Perfumery: Practice and Principles PDF
Preview Perfumery: Practice and Principles
Page iii Perfumery Practice and Principles Robert R. Calkin Perfumery Training Consultant J. Stephan Jellinek Dragoco, Holzminden, Germany A WILEYINTERSCIENCE PUBLICATION John Wiley & Sons, Inc. NEW YORK / CHICHESTER / BRISBANE / TORONTO / SINGAPORE Page iv This text is printed on acidfree paper. Copyright © 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in Canada. Reproduction or translation of any part of this work beyond that permitted by Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act without the permission of the copyright owner is unlawful. Requests for permission or further information should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 101580012. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data: Calkin, Robert R. Perfumery: practice and principles / Robert R. Calkin, J. Stephan Jellinek. p. cm. ISBN 0471589349 (alk. paper) 1. Perfumes. I. Jellinek, Joseph Stephan. II. Title. TP983.C33 1994 668'.54—dc20 9341844 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 Page v CONTENTS Preface vii Part I Basic Skills and Techniques 1 3 What It Takes to Be a Perfumer 2 10 The Student Perfumer Today 3 15 The Technique of Smelling 4 19 Perfumery Raw Materials 5 24 The Learning and Classification of Raw Materials 6 44 The Floral Accords 7 58 The Technique of Matching Part II Aesthetics and the Fundamentals of Composition 8 75 The Biological Basis of Aesthetics 9 83 The Structure of a Perfume 10 94 The Use of Bases Part III Studies in Fine Fragrance 11 101 The Descent of Perfumes 12 107 Selected Great Perfumes Page vi Part IV Aspects Of Creative Perfumery 13 143 Perfumes for Functional Products 14 177 The Challenge of New Materials 15 180 Constraints to Creation 16 196 The Perfumer and the Market Part V Scientific Fundamentals 17 207 The Chemical Structure of Perfumery Materials 18 222 Chemical Reactions in Perfumery 19 234 The Physical Basis of Perfumery 20 243 Psychophysics and Perfumery Appendixes A 253 Structural Groups B 258 The Functional Groups C 261 The Aldehydes D 267 The Ionones E 269 Glossary of Perfumes, Specialty Raw Materials, and Bases Bibliography 273 Index of Perfumery Raw Materials and Bases 277 General Index 283 Page vii PREFACE Some thirty years ago the perfumery profession was shaken by the commercialization of the gas chromatograph. In lectures, roundtable discussions, and private conversation hot debates centered around the question whether this analytical tool, by greatly simplifying the separation of complex mixtures of volatile materials, would make the perfumer redundant. The initial stir soon calmed down, to be replaced by a feeling that the gas chromatograph, while highly useful to the analytical chemist and to quality control, would have little or no effect upon the perfumer's essential job, the creation of perfumes. Today it is becoming increasingly clear that this businessasusual second reaction was as misguided as the panicky initial response had been. For gradually but surely, the gas chromatograph—which soon expanded its scope of effectiveness by the successive introduction of capillary columns, the mass spectrometer, and quantitative headspace analysis techniques—has profoundly changed the perfumer's daily work. In reviewing the changes, we concentrate upon the most salient ones: the erosion of secrecy and the intensification of competition, the acceleration of trends and of the trickledown phenomenon, the rise of safety and environmental concerns, and the refinement of performance measurement. Just one generation ago perfumers' work and the operations of the fragrance industry were steeped in secrecy. Access to the book of Page viii formulations was limited to a few trusted individuals. Perfumers kept to themselves any insights about the composition of famous perfumes which they might have acquired by dint of extensive matching efforts. The notion of giving customers information about the formulation of perfumes they were buying was anathema. The fact that anyone armed with good GC/MS equipment and experienced in using this equipment can today, within days, find out a great deal about the formulation of any perfume has radically changed this climate. Formulas are still confidential, but the value of this confidentiality has been greatly diminished by the knowledge that, whenever it is to their advantage, customers and competitors can analyze most perfumes more or less precisely. The practice of giving formulas to major customers, either partially open with keys, or in toto in sealed envelopes to be opened under certain specified conditions, has long since ceased to be shocking. This erosion of secrecy has logically led to a climate of more intensive competition, with results that are changing the face of the fragrance industry. Where formerly the industry offered good profit opportunities even to those companies that operated at less than peak efficiency, and the old artisan style of operation could survive alongside with the upcoming high technology approach, today only those fragrance houses are profitable that are either organized for peak efficiency or have specialized in optimally serving a specific niche of the market. In the brief span of five years (1986 to 1991) the share of world industry turnover accounted for by the ten largest fragrance and flavor suppliers increased from less than 50% to about twothirds, and the trend continues. It would be an oversimplification to say that this development is due entirely to the gas chromatograph, but GC/MS certainly has played a major part in it. It goes without saying that the growing pressures for efficiency in the industry are having marked effects also upon perfumers in their work, limiting their freedom of choosing raw materials (for the sake of keeping inventories in check), requiring them to accept judgments by evaluation boards or consumer panels on the quality and market appeal of their creations, and forcing them to make optimal use of the very tool that has played a major part in bringing about their new working environment, GC/MS. The task of exploring the composition of successful and trendsetting products in the market, which formerly occupied a major portion of the time of many perfumers, has become the work of specialized perfumerchemist teams who conduct it more efficiently, leaving the perfumers free—but also forcing them—to concentrate their efforts upon the truly creative aspects of the job. Page ix Gas chromatographic analysis today throws an increasingly clear light upon questions regarding the purity of natural perfumery materials. As a result perfurmers can now, if they are willing to pay the price, work with reliably pure materials; if they choose to use a commercial grade they know, more precisely than in the past, the material's degree of purity. The history of perfumery has always been marked by evolutionary changes. Perfumers studied the perfumes they admired and built upon them, replacing their structural components by related yet different newer materials, shifting their center of gravity, introducing new nuances. At the heart of this process there was the quest for mastering the model perfume, and the modifications were like commentaries upon a classical text, highlighting certain of their features and showing their continued relevance in a changing world of fashions and styles. Mirroring the arduousness of the task of matching the model, the rhythm of this process was slow. When Madame Rochas, a commentary on Arpège, was launched in 1960, it took its place within an evolution of floral aldehydic perfumes that had continued without a break since 1921, the year of birth of Chanel No. 5. Fidji (1966) was a direct descendant of L'Air du Temps (1948). Today the appearance of descendants of important fragrances is a nearly instantaneous process. The development and launching of mutations of and commentaries upon such perfumes occur at high intensity within very few years, even months after their launching, affecting not only the world of fine fragrances but also, thanks to the ubiquitous trickledown phenomenon, deodorants and other toiletries, even laundry care and household products. As quickly as the trend has taken off, so quickly may it die down when the attention of the marketing community shifts to other models. It would be wrong to attribute this change of pace to the GC/MS technique of matching; its origin lies, rather, in a transformation of marketing objectives. But in making nearinstant matches possible, the GC/MS technique has provided the technical conditions that have made the dramatic speedup of derivation and of trickle down possible. The role that the gas chromatograph and mass spectrometry, along with a host of other highpowered new analytical techniques, have played in intensifying public concerns about the effects of fragrances and fragrance materials upon human health is perhaps not immediately obvious yet fundamental. One generation ago public opinion about the wholesomeness of foods was dominated by ideas about main ingredients: Fresh fruits and vegetables are good for you, candy is not; proteins are good, too much Page x fat is not. The same kind of thinking prevailed in the public mind about what is good or bad for the skin: Harsh solvents are bad, creams and oils are good. The knowledge that most foods and skin products contain, in addition to their main ingredients, small amounts of minor components including additives and trace residues of materials used in crop protection, processing, packaging, and so on, was confined to a small group of specialists. Then, due to the rapid advances in analytical techniques, these specialists began finding more and more potentially harmful impurities even in foods that had been totally beyond suspicion: in fresh meat and beer, in baby food and milk including mothers' milk, even in the water we drink and the very air we breathe. It did not take long for these findings to catch the public's imagination and lawmakers' watchful attention. As a result we live in a climate of opinion today where public awareness of additives and impurities and their possible harmful effects has been raised to a level where it often overshadows thinking about the main effects of foods and beverages. This climate has also colored the way the public perceives the products with which the perfumer deals: cosmetics and toiletries, detergents, and household products. Here too, additives and impurities are now seen as serious risk factors. One of the additives that has become salient and a cause for concern is fragrance. As a result perfumers today must constantly take into account the manifold and everchanging safetyrelated requirements of the countries and of the specific customers for whom they create their fragrances. In parallel to the awareness of possible health effects, concerns about environmental impact of materials and impurities have been greatly on the rise. The roots of this development do not lie in the advances in analytical chemistry but its course has been profoundly marked by these advances. It too is beginning to have a strong impact upon perfumers' work. Turning now to the effects of analysis upon the objective quantitative measurement of fragrance performance, we broach a subject whose outlines are only just beginning to take shape and whose impact will be felt largely in the future. Perfumery is the art of creating pleasurable and meaningful odor experiences. The nature of the experiences elicited by a fragrance in use is the measure of that fragrance's performance. The chain of events leading from the incorporation of a fragrance into a product to the experiencing of that fragrance by the product's user is complex and includes diverse chemical, physical, and neurophysical phenomena. In the past the only way perfumers could get information about what Page xi went on after they incorporated a perfumery material or a perfume in a product base was by smelling. Smelling is very imprecise when it comes to measuring intensity, a major aspect of performance. Moreover, being subjective, it is subject to all kinds of distortions. Since smelling registers only the mental experience that comes at the very end of the chain of events, it gives no clues about what went wrong at what point of the chain if performance is unsatisfactory. Today quantitative headspace chromatography provides a means for monitoring objectively what is happening at an intermediate point in the chain. Coupled with improved techniques of extraction and liquid chromatography to identify chemical changes that perfume materials undergo in the product base, it can make perfumers far more efficient in arriving at highly performing fragrances than they had been in the past. The idea for writing this book was the result of the authors' recognition of the profound changes in the nature of perfumery that are being brought about by recent advances in analytical techniques, and their awareness that these changes also call for a new approach to teaching perfumery. One of us (R. R. C.) is daily observing, in his work as a teacher of perfumers, how the detailed knowledge of the structure of the great perfumes that today, for the first time, is becoming common knowledge, revolutionizes the teaching and learning of perfumery skills. The other (J. S. J.), who early in his career explored the physical aspects of fragrance performance and later centered his interest upon measuring and understanding human responses to fragrance, has seen his fields of interest similarly affected by the advances in analytical technique. Writing this book in the midst of a period of rapid change, we are acutely aware that it cannot hope to offer the last word on any of the many topics it covers. We nevertheless hope that as an extensive review of an art in progress, it will prove useful not only as a textbook for prospective perfumers but also as an aid for those workers in the fragrance industry, the fragrance material industry, and the various industries of perfumed consumer products who want to improve their understanding of modern creative perfumery. J. STEPHAN JELLINEK ROBERT R. CALKIN HOLZMINDEN, GERMANY MAY 1994
The list of books you might like
