is finished.

    How do you become a perfumer?

    Either an in-house school at a fragrance supplier or a specialist institution like ISIPCA followed by getting hired. Nez’s survey of perfumery education puts Givaudan’s school at three students a year over four years, Symrise at five or six over five years and Robertet at three; Mane publishes a programme length but not an intake. The bottleneck is places, not talent.

    How many perfumers are there in the world?

    There is no authoritative census, and the fragrance houses do not publish perfumer headcounts even in their annual reports. What is documented is part of the training pipeline: the three in-house schools that publish an annual intake admit roughly a dozen people a year between them. Numbers in the hundreds to low thousands circulate but are unsourced.

    What is a perfumer’s organ?

    A tiered semicircular workbench of material bottles, named for its resemblance to church organ pipes. Professional organs are described as holding between 1,000 and 3,000 materials, arranged by olfactive family or by volatility. Most materials are stored diluted, commonly at 10 percent, because neat materials tell you little about in-use behavior.

    What is the difference between a perfumer and a creative director?

    The perfumer composes the formula. A brand’s creative director supplies direction and approval. In between sits the fragrance house’s evaluator or creative fragrance director, whom Givaudan compares to a music producer to the perfumer’s musician, and whom one Mane evaluator describes as a co-pilot to the perfumer.

    Do perfumers work for the brand on the bottle?

    Usually not. Most work for a fragrance supplier such as Givaudan, IFF, dsm-firmenich, Symrise, Mane or Robertet, which composes the fragrance and sells the concentrate to the brand. A few brands employ in-house perfumers. The formula normally remains the fragrance house’s property, not the brand’s.

    What is an accord in perfumery?

    A sub-blend treated as a single material. Rather than dosing twenty compounds individually to make a muguet effect, a perfumer builds a muguet accord once and doses it as a unit. The Givaudan Perfumery School curriculum includes learning essential accords. It makes long formulas revisable without disturbing internal balances.

    How long does it take to create a fragrance?

    Months to years, dominated by revisions and approvals rather than by any single step. IFF describes dozens to thousands of versions per project. Consumer testing, stability testing, packaging compatibility and regulatory clearance can each send an approved formula back for further work.

    Do perfumers really memorize hundreds of ingredients?

    Yes. The Givaudan Perfumery School says students focus on memorising around 500 ingredients over its four-year programme, and IFF states its perfumers memorize more than a thousand. The skill being built is recall and naming, not unusual olfactory sensitivity, which is why the training runs for years.

    Can a perfumer tell what is in a fragrance just by smelling it?

    Partly. Trained perfumers identify familiar materials and describe structure accurately. But the industry’s own method for working out what is in a competitor’s product is gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, not smelling. Published note lists are marketing copy; the formula is a trade secret.

  • Natural vs Synthetic Aroma Materials

    Natural vs Synthetic Aroma Materials

    Naturals give complexity, texture and an unrepeatable background of minor compounds, at the cost of variability, price volatility and a heavy allergen load. Synthetics give consistency, materials that cannot be extracted from anything, stability in product, and often a cleaner safety and supply profile. Neither category is safer or better. They do different jobs.

    What is the real difference between natural and synthetic aroma materials?

    Not chemistry. A molecule of geraniol distilled from rose and a molecule of geraniol made in a reactor are the same molecule, and your olfactory receptors cannot tell you which vessel it came out of. The difference is in what else is in the bottle.

    A natural aroma material is a mixture. ISO 9235, the international vocabulary standard for aromatic natural raw materials, defines an essential oil as a “product obtained from a natural raw material of plant origin, by steam distillation, by mechanical processes from the epicarp of citrus fruits, or by dry distillation.” That definition is about process, not purity, and the output is typically hundreds of compounds in a fixed-but-drifting ratio. A synthetic aroma material is usually one compound at 95 percent or better, plus known impurities.

    The practical consequence is control. A perfumer adding 2 percent rose oil is adding geraniol at about 35 percent of that dose, citronellol at 32 percent, nerol at 15 percent and several hundred trace compounds that were not chosen individually. A perfumer adding 0.7 percent geraniol is adding geraniol.

    What do naturals actually give a perfume?

    Four things that are hard to get any other way.

    Trace compounds you would never think to add. The character of a good jasmine absolute is not benzyl acetate, the compound present in largest quantity. It is the interaction of that bulk with indole, which smells frankly fecal on its own, and a handful of others present at fractions of a percent. Reconstructions built from the top twenty compounds smell like an approximation of jasmine. The absolute smells like jasmine.

    Texture and body. Absolutes carry non-volatile material — waxes, plant pigments, heavier aromatics. Analytical work on Turkish rose absolute found hexadecane, an odorless long-chain alkane, at 28.3 to 36.3 percent of the extract. That fraction contributes almost nothing to smell directly but changes how the volatile fraction leaves the skin.

    Movement over time. Because a natural contains compounds spread across a wide volatility range, it evolves on its own. A single synthetic does not.

    Provenance you can charge for. This is a commercial function rather than an olfactive one, but it is real, and it is why naturals appear in briefs for reasons that have nothing to do with how the fragrance smells.

    What do synthetics give that naturals cannot?

    The strongest argument for synthetics is not cost. It is that a large part of the modern olfactive vocabulary has no natural source at all.

    Lily of the valley is the standard example. Perfumer & Flavorist reports that “conventional extraction methods, such as distillation, solvent or supercritical carbon dioxide extraction have proved unable to isolate useful amounts of essential oil” from the flower, and that its headspace is diffuse — benzyl alcohol around 35 percent, cis-3-hexen-1-ol 11 percent, citronellol 9.6 percent, geraniol 8.4 percent — with no signature compound to anchor a reconstruction. Every muguet note you have smelled was built from synthetics, as were lilac, freesia, gardenia, peony and violet flower. Marine and ozonic notes have no botanical source at all.

    Material What it smells like Origin and date Why it matters
    Coumarin Hay, sweet tobacco, warm almond-vanilla, slightly dusty First synthesized by William Henry Perkin, 1868 (J. Chem. Soc. 21, 53); in industrial production by the mid-1870s Used in Houbigant Fougere Royale (1882), generally described as the first perfume built on a synthetic
    Vanillin Sweet, creamy, faintly woody-phenolic; thinner than vanilla bean Haarmann and Tiemann, 1874 Central to Guerlain Jicky (1889) and later to almost every gourmand
    Ionones Powdery violet, dry, slightly woody, with an almost dusty-suede facet Tiemann, 1893 The only economically viable route to violet and to most iris effects
    Aliphatic aldehydes C10-C12 Waxy, metallic, soapy-clean, abrasively bright at high dose In perfumery use from the early twentieth century; no reliable single attribution for the enabling process could be sourced The defining top of Chanel No 5 (1921)
    Hedione (methyl dihydrojasmonate) Transparent, airy jasmine-tea with a soft magnolia lift; almost no weight Demole at Firmenich, around 1960 Introduced commercially in Dior Eau Sauvage (1966); the start of transparent perfumery
    Iso E Super Dry cedar and ambergris, velvety, curiously neutral; smells like the space around other materials Hall at IFF, 1973 Became the backbone of woody-amber perfumery after Dior Fahrenheit (1988)
    Ambroxan / ambroxide Warm, dry, mineral-woody, faintly salty; skin-like rather than perfume-like Stoll, 1951, from clary sage sclareol Replaced ambergris; now also made by fermentation of cane sugar

    Two details in that table deserve expanding, because they overturn the usual assumption that a synthetic is a simple thing.

    Iso E Super is not one compound. It is, in the words of a detailed trade history of the material, “not an individual compound but a very complex isomer mixture,” and the compound responsible for most of its smell — sold separately as Arborone or Iso E Super Plus — is only about 5 percent of the commercial material. The most-used woody material in modern perfumery is 95 percent something other than the thing that does the work. To smell it undiluted, Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 is marketed as the material alone in alcohol. Houses do not disclose how much of it any named fragrance contains, and the usage percentages that circulate in trade writing are not traceable to a disclosed formula, so this article does not quote them. You can hear the material clearly in Terre d’Hermès.

    Hedione’s importance is measurable. Epimerized, cis-enriched grades have a reported odor recognition threshold of 15 parts per billion, and the material shifts from “floral and citrus” in racemic form to a “dense buttery-floral” character when epimerized. That is two materials with the same molecular formula and different smells, which is not something you can do with a plant.

    Which famous perfumes depend entirely on synthetics?

    Most of them, including the ones people invoke as examples of an all-natural golden age.

    Fougere Royale (1882) is generally credited as the first fragrance built on a synthetic, and the synthetic was coumarin. Jicky (1889) used vanillin. Chanel No 5 (1921) used aliphatic aldehydes, and nitro musks — the first made by Baur in 1888 — were standard base materials of the period, though no house has published the original No 5 formula and this article does not claim to know what was in it. L’Heure Bleue (1912) leans on ionones. The chypre and fougere families, described as the classical heart of perfumery, are structurally dependent on synthetics: a fougere is coumarin plus lavender plus oakmoss, and without the coumarin it is just lavender.

    The fair statement is the reverse of the folklore. Perfumery before about 1880 was severely limited: it could do citrus, florals, spices, resins and animalics, and little else. Synthetics did not degrade an existing art. They created the modern one.

    Is natural safer than synthetic?

    No, and the strongest evidence is regulatory, not rhetorical.

    Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 substantially expanded individual fragrance-allergen label declaration in the EU. Its recitals state that 24 fragrance allergens were previously subject to individual labelling, and that the SCCS identified 56 more “which have clearly caused allergies in humans”; the annex replaces 17 Annex III entries and adds 45, numbered 327 to 371. Twenty-one of the 45 are plant oils or extracts: ylang-ylang, cinnamon bark and cassia leaf, neroli, bitter orange peel, bergamot peel, lemon peel, lemongrass, eucalyptus, clove, jasmine oil and extract, lavender, geranium, patchouli, rose flower oil and extract, narcissus extract and sandalwood, plus isolated natural compounds including anethole, camphor, menthol, santalol, terpineol and vanillin. Thresholds are 0.001 percent leave-on and 0.01 percent rinse-off. New EU products had to comply by 31 July 2026; existing stock may be sold until 31 July 2028.

    The mechanism behind several of those entries explains why “it’s just a plant oil” is not a safety argument. Limonene and linalool, the most widespread terpenes in citrus and lavender, are pre-haptens: not significant sensitizers themselves, but they autoxidize on contact with air into hydroperoxides that are. A 2022 review in Contact Dermatitis recommends adding limonene hydroperoxides at 0.3 percent and linalool hydroperoxides at 1.0 percent in petrolatum to the baseline patch test series, because studies increasingly report high rates of positive reactions to the oxidised products. A 2024 study in Dermatitis states that “nonoxidized linalool is not regarded as a skin sensitizer, whereas oxidized linalool, containing mainly hydroperoxides of linalool, was found to be a potential skin sensitizer,” reporting reactions at 1 percent in petrolatum “in children and adults up to >10% in consecutive dermatitis patients.” A bottle of lavender oil becomes more allergenic the longer it is open.

    Two further examples close the argument. The most restricted materials in European fragrance history — atranol and chloroatranol, prohibited under Commission Regulation (EU) 2017/1410 after the SCCS concluded they “caused the highest number of contact allergies cases in past years” — are naturally occurring constituents of oakmoss, a lichen extract. And expressed bergamot oil is phototoxic because of naturally present bergapten, which is why IFRA specifies that total bergapten in consumer products applied to UV-exposed skin should not exceed 0.0015 percent, and why bergapten-free bergamot exists.

    None of this makes synthetics innocent. Musk xylene, a nitro musk, was banned in the EU under REACH in 2011 for environmental persistence, not skin safety. Butylphenyl methylpropional, the muguet material sold as Lilial, was added to Annex II of the EU Cosmetics Regulation by Regulation (EU) 2021/1902 and prohibited from 1 March 2022, on the basis of a CMR category 1B classification for reproductive toxicity. Both categories contain materials that turned out to be problems. Neither category is exempt.

    Attribute Naturals Synthetics
    Composition Hundreds of compounds; ratio set by biology and process Typically one compound at high purity, plus defined impurities
    Batch consistency Varies by origin, season, harvest year and extraction method Manufactured to specification; drift is a process fault, not a given
    Price stability Volatile. Vanilla moved from around $20/kg in 2008-2010 to about $600/kg in 2017-2018 Tied to feedstock and energy; far less volatile
    Supply risk Weather, disease, political disruption, CITES listings, land-use change Plant capacity and feedstock; a discontinued captive is the main risk
    Allergen load High. 21 of the 45 new EU allergen labelling entries (327-371) are plant oils or extracts Variable. Some are among the most restricted materials; many are not allergens at all
    Olfactive range Cannot deliver muguet, lilac, gardenia, marine, ozonic or most fruit notes Covers those, plus effects with no natural analogue
    Cost per kilo Spans roughly three orders of magnitude, from citrus oils to orris butter Also spans orders of magnitude; captives can exceed most naturals

    What is headspace technology, and what did it change?

    Headspace analysis is the answer to a specific problem: some things smell wonderful and cannot be extracted. Rather than take the material apart, you sample the air around it.

    A chamber or dome is sealed around a living flower, fruit or whole environment. Air is drawn through, the volatiles are captured on an adsorbent trap or cold surface, then desorbed and separated by gas chromatography with mass spectrometric identification. The plant is left intact; what is analyzed is the surrounding air. Roman Kaiser, a fragrance chemist at Givaudan’s Dubendorf research centre since 1968, pioneered the technique from 1975, has published three books on the scents of orchids, world environments and vanishing flora, and holds roughly 25 patents.

    What headspace changed is the direction of the work. Before it, a perfumer could use only what an extractor could deliver. After it, a chemist could describe the composition of a smell no extract existed for, and the perfumer could rebuild it from the palette. That is how fig leaf, seaside air, wet stone or a specific orchid enters perfumery at all. It also proved something in itself: comparative headspace data show a living flower and a picked flower emit measurably different profiles, so even a perfect extract of a cut flower is not a recording of the living one.

    How do supply and price shape what perfumers can use?

    More than taste does, on most projects. Naturals are agricultural commodities with all the exposure that implies.

    Vanilla is the clearest documented case. A peer-reviewed analysis of vanilla price bubbles records prices around $20/kg in the 2008-2010 window, roughly $80/kg in 2014, rising to about $600/kg in 2017 and a record around $600/kg in May 2018, with subsequent trading between $600 and $750. The 2014-2018 spike is attributed to rising demand, falling supply, speculation and Cyclone Enawo, which struck Madagascar’s vanilla-growing regions in March 2017. Any brief written for a vanilla-forward gourmand in 2017 was written against a thirty-fold price move.

    Woods are constrained differently. Sandalwood and agarwood are slow-growing trees under conservation pressure, and the trade in agarwood-producing genera is CITES-regulated. There is no way to increase supply on a launch timetable.

    This is where synthetics function as supply insurance rather than as substitution. Givaudan announced in 2019 a biotechnological route to Ambrofix, its ambroxide, using fermentation of cane sugar rather than semisynthetic conversion from clary sage sclareol; Firmenich had scaled a fermentation process for its own ambroxide in 2016. The resulting material is the same molecule, made from an annual crop instead of a specialty botanical. You can smell what ambroxide does in Dior Sauvage Eau de Parfum and, in a much sweeter setting, Baccarat Rouge 540.

    How does a perfumer decide between a natural and a synthetic?

    1. Check whether a natural exists at all. For muguet, lilac, gardenia, freesia, peony, violet flower, marine and ozonic effects the decision is already made: trade literature reports that distillation, solvent and CO2 extraction all fail to yield useful amounts from lily of the valley.
    2. Price the natural against the brief’s ceiling. A cost-per-kilo limit on the concentrate can rule out a natural before anyone smells it. A material trading at $600 per kilo behaves very differently in a costing than one at $20.
    3. Check supply security for the product’s life. A fragrance expected to sell for twenty years cannot rest its identity on a crop exposed to a single cyclone season. This is where fermentation-derived materials like the cane-sugar route to ambroxide change the calculation.
    4. Check the allergen and restriction position. A natural is not a shortcut past this. Twenty-one of the 45 new entries on the EU fragrance allergen labelling list are plant oils or extracts, and expressed bergamot carries a phototoxicity limit because of naturally present bergapten.
    5. Decide what the material is for. Structure and volume usually come from synthetics, because they are predictable at dose. Identity and texture often come from a natural at a low percentage, because that is where complexity is worth paying for.
    6. Use the natural at the dose that earns it. A jasmine absolute at 1 percent of the concentrate may contribute more perceived realism than the same money spent on anything else. At 10 percent it may only contribute cost.
    7. Test the whole thing for stability. Naturals containing limonene and linalool oxidize, and oxidation both changes the smell and creates sensitizers, which is why antioxidant and UV-stabilizer choices are part of the formulation decision.

    Which natural versus synthetic claims are wrong?

    “Natural means hypoallergenic”

    What is claimed: Natural fragrance is gentler and less likely to cause reactions.

    What the evidence shows: 21 of the 45 entries added to the EU fragrance allergen labelling list in 2023 are plant oils or extracts, and several more are isolated natural constituents such as anethole, camphor, menthol, santalol, sclareol, terpineol and vanillin. The two substances the SCCS identified as causing the highest number of contact allergy cases, atranol and chloroatranol, are natural oakmoss constituents and are now prohibited in EU cosmetics. Limonene and linalool sensitize after autoxidation; published patch-test data report positivity to linalool hydroperoxides at up to more than 10 percent among consecutively tested dermatitis patients.

    What people wrongly conclude: That choosing an all-natural fragrance reduces the risk of contact dermatitis. It may raise it, and it certainly does not remove it. If you have a diagnosed fragrance allergy, the useful information is the specific allergen, not the natural-or-synthetic label.

    “Synthetics are cheap fillers”

    What is claimed: Synthetics are used to cut costs at the expense of quality.

    What the evidence shows: Some synthetics are inexpensive. Others are captive molecules made by a single house at low volume and priced accordingly. Iso E Super’s principal odorant is a roughly 5 percent component of the commercial material, which is a chemistry problem, not a cost saving. Materials like Hedione, active at parts per billion, exist because they do something nothing else does.

    What people wrongly conclude: That a high synthetic content signals a cheap fragrance. Synthetic content correlates with launch date and with the olfactive family, not with price.

    “The classics were all natural”

    What is claimed: Great perfumes of the past were made from naturals, and synthetics are a modern compromise.

    What the evidence shows: Fougere Royale (1882) is credited as the first fragrance built on a synthetic, coumarin. Jicky (1889) used vanillin. Chanel No 5 (1921) used aliphatic aldehydes. L’Heure Bleue (1912) used ionones at high concentration. The classical period and the synthetic period are the same period.

    What people wrongly conclude: That reverting to naturals would recover a lost quality. It would delete most of the reference points, including the fragrances being held up as examples. If you want to hear aldehydes doing the work they were famous for, smell Chanel No 5.

    “An all-natural perfume is possible and simply better”

    What is claimed: A skilled perfumer could work entirely in naturals with no loss.

    What the evidence shows: They can, and people do, but the palette is bounded. There is no natural muguet, lilac, gardenia, freesia, marine or ozonic material. There is no natural way to obtain a transparent jasmine that lifts without weight, which is what Hedione does. All-natural work is a genuine discipline with real results within a defined range, not a superset of ordinary perfumery.

    What people wrongly conclude: That “natural” describes quality. Under ISO 9235 it describes process.

    The honest limits of this article

    Three limits matter. First, nobody outside a house knows the natural-to-synthetic ratio of any commercial fragrance; formulas are trade secrets, which is why no usage percentage appears here for any named fragrance. Second, allergen prevalence figures come from patch-test studies run in dermatology clinics on patients who already have dermatitis — the right population for identifying allergens, the wrong one for estimating how often a general consumer reacts. A figure like “more than 10 percent” means “more than 10 percent of patients being investigated for dermatitis.” The granular per-study ranges for limonene and linalool hydroperoxides sit behind a paywall and are not reproduced here. Third, “natural” and “synthetic” are legal and marketing categories as much as chemical ones, and a nature-identical molecule made by fermentation sits awkwardly in both.

    What to do with this at the counter

    Stop using natural content as a proxy for quality and start using it as a prediction about behavior. A composition weighted toward naturals will usually read as less linear, warmer, and more variable between bottles and over time; one weighted toward synthetics will usually read as cleaner-edged, more consistent, and more likely to hold its shape for hours. Neither is a virtue.

    The most useful exercise is to smell a single synthetic against the accord it enables. Compare a material-forward woody-amber against a natural-heavy floral absolute construction and note that the disagreement is about texture, not quality. Then compare a citrus-led cologne — Acqua di Parma Colonia — with a musk-led modern composition, and you will find that what you are actually choosing between is a material set with a two-hour arc and one built to survive a working day.

    What our own catalogue shows

    One number puts the clean-fragrance conversation in proportion: of the 3,832 bottles we list, about 32 — under 1%, across a dozen brands — market themselves as natural, botanical or clean. Far too small a base to call a trend. The materials argument above is not about a niche; it is about essentially everything on the page.

    Whether the fragrances still on sale with oakmoss in their copy predate the restrictions is not something we can answer. A product listing has no release-year field; the only dates in the data are ones marketing prose happens to mention, never written to be counted.

    Related reading

    Common questions

    Are synthetic fragrance ingredients bad for you?

    Not as a class. Individual materials in both categories have been restricted or banned. Musk xylene was banned in the EU under REACH for environmental persistence, and Lilial was prohibited from 1 March 2022 as a reproductive toxicant. Meanwhile two natural oakmoss constituents, atranol and chloroatranol, are the most notorious fragrance allergens in EU regulation. Risk attaches to materials, not to categories.

    Is natural perfume better for sensitive skin?

    There is no evidence it is. Of the 45 fragrance-allergen entries added to the EU labelling list in 2023, 21 are plant oils or extracts. Limonene and linalool, which are abundant in citrus and lavender oils, form sensitizing hydroperoxides as they oxidize in an opened bottle, and published patch-test data report positivity to linalool hydroperoxides at up to more than 10 percent among consecutively tested dermatitis patients. If you react to fragrance, identify the specific allergen.

    What perfume ingredients cannot be made from plants?

    Lily of the valley, lilac, freesia, gardenia, peony and violet flower have no commercially viable extract; trade literature reports that distillation, solvent extraction and CO2 extraction all fail to yield useful amounts from muguet. Marine, ozonic and most fruit notes other than citrus also have no botanical source. All of these are built from synthetics.

    What is Iso E Super and why is it in everything?

    A woody material introduced by Hall at IFF in 1973. It smells dry, cedar-like and faintly ambergris-ish, and it is unusually neutral, so it adds volume without imposing a character. Trade writing describes it as an isomer mixture whose main odorant makes up only about 5 percent of the commercial product. How much of it any named fragrance contains is not disclosed.

    What does Ambroxan smell like?

    Warm, dry and mineral-woody, with a faint salty-skin quality rather than an obviously perfumed one. A peer-reviewed history of industrial fragrance chemistry dates its synthesis from clary sage sclareol to Stoll, 1951. It is now also produced by fermentation of cane sugar, which removes the botanical supply constraint entirely.

    What is headspace technology in perfumery?

    A way of analyzing a smell without extracting it. A chamber is sealed around a living flower or environment, volatiles are captured on a trap, and gas chromatography with mass spectrometry identifies them. Roman Kaiser at Givaudan pioneered it from 1975. It lets perfumers reconstruct smells that no extract exists for.

    Were old perfumes made only from natural ingredients?

    No. Houbigant Fougere Royale (1882) is credited as the first perfume built on a synthetic, coumarin. Guerlain Jicky (1889) used vanillin, L’Heure Bleue (1912) used ionones, and Chanel No 5 (1921) used aliphatic aldehydes. The classical era and the synthetic era are the same era. No house has published the original formula of any of them.

    Why does natural jasmine absolute smell different from a jasmine synthetic accord?

    Because the absolute contains compounds nobody would choose to add deliberately, including indole, which smells fecal in isolation, and a large fraction of odorless heavy material. Turkish rose absolute, for comparison, was measured at 28 to 36 percent hexadecane. That ballast changes how the volatile fraction leaves the skin.

    Do naturals make a perfume last longer?

    Not reliably. Longevity is set by the volatility of the materials present, not by their origin. Several of the longest-lasting materials in perfumery are synthetic musks and woody ambers, and several of the shortest-lived are natural citrus oils. A heavily natural composition often reads as less linear rather than longer.

    Is nature-identical the same as natural?

    Legally, no. A nature-identical molecule is chemically the same compound found in a plant but made by synthesis or fermentation. ISO 9235 defines natural raw materials by the process used to obtain them, so a fermentation-derived ambroxide is the same molecule as the botanical route product while falling outside the natural definitions.

  • How Perfume Is Actually Made, From Raw Material to Bottle

    How Perfume Is Actually Made, From Raw Material to Bottle

    Perfume is made in two separate industries. A supply industry turns plants and feedstocks into individual aroma materials. A composition industry blends several dozen of those into a concentrate, which is diluted in denatured ethanol, chilled, filtered, filled and tested. The plant side can take six years. The bottling side takes hours.

    What are the actual stages of making a perfume?

    Almost every consumer-facing description of perfume production jumps from a field of flowers to a finished bottle. The interesting part is what sits between them, and it is not one process but a chain of roughly ten, run by different companies on different timescales.

    Stage What actually happens Typical timescale Who does it
    1. Agricultural production Planting, growing, harvesting a crop grown for its odor Months to six years depending on the crop Growers and cooperatives, often under contract to an extractor
    2. Extraction or isolation Distillation, expression, solvent extraction or CO2 extraction; or chemical synthesis and fermentation for synthetics Hours per batch, within a harvest window of days to weeks Extractors (Robertet, Payan Bertrand and others) and chemical producers
    3. The brief A written creative and commercial specification for the fragrance Weeks Brand marketing, with a fragrance house evaluator
    4. Formulation and trials The perfumer writes and rewrites a formula; assistants weigh each trial Months, sometimes years Perfumer, lab technicians, evaluator
    5. Selection and safety clearance Consumer testing, IFRA compliance check, stability and packaging compatibility Weeks to months Fragrance house regulatory and product safety teams
    6. Compounding the concentrate The approved formula is weighed at scale into a batch of fragrance oil Hours Fragrance house compounding plant
    7. Alcohol dilution Concentrate dissolved into denatured ethanol and water Hours Filler, often a third-party contract manufacturer
    8. Maceration or rest The diluted solution is held before finishing Hours to months; not publicly specified by houses Filler
    9. Chilling and filtration Cooling to precipitate waxes and insolubles, then filtering to a clear liquid Hours Filler
    10. Filling and quality control Filling, crimping, capping, coding, and release testing Hours per batch Filler and brand QC

    The table’s timescales are conventional industry ranges drawn from the sources cited at the end, not a single company’s published schedule. No major house publishes its actual cycle times.

    Where do the raw materials come from, and how long does that take?

    The slowest step in the whole chain is agricultural, and the extremes are genuinely extreme.

    Orris, the powdery violet-and-suede material that gives a fragrance like Prada Infusion d’Iris its cool, dry, almost floury quality, is the clearest case. A 2025 field trial of Iris pallida in Greve in Chianti reports rhizomes grown for two to four years, harvested, sun-dried for about nine days with a 70 percent loss of fresh weight, then stored for a further 36 months before extraction. Fresh rhizome is close to odorless; the violet-like irones form slowly by oxidation during that storage. The study measured orris concrete yields averaging 0.045 to 0.055 percent, and its best treatment produced 6.30 kg of concrete per hectare per year. That is the entire annual output of a hectare of land, and it arrives three years late.

    Rose is the opposite problem: not slow, but narrow. Flowers are picked in a window of a few weeks, at dawn, and must be distilled the same day. A Turkish production description records stills charged with 500 kg of flowers and 1,500 liters of warm water, distilled for about an hour and a half with the condenser running at 35 to 45 °C, producing a first and second oil that are later blended. Peer-reviewed measurements of Rosa damascena put the distilled oil yield at 0.035 to 0.049 percent of fresh flower weight.

    Jasmine is hand-picked, and the labor figure is the one worth remembering: published trade data put one picker’s daily output at 3 to 4 kg of flowers over five to six hours. Egyptian Jasminum grandiflorum returns about 2.6 kg of concrete per tonne of blossom, a 0.26 percent yield, and the concrete yields 55 to 61 percent absolute on ethanol washing.

    Material What sets the lead time Published figure
    Orris (Iris pallida) Rhizomes grow for years, then must be dried and stored before the odorous irones form at all Sun-dried about 9 days with 70% loss of fresh weight, then 36 months in storage; concrete yield 0.045-0.055%; 6.30 kg concrete per hectare per year
    Rose (Rosa damascena) A short annual flowering window; flowers must be distilled the day they are picked Stills charged with 500 kg flowers and 1,500 L warm water for about 1.5 hours; oil yield 0.035-0.049% of fresh flowers
    Jasmine (Jasminum grandiflorum) Hand picking; every flower is removed individually 3-4 kg of flowers per picker per 5-6 hour shift; concrete yield about 0.26% of blossom; concrete gives 55-61% absolute
    Vanilla Hand pollination, then a curing process, then an exposed single-origin supply chain Price moved from around $20/kg in 2008-2010 to about $600/kg in 2017-2018, a move the published analysis attributes to demand, falling supply, speculation and cyclone damage including Cyclone Enawo
    A synthetic aroma chemical Reactor capacity and feedstock availability Made to specification, with no seasonal window; houses do not publish plant lead times

    What is a perfumer’s brief, and who writes it?

    A brief is a written document, not a conversation. IFF describes it as defining “the target audience, emotional intent and olfactive direction,” produced with the client and shepherded by a scent design manager acting as an olfactive art director. It will normally also carry the commercial constraints that decide what the perfumer can actually use: a cost-per-kilo ceiling for the concentrate, the product categories it must be safe in, the markets it will ship to, and the packaging it has to survive.

    Briefs are usually competitive. Several houses, and several perfumers within each house, work the same brief and submit against each other. The scale of that funnel is visible in Givaudan’s 2025 integrated report, which refers to “more than 300,000 briefs we receive each year” — a company-wide figure covering flavour and taste briefs as well as fragrance, not a fine-fragrance count. Most submissions are never sold.

    How does a perfumer turn a brief into a formula?

    A formula is a list of materials with a weight against each, and nothing else. It is written and revised on paper or in software, not improvised at the bench. Perfumers work from a palette that IFF puts at over 1,000 natural extracts and aroma molecules; the physical cabinet those materials sit in, the organ, typically holds between 1,000 and 3,000 bottles arranged by family or by volatility.

    Trials are weighed by laboratory technicians, not by the perfumer. IFF says “dozens, sometimes hundreds, even thousands of versions may be created before one feels complete,” compounded by perfumery assistants and then smelled blind by the perfumer and the creative team. Each version differs from the last by a few grams in a few places.

    What happens when the concentrate is compounded?

    Compounding is the industrial version of the lab trial. The approved formula is scaled from a 100-gram trial to a batch measured in hundreds of kilos, weighed into a jacketed stainless steel vessel in a set order, and mixed until homogeneous. The output is a single dark liquid: the concentrate, or fragrance oil. This is the thing the brand buys. It is shipped to a filler, and in many cases the brand never sees the formula at all, because the formula is the fragrance house’s property.

    Before it can be compounded, the formula has to clear regulatory review. Since IFRA’s 51st Amendment was notified on 30 June 2023, new fragrance creations containing restricted or specified materials have had to comply by 30 March 2024, and existing creations by 30 October 2025. A formula that fails is not a safety incident; it is simply not manufacturable for the market it was written for, and goes back to the perfumer.

    Does maceration really change the fragrance?

    This is where the honest answer diverges from the romance. IFF describes maceration as a resting period that “can take weeks to months.” The historic French house L.T. Piver describes its own process as taking place “over several weeks, sometimes several months” in stainless steel vats. Neither states a number, and no major house publishes a maceration schedule for a named fragrance.

    Patent literature describing industrial batch manufacture of fragrance compositions points somewhere else entirely. One process patent describes a conventional batch cycle of about four to six hours to produce roughly 1.5 tonnes of product, with 15 to 90 minutes of residence time attributed to maceration and 27 minutes to 1.5 hours attributed to precipitating wax out of solution. In that account, the bulk of the delay is not flavor-marrying: it is waiting for solids to drop out so they can be filtered off.

    Both things can be true. A long hold is plausible for a heavily loaded, resin-rich fine fragrance; a four-hour cycle is plausible for a high-volume line. What is not supportable is the claim that all perfume is aged for six months, or that ageing is analogous to wine maturation. Ethanol solutions of aroma materials do change over time, and the most reliably documented change is not improvement but oxidation.

    Why is perfume chilled and filtered before bottling?

    Because a concentrate contains materials that are only marginally soluble in dilute ethanol at room temperature, and much less soluble when cold. Absolutes carry plant waxes. Resinoids carry non-volatile gums. Left alone, these drop out as a haze or a floc on the first cold night in a warehouse, and the product looks defective.

    The fix is to force the problem forward. The batch is cooled so the marginal material precipitates deliberately, then filtered out while cold. Patent literature on perfume and cologne manufacture describes the solution being left to stand until flakes form, with formation times of two to twelve hours depending on the fragrance, then filtered through media with porosity between 0.5 and 30 microns using bag, press, cartridge or basket filters. Houses do not publish their chilling temperatures or filter specifications. What the step does is well understood; the exact numbers are proprietary.

    There is a real cost to it. Filtration removes some of what was in the formula. A perfumer who wants a heavy, waxy, resinous character has to allow for the fact that part of it will be on the filter pad, which is one reason oil-based and unfiltered releases smell different from their alcoholic counterparts.

    What alcohol is perfume diluted with?

    In the United States, almost always specially denatured alcohol, and usually Formula 40-B. The composition is set in federal regulation, not by the brand: 27 CFR 21.76 specifies that per 100 gallons of ethyl alcohol, Formula 40-B is denatured with one-sixteenth of an avoirdupois ounce of denatonium benzoate and one-eighth of a gallon of tert-butyl alcohol. Denatonium benzoate is an extremely bitter compound; tert-butyl alcohol is the second denaturant. The regulation lists perfumes, toilet waters and colognes among its authorized uses.

    A commercial safety data sheet for 190-proof SDA 40-B gives the shipped composition as 92.3 percent ethyl alcohol, 7.6 percent water, 0.1 percent tert-butyl alcohol and under 0.1 percent denatonium benzoate. The practical consequence: the ethanol in your bottle is denatured so it cannot be drunk and is not taxed as a beverage, and the bitterness is deliberate. That is a tax and public health mechanism, not a quality signal, and it does not distinguish a cheap fragrance from an expensive one.

    What happens on the filling line and in quality control?

    Filling is ordinary precision liquid packaging: the filtered bulk is metered into bottles, the pump is crimped in place, the cap is fitted, a batch code is applied, and the unit is cartoned and cellophaned. Much of the world’s fine fragrance is filled by third-party contract manufacturers rather than by the brand.

    Quality control runs on two axes. Analytical release checks the bulk against a reference: appearance, color, density, refractive index, alcohol content, and a gas chromatography trace compared against a retained standard. Olfactive release is a trained panel smelling the batch against a retained reference sample. IFF describes finished fragrances being tested for stability, safety and consistency across conditions including “blotters and skin, warm and cool light, day and night.” Stability testing normally means holding samples at raised temperature and in light for a defined period and checking that they have not shifted, discolored or thrown a precipitate.

    The ten steps, in order

    1. Grow. A crop is planted and harvested on its own schedule. For orris, six years elapse between planting and extraction.
    2. Extract or synthesize. Odorous material is separated from biomass, or built from feedstocks. See how aroma materials are extracted.
    3. Brief. The brand writes a specification: audience, direction, cost ceiling, markets, categories.
    4. Formulate. The perfumer writes a formula in weights. Technicians weigh each trial.
    5. Revise. Tens to thousands of versions. Blind smelling. Consumer testing on shortlisted submissions.
    6. Clear. Regulatory review against IFRA Standards and destination-market law; stability and packaging compatibility testing.
    7. Compound. The formula is weighed at production scale into a concentrate.
    8. Dilute. Concentrate into denatured ethanol and water at the target strength.
    9. Chill and filter. Cool to precipitate waxes and insolubles; filter cold to a bright liquid.
    10. Fill and release. Fill, crimp, cap, code, carton. Analytical and olfactive release against a retained reference.

    Which perfume production myths are wrong?

    “Perfume is aged for months or years, like wine”

    What is claimed: Fine fragrance requires a long maturation that improves it.

    What the evidence shows: Houses describe maceration in vague ranges — “weeks to months” (IFF), “several weeks, sometimes several months” (L.T. Piver) — and publish no schedules. Patent literature describing industrial batch manufacture accounts for the hold time largely as wax precipitation before filtration, in a total cycle of four to six hours.

    What people wrongly conclude: That a specific number of months is standard, and that a bottle improves on a shelf. Wine ageing involves an enzyme-free but chemically active reduced system in glass; a filtered hydroalcoholic solution in a sprayer that admits air is more likely to oxidize than to improve.

    “The bottle is full of flowers”

    What is claimed: Because it takes thousands of kilograms of roses to produce a kilogram of rose oil, a bottle of rose perfume contains an enormous quantity of roses.

    What the evidence shows: Arithmetic, mine: a 50 ml eau de parfum at 15 percent concentrate contains about 7.5 g of concentrate. If 1 percent of that concentrate is rose oil — a generous dose for a rose accord, since most rose character in commercial perfumery comes from isolates and synthetics — the bottle holds roughly 0.075 g of rose oil. At the peer-reviewed yield of 0.045 percent, that is about 170 g of flowers. Not thousands of kilograms.

    What people wrongly conclude: That raw material yield ratios tell you something about a finished bottle. They tell you about the price of the ingredient, and very little else.

    “Expensive perfume uses better alcohol”

    What is claimed: Premium fragrances use a purer or finer grade of alcohol.

    What the evidence shows: In the US the denaturing formula is fixed by 27 CFR Part 21. SDA 40-B is SDA 40-B. Alcohol quality does vary in terms of residual congeners and odor, and some producers do buy a tighter specification, but the denaturant package is regulatory, identical across price tiers, and not something a brand chooses for quality reasons.

    What people wrongly conclude: That the bitterness or the alcohol note in a fragrance reflects cheapness. It reflects federal alcohol law.

    Production parameter Publicly known? Best available source
    The formula of a named fragrance No Trade secret. Published note lists are marketing copy
    Concentrate percentage in a named product Rarely Occasional brand disclosure; not standardized across the industry
    Maceration time for a named product No Qualitative ranges only: “weeks to months” (IFF), “several weeks, sometimes several months” (L.T. Piver)
    Chilling temperature and filter specification No Patent literature gives ranges for the general process: 0.5-30 micron media, 2-12 hours for flake formation
    Cost-per-kilo ceiling in the brief No Not disclosed by any house
    Alcohol denaturing formula Yes, exactly 27 CFR 21.76 specifies SDA Formula 40-B composition
    Regulatory compliance deadlines Yes, exactly IFRA amendment notification letters give dated deadlines
    Agricultural yields Partly Peer-reviewed field trials and analytical studies; commercial extractors do not publish theirs

    The honest limits of this article

    Nobody outside the industry can verify a specific house’s process. Fragrance houses do not publish formulas, compounding parameters, maceration schedules, chilling temperatures, filter specifications, or the cost-per-kilo ceilings in their briefs, and the contract fillers who do much of the physical work are bound by confidentiality. Everything above is assembled from three kinds of source: published agronomic and analytical research, which is reliable but narrow; patent literature, which describes what processes exist and what problems they solve but is written to claim inventions rather than to document current practice; and fragrance-house corporate communication, which is accurate as far as it goes and deliberately unspecific. Where those sources give ranges rather than figures, this article gives ranges. Where they give nothing, it says so.

    What this changes about how you smell things

    Two things follow from the chain above, and both are usable at a counter.

    First, the filtration step explains a real difference you can smell. Compare a heavily resinous alcoholic fragrance with an oil-based or unfiltered version of a similar accord: the oil usually reads thicker and closer to the skin, because nothing was removed on a filter pad. An amber-heavy composition like Guerlain Shalimar shows what survives that process; the balsamic weight in the base is there because the formula was built expecting it to be.

    Second, the agricultural section explains why some notes are always partly synthetic. If a hectare of iris produces about 6 kg of concrete a year, then a launch shipping globally cannot be built on orris concrete alone at any plausible price, and it is not. The violet-powder effect in a widely distributed fragrance is mostly ionones and methyl ionones doing the work, which is not a cheat — it is the only way the smell reaches you at all. Reading a note list as a shopping list of plants gets the production chain backwards. This is the whole substance of the naturals-versus-synthetics argument, and it is also the constraint a perfumer works inside every day.

    What our own catalogue shows

    One more thing the catalogue can show, carefully framed. Of our 3,832 listings, about 1,142 — a little under a third — say anything at all about materials. Within that copy, the materials named most often are bergamot and rose (about 334 listings each), musk (316), amber (283), jasmine (267), vanilla (201), lavender (200), sandalwood (185), mandarin (176) and lemon (170). Read that as the materials perfume copywriters mention most, not as the materials the industry uses most. The two lists are not the same, and the materials that matter most commercially — the woody-ambers, the hedione-type florals, the laundry musks — barely appear in marketing language at all.

    It would be satisfying to end with a figure for how much of what we sell is made under licence, and we cannot produce one honestly: a listing records a name, a price, a size and a code, not who holds the licence, and licence arrangements change without the bottle changing. What the catalogue does show is the shape of the thing. We list products from more than 460 distinguishable brands, most of them carrying a handful of references each, and almost none of them operates a factory. The production chain described above sits behind nearly every bottle on the page, whoever’s name is on the front.

    Bottles to try this on

    If you want to taste the difference the extraction step makes rather than read about it, the most instructive pairing is a distilled-material fragrance against a solvent-extracted one. Something citrus-led and clean like Acqua di Parma Colonia sits almost entirely on expressed and distilled oils; a dense floral absolute construction like Chanel No 5 does not. And a fragrance built around a single synthetic, such as Escentric Molecules Molecule 01, shows how little of the chain above is agricultural at all.

    For the aged-material end of the spectrum, Tom Ford Oud Wood and Dior Sauvage Eau de Parfum make a useful contrast: one is built on materials whose supply chains are slow and constrained, the other on materials that can be made to specification in a reactor.

    Related reading

    Common questions

    How long does it take to make a perfume from scratch?

    From brief to shelf, most fine fragrance projects run months to a couple of years, dominated by formulation trials and approvals rather than manufacturing. Manufacturing itself is fast: compounding, dilution, chilling, filtration and filling are measured in hours per batch. The slow part is agricultural, and for orris it runs to six years.

    What is maceration in perfume making?

    Maceration is holding the diluted fragrance before finishing. IFF describes it as taking weeks to months. Patent literature on industrial batch manufacture attributes most of the hold to precipitating waxes so they can be filtered out. No major house publishes a maceration schedule for a named fragrance, so treat specific month figures with suspicion.

    Why is perfume filtered?

    Because absolutes and resinoids carry waxes and gums that are only marginally soluble in dilute alcohol. Cooling the batch forces them out as flakes, and filtering cold removes them, so the product will not go hazy in a cold warehouse. Patent literature describes filter media between 0.5 and 30 microns.

    What kind of alcohol is in perfume?

    In the US, usually specially denatured alcohol Formula 40-B. Under 27 CFR 21.76 it is ethanol denatured with denatonium benzoate, an intensely bitter compound, plus tert-butyl alcohol. A commercial 190-proof grade ships at about 92.3 percent ethanol and 7.6 percent water. The denaturing is a tax and safety requirement, not a quality tier.

    Do perfume brands make their own perfume?

    Rarely. Most brands write a brief, a fragrance house composes and supplies the concentrate, and a contract filler dilutes, filters, fills and packs it. A handful of houses keep in-house perfumers. The formula usually belongs to the fragrance house, not the brand whose name is on the bottle.

    How many ingredients are in a perfume?

    Commercial fine fragrance formulas commonly run from a few dozen to a few hundred materials, drawn from a palette IFF puts at over 1,000. The physical cabinet a perfumer works from typically holds 1,000 to 3,000 bottles. Exact counts for named fragrances are not published; the formula is a trade secret.

    What is a fragrance concentrate?

    The concentrate, also called the fragrance oil or the juice, is the blended aroma material before any alcohol is added. It is what the fragrance house sells to the brand. An eau de parfum is typically that concentrate at 15 to 20 percent in denatured ethanol and water, though the exact figure is not standardized.

    Is perfume tested on the production line?

    Yes, on two axes. Analytical release checks appearance, color, density, refractive index, alcohol content and a gas chromatography trace against a retained reference. Olfactive release is a trained panel smelling the batch against a retained standard. Stability testing holds samples hot and in light to confirm they do not shift or precipitate.

    Why does the same perfume smell slightly different between batches?

    Because naturals vary. The measured essential oil content of the same rose cultivar differed across harvest years in published field trials, and the same is true of most crops. Houses correct for this by blending lots against a reference standard, but tolerances are not zero. Oxidation in your own bottle is a larger effect than batch variation.

    Does an expensive perfume cost more to make?

    Sometimes, but the concentrate is rarely the dominant cost. Packaging, glass, advertising, retail margin and licensing typically exceed the cost of the juice. High-cost naturals like orris and sandalwood do move the number materially, which is why they usually appear at low dose alongside synthetics that carry the same effect.

  • How Aroma Materials Are Extracted

    How Aroma Materials Are Extracted

    Five methods matter. Steam and water distillation for robust plant material, mechanical expression for citrus peel, volatile solvent extraction for heat-sensitive flowers, supercritical or liquid CO2 for selective extraction without heat, and enfleurage, which is effectively obsolete. Each produces a chemically different product from the same plant.

    What do essential oil, concrete, absolute, resinoid and tincture actually mean?

    These are defined terms, not marketing words. ISO 9235, the international vocabulary standard for aromatic natural raw materials, defines each by the process that produces it. The definitions are worth reading closely, because almost every popular explanation of them is wrong in some detail.

    Term ISO 9235 definition What that means in practice
    Essential oil “Product obtained from a natural raw material of plant origin, by steam distillation, by mechanical processes from the epicarp of citrus fruits, or by dry distillation” Only three processes qualify. A solvent extract is not an essential oil, however it is labelled
    Cold-pressed essential oil “Essential oil obtained by mechanical processes from the epicarp of the fruit of a citrus, at ambient temperature” Citrus only, and the epicarp is the outer colored peel, not the whole fruit
    Concrete “Extract obtained from a fresh natural raw material by extraction with one or several solvents” A waxy, often semi-solid paste. Fresh material and a hydrocarbon solvent
    Absolute “Product obtained by extraction with ethanol from a concrete, a floral pomade, a resinoid or a supercritical fluid extract” A second-stage product. There is no such thing as an absolute made directly from a plant
    Resinoid “Extract obtained from a dry plant natural raw material by extraction with one or several solvents” Same process as a concrete, but from dried material. Benzoin, labdanum, myrrh
    Tincture / infusion “Solution obtained by maceration of a natural raw material in ethanol at variable concentrations or in water” The raw material stays in the alcohol. Nothing is concentrated; the solvent is the product
    Pomade “Perfumed fat obtained from a flower, either by cold enfleurage… or by hot enfleurage” The intermediate product of enfleurage, not a finished perfumery material
    Extract “Product obtained by treating a natural raw material with one or several solvents” The general category. Concretes, resinoids and CO2 extracts are all extracts

    Two consequences follow immediately. An “absolute” sold as a direct extraction of a flower is mislabelled, because by definition an absolute is washed out of a concrete, pomade, resinoid or supercritical extract with ethanol. And a tincture is the weakest form of natural material in the palette, not the strongest, because it is a dilute solution rather than a concentrate.

    How does distillation work, and what does it do to the smell?

    Steam is passed through, or water is boiled with, plant material in a still. Volatile compounds leave with the steam, the mixture is condensed, and because most aroma compounds are only slightly soluble in water, the oil separates and is drawn off. The aqueous phase left behind is the hydrosol or floral water.

    A published account of Turkish rose production gives the working parameters: copper stills charged with 500 kg of flowers and 1,500 liters of warm water, distilled for about an hour and a half, with the condenser running at 35 to 45 °C. It produces a first oil and a second oil, blended afterward for the final product. The second oil comes from cohobation — redistilling the aqueous distillate to recover material that stayed in the water on the first pass.

    That detail about water solubility is the most important thing distillation does to a smell, and rose demonstrates it better than anything else. Analytical work comparing the same Turkish roses by three methods found:

    Compound Living flower (headspace) Distilled rose oil Rose absolute (solvent)
    Phenylethyl alcohol 43.2% 1.3% 35.2-38.4%
    Geraniol 10.3% 35.4% 6.9-10.8%
    Citronellol 16.6% 31.6% 5.6-8.4%
    Nerol 1.9% 15.3% 3.4-5.0%
    Hexadecane (odorless) not reported not reported 28.3-36.3%

    Phenylethyl alcohol is the honeyed, slightly sweet, unmistakably fresh-petal smell of a rose. It is also water-soluble, so it stays in the distillation water and drops from 43 percent of the living flower’s emission to 1.3 percent of the distilled oil. Geraniol and citronellol, which are more geranium-like and sharper, concentrate in its place. This is why rose otto smells lemony, waxy, faintly metallic and green-spicy, while rose absolute smells like a rose in a warm room. The plant is identical. The method rewrote the composition.

    Dry distillation, the third route ISO recognizes, heats the material with no water at all. It produces birch tar and cade — smoky, tarry, leather-like materials that are pyrolysis products, not extracts. Nothing in a living birch smells like birch tar.

    Distilled oils can also be worked further. Fractional distillation and rectification separate an oil into cuts by boiling point, which is how terpeneless citrus oils, individual isolates and deodorized fractions are made. Molecular distillation, run under high vacuum at low temperature, is used for heat-sensitive material such as orris butter.

    Why are citrus oils pressed instead of distilled?

    Because citrus oil is already sitting in reservoirs in the outer peel, and because heat ruins it. The aldehydes that give lemon oil its bright, cutting freshness degrade in a still; the resulting distilled oil is flatter and more terpenic.

    Industrial expression uses several machine types, each with a different reputation. A pelatrice passes whole fruit between counter-rotating stainless steel drums under water sprays, forming an emulsion that is centrifuged. A sfumatrice carries already-juiced peel between chains and a fixed ribbed plate. An FMC in-line extractor, typically with four heads, takes oil and juice simultaneously as cups compress the fruit and cutters rupture the oil cells. A torchio forces rinds between two counter-rotating screws under regulated pressure. Trade reporting holds that sfumatrice oil is normally superior and commands a premium over FMC or pelatrice oil.

    Expression has a safety consequence. Because it is a mechanical squeeze rather than a distillation, non-volatile peel constituents come along, including furocoumarins. Bergapten in expressed bergamot is phototoxic. The IFRA Standard for citrus oils and other furocoumarin-containing essential oils, in the Amendment 49 version currently published in IFRA’s Standards Library, states that “the total level of Bergapten in the consumer products should not exceed 0.0015% (15 ppm)” where the product is applied to skin exposed to UV light. That figure is being revised: IFRA has published the documentation behind a second leave-on threshold of 5 ppm, and the 52nd Amendment consolidates several natural-substance standards into one furocoumarin standard, so check the current Standards Library before relying on it. Bergapten-free bergamot exists as a separate commercial grade. Distilled citrus oils are not phototoxic in the same way, because the furocoumarins do not distill over. A bright citrus opening like Acqua di Parma Colonia is expressed-oil territory, and the reason its top is so short-lived is the same reason it is so vivid.

    How does solvent extraction work, and why does it give a different smell?

    Fresh plant material is washed with a volatile hydrocarbon solvent, historically petroleum ether or hexane, at or near ambient temperature. The solvent dissolves the aroma compounds along with plant waxes, pigments and other lipophilic material. The solvent is then stripped under vacuum, leaving the concrete: a waxy, colored, often semi-solid paste.

    The concrete is then stirred with ethanol, which dissolves the aromatic fraction but not most of the waxes. The mixture is chilled, the precipitated waxes are filtered off, and the ethanol is removed. What remains is the absolute.

    Two properties explain why absolutes smell closer to the living flower than distilled oils do. No heat, so thermally fragile compounds survive. And no water, so water-soluble compounds like phenylethyl alcohol are retained rather than left behind in a hydrosol. The tradeoff is that absolutes carry odorless ballast — in Turkish rose absolute, hexadecane at 28 to 36 percent — and residual solvent at trace levels, which is one reason absolutes are not permitted in some certification schemes.

    This is the method behind almost every floral material a perfumer actually uses: jasmine, tuberose, orange flower, mimosa, narcissus, violet leaf, and rose absolute alongside rose otto. Floral-absolute construction is audible in something like Chanel No 5, where the rose-jasmine core is doing work that no distilled oil could do at that dose.

    Is enfleurage still used?

    Essentially no, and this is the single most repeated piece of misinformation about extraction.

    Enfleurage works by diffusion into fat. In cold enfleurage, flowers are laid by hand onto a fat-coated glass plate held in a wooden frame called a chassis, left about 24 hours, then replaced with fresh flowers until the fat is saturated. The perfumed fat is a pomade, washed with ethanol to give a pomade absolute. In hot enfleurage, or maceration, flowers are digested in melted fat: a Grasse house describes the fat as 75 percent pork and 25 percent beef, held in a bain-marie at 40 to 60 °C for at least 24 hours with the flowers replaced daily.

    That same Grasse house states that the technique was made obsolete around 1930, when volatile solvent extraction became reliable, and that it is “little used today”; it names recent enfleurage work on tuberose in Grasse and a Guerlain project using mango butter as revivals rather than continuing practice. That enfleurage has been superseded because it is inefficient and costly is uncontroversial, but the date of around 1930 rests on that single company page, so read it as the house’s own account rather than an established chronology. If a product description says its jasmine was obtained by enfleurage, that is a claim worth asking about: nothing in the public record suggests the material is available at scale.

    What does CO2 extraction do differently?

    Carbon dioxide has a critical point at about 31 °C and 74 bar. Above that, it behaves as a supercritical fluid: gas-like in its ability to penetrate plant material, liquid-like in its ability to dissolve. Crucially, its solvent power can be tuned continuously by changing pressure and temperature, so the same plant can be extracted selectively.

    The practical demonstration: volatile oils can be taken at relatively low pressures around 100 bar, while lipids require higher pressures, and more polar compounds require adding a modifier such as ethanol. Depressurize and the CO2 leaves as a gas, so there is no solvent residue at all, and the whole operation runs near room temperature.

    Whether it produces a better material depends on the plant, and the published jasmine comparison is instructive rather than flattering. A study on Jasminum grandiflorum found liquid CO2 extraction gave a relatively fat-free product at 0.26 percent yield, against 0.35 percent for an n-pentane concrete, 0.27 percent for the absolute obtained from it, and 0.05 percent for steam distillation. CO2 matched the absolute on yield while avoiding excess fats, recovering benzyl acetate, alpha-farnesene and indole well. It did not beat solvent extraction by a wide margin: it produced a cleaner, differently weighted material at a similar yield.

    Where CO2 genuinely wins is with materials that distillation destroys and solvent extraction muddies: vanilla, ginger, black pepper, hops, spices and resins. A CO2 pepper extract smells recognizably like cracked pepper. Distilled pepper oil smells like pine and citrus with the pepper missing.

    What are the real yields?

    Yield figures in perfumery writing are the most corrupted data in the field. Here are the ones that trace to peer-reviewed papers or technical monographs. Everything in the table is a measured or published figure; the kilograms-per-kilogram columns are my arithmetic from those percentages, and are labelled as such.

    Material and method Published yield kg raw material per kg product (my arithmetic) Source type
    Rose oil, hydrodistillation (Rosa damascena) 0.035-0.049% of fresh flowers ~2,040-2,860 kg Peer-reviewed field trial
    Rose oil, hydrodistillation (Turkish, measured average) 0.045% v/w ~2,220 kg Peer-reviewed analytical study
    Rose concrete, solvent extraction 0.30-0.66% depending on solvent; literature ~0.25% ~150-400 kg Peer-reviewed analytical study
    Rose absolute, from concrete 52.1-70.9% of concrete ~250-515 kg of fresh flowers (stated in the paper) Peer-reviewed analytical study
    Jasmine grandiflorum concrete 0.26-0.30% of flowers ~333-385 kg Trade technical review
    Jasmine grandiflorum absolute 55-61% of concrete (Egypt) ~590-700 kg of flowers Trade technical review
    Jasmine grandiflorum, liquid CO2 0.26% ~385 kg Peer-reviewed comparative study
    Jasmine grandiflorum, steam distillation 0.05% ~2,000 kg Peer-reviewed comparative study
    Orris concrete (Iris pallida) 0.045-0.055%; best treatment 6.30 kg/ha/year ~1,820-2,220 kg of rhizome Peer-reviewed field trial
    Lemon oil, distilled 0.07-0.10% ~1,000-1,430 kg Trade technical review

    Read the rose rows together and you have the answer to the most-repeated yield claim in perfumery. A technical monograph on oil-bearing rose cultivation states that “1 kg rose oil can be obtained from 3000-4000 kg of rose petals.” The measured yields imply roughly 2,040 to 2,860 kg, so the monograph figure is 40 to 50 percent higher than the measured one — that arithmetic is mine — probably because it describes petals as charged rather than whole flowers as harvested, and because real distilleries do not hit laboratory yields. That is an unusually good result for a widely repeated number. Most are worse.

    How are aroma materials actually extracted from plants, method by method?

    1. Decide whether the material survives heat. If it does, distillation is cheapest. If it does not — jasmine, tuberose, mimosa, narcissus — distillation is off the table before anything else is considered.
    2. Decide whether the odor lives in an oil gland you can rupture. Citrus peel does, so it is pressed. Almost nothing else does.
    3. Harvest into the window. Rose and jasmine are picked at dawn and processed the same day; delay costs yield and shifts composition. Orris is the opposite: it must be aged 36 months before the irones exist at all.
    4. Prepare the charge. Distillation takes whole or comminuted material into the still. Solvent extraction takes fresh flowers into an extractor. Orris rhizomes are sun-dried about nine days first, losing roughly 70 percent of their fresh weight.
    5. Run the separation. Steam through the still for about 90 minutes for rose; solvent wash at ambient temperature for flowers; pressure and temperature setpoints for CO2.
    6. Recover the first product. Oil separates from the hydrosol; solvent is stripped under vacuum to leave a concrete; CO2 is depressurized to gas and vented.
    7. Recover the second product where economics justify it. Cohobate the distillation water for a second oil; wash the concrete with ethanol, chill and filter to get the absolute.
    8. Standardize. Blend lots against a reference, and rectify or fractionate where a cleaner or more consistent cut is needed.

    Which extraction claims are wrong?

    “Enfleurage is still used for jasmine and tuberose”

    What is claimed: Fine perfumery still obtains its most delicate florals by enfleurage.

    What the evidence shows: Standard reference accounts describe enfleurage as superseded by solvent extraction and supercritical fluid extraction on grounds of inefficiency and cost. A Grasse fragrance house puts the change at around 1930, when volatile solvent extraction became reliable, and says the technique is “little used today,” describing recent exceptions as new initiatives rather than continuing practice. The 1930 date is that one company’s account.

    What people wrongly conclude: That enfleurage-derived materials are available at scale. They are not, and a product claiming them is making a claim about an artisanal revival, not about standard industry practice.

    “It takes a thousand tonnes of iris to make two kilos of orris”

    What is claimed: Vendor descriptions of orris cite ratios in the range of a thousand tonnes of rhizome per couple of kilograms of finished material.

    What the evidence shows: The peer-reviewed field trial measured orris concrete yield at 0.045 to 0.055 percent of rhizome. Arithmetic, mine: at 0.05 percent, a thousand tonnes of rhizome gives about 500 kg of concrete. Even allowing that orris butter is a further distillation of the concrete and so a fraction of it, the vendor ratio is off by something like two orders of magnitude.

    What people wrongly conclude: That orris is rare in a way that no arithmetic can express. It is genuinely one of the most expensive materials in perfumery — the driver is six years of capital tied up in a crop, plus about 6 kg of concrete per hectare per year — but the extreme ratios circulating in retail copy are not measurements.

    “An absolute is a purer, more concentrated essential oil”

    What is claimed: Absolutes are essential oils refined a step further.

    What the evidence shows: ISO 9235 defines an essential oil by distillation, expression or dry distillation only; an absolute is an ethanol extract of a concrete, pomade, resinoid or supercritical extract. They are different product classes from different processes. And absolutes are not purer: Turkish rose absolute was measured at 28 to 36 percent hexadecane, an odorless alkane.

    What people wrongly conclude: That absolute is a quality grade. It is a process designation, and for some plants — rose, in particular — the absolute and the distilled oil are usefully different materials that a perfumer uses for different jobs.

    “Essential oil captures the smell of the flower”

    What is claimed: Distillation gives you the plant’s true scent.

    What the evidence shows: Living rose headspace is 43.2 percent phenylethyl alcohol. Distilled rose oil is 1.3 percent. The compound most responsible for the fresh-petal smell is largely absent from the distilled oil because it is water-soluble.

    What people wrongly conclude: That essential oil is the reference against which other extracts are judged. For most flowers it is the least faithful of the available options.

    “CO2 extraction is always superior”

    What is claimed: Supercritical extraction is a strictly better technology.

    What the evidence shows: On jasmine it matched the absolute on yield (0.26 versus 0.27 percent) while avoiding excess fats. Better for some purposes, not all: it produces a differently weighted material, and for many plants the solvent-extracted absolute remains the reference perfumery material.

    What people wrongly conclude: That a CO2 label signals quality. It signals a process choice suited to particular materials, most convincingly spices, resins, vanilla and hops.

    The honest limits of this article

    Yields are the weak point of every article on this subject, including this one. Published percentages come from specific cultivars, seasons, equipment and laboratories; commercial extractors achieve lower numbers than research stills, and do not publish them. Any kilograms-per-kilogram figure derived from a percentage carries that uncertainty compounded by whatever the original study meant by “flowers” — whole flowers, petals only, fresh or partly wilted — which is frequently not stated. Flower-count claims of the “it takes eight million blossoms” type cannot be verified without a stated average weight per flower, which is almost never given, so this article does not repeat any of them. Where a figure here is arithmetic rather than measurement, it says so.

    What this changes about what you smell

    The immediate payoff is that “rose” on a box tells you almost nothing, and you now know what question replaces it. Rose otto and rose absolute are different materials from the same plant: otto reads lemony, waxy, sharp and slightly metallic; absolute reads honeyed, jammy, deeper, closer to a cut flower in a warm room. A fragrance built on one does not smell like a fragrance built on the other, and the note list will not distinguish them.

    The same logic applies down the list. A citrus top that vanishes in fifteen minutes is expressed oil behaving normally, not a fault. A pepper note that smells piney is distilled; one that smells like a pepper grinder is a CO2 extract. A vanilla that smells woody and slightly smoky rather than sweet is closer to a real bean extract than a vanillin-led accord. And an oud note in a widely distributed fragrance such as Tom Ford Oud Wood is largely reconstruction work, because the extraction economics of real agarwood do not scale.

    What our own catalogue shows

    Two figures from our listings show how little of this reaches a label. About 334 mention rose; of those, eight specify damascena or damask, six Turkish rose, five May rose, two rose absolute, none rose otto. About 112 mention oud or agarwood, at a median of roughly $90 per 100 ml against $68 catalogue-wide — a premium buying a reconstruction, not distilled oud oil, which at commercial volumes does not exist. Both counts reflect which copy names a material, not which formulas use it.

    Bottles to try this on

    For iris, the method determines almost everything: Prada Infusion d’Iris leans on the cool, dry, faintly floury side of the material, and it is worth smelling next to a warm, powdery-vanillic construction like Guerlain Shalimar to hear how differently powder can be built. For a pure floral-absolute reference against a synthetic-led one, compare a jasmine-heavy classical structure with something like Dior Sauvage Eau de Parfum, which contains essentially none of the processes described in this article.

    Related reading

    Common questions

    What is the difference between an essential oil and an absolute?

    Process. ISO 9235 defines an essential oil as a product of steam distillation, mechanical expression of citrus peel, or dry distillation. An absolute is obtained by washing a concrete, pomade, resinoid or supercritical extract with ethanol. They are different product classes, and for flowers like jasmine only the absolute route works at all.

    What is a concrete in perfumery?

    A concrete is the first product of solvent extraction: fresh plant material washed with a hydrocarbon solvent, which is then stripped off, leaving a waxy colored paste containing aroma compounds plus plant waxes and pigments. Jasmine concrete yields are about 0.26 to 0.30 percent of flower weight. Washing it with ethanol gives the absolute.

    Why does rose oil smell different from rose absolute?

    Because distillation loses the water-soluble compounds. Analytical work on the same Turkish roses measured phenylethyl alcohol at 43.2 percent of the living flower’s emission, 1.3 percent of the distilled oil and 35 to 38 percent of the absolute. That compound carries the honeyed fresh-petal character, so the oil reads sharper and more geranium-like.

    Is enfleurage still used to make perfume?

    Not commercially. Standard reference accounts describe it as superseded by solvent extraction and supercritical extraction because it is inefficient and costly. A Grasse fragrance house puts the change at around 1930 and says the technique is little used today, naming recent tuberose work in Grasse as a revival. That 1930 date is one company’s account rather than an established chronology.

    Why are citrus oils cold pressed instead of distilled?

    Because the oil already sits in glands in the outer peel and can be squeezed out mechanically, and because heat degrades the aldehydes responsible for citrus brightness. Distilled lemon oil is flatter and more terpenic. The tradeoff is that expression also carries over phototoxic furocoumarins such as bergapten in bergamot, which IFRA restricts.

    What does CO2 extraction actually do?

    Carbon dioxide above about 31 degrees C and 74 bar behaves as a supercritical fluid that penetrates plant material like a gas and dissolves like a liquid, with solvent power tunable by pressure and temperature. It leaves no residue, since the CO2 is simply vented as gas, and it runs near room temperature so heat-sensitive compounds survive.

    How many roses does it take to make rose oil?

    Published yields for Rosa damascena are 0.035 to 0.049 percent of fresh flower weight, which works out to roughly 2,040 to 2,860 kg of flowers per kilogram of oil by my arithmetic. The frequently repeated figure of 3,000 to 4,000 kg comes from a technical monograph describing petals rather than whole flowers, and is roughly 40 to 50 percent higher than the measured range.

    What is a tincture in perfumery?

    ISO 9235 defines it as a solution obtained by macerating a natural raw material in ethanol or water. The raw material simply sits in the solvent and the solution is the product. Nothing is concentrated, so a tincture is a weak material used for specific effects, not a concentrated extract.

    Which extraction method gives the most authentic smell?

    It depends on the plant. For flowers, solvent extraction and CO2 extraction come closest to the living smell because neither uses heat or water. For citrus peel, expression is the most faithful. For spices and resins, CO2 extraction. For robust herbs and woods, distillation is both faithful and cheapest.

    What is cohobation in rose distillation?

    Redistilling the aqueous distillate to recover aroma compounds that dissolved in the water on the first pass. A Turkish production account describes it producing a second oil, which is then blended with the first oil for the final product. It partly compensates for the loss of water-soluble compounds like phenylethyl alcohol.