How Perfume is Made

Perfumes are made of dozens of ingredients, bound together in carefully created formulas that are often kept as closely guarded secrets.

Plant-based ingredients

The history of perfume is built on natural scents that come mainly from plants  from flowers (e.g. jasmine), leaves (e.g. patchouli), roots (e.g. ginger), fruit (e.g. oranges), bark (e.g. cinnamon) and wood (e.g. cedarwood). There are many thousands of plants in the world, all with their own scent, but only some 200 of these are used commercially to make perfume. These scents come from fragrant oils; they are extracted by a number of methods, each of which is designed to preserve the essential qualities of the natural aroma, often intensifying it and sometimes deliberately distorting it. (For more details about individual ingredients, see the separate article on Perfume Ingredients.)

Steam distillation

For moderately delicate fragrant oils that are easily extracted from the raw material (such as lavender or rose petals, and even cedarwood), the harvested plant matter is chopped or crushed and placed in vats, then exposed to steam. The heat extracts the oils, which mix with the steam, and together these rise from the vat and liquefy in the cooling tube of the still. Most oils then separate naturally from the water and can be drawn off. The resulting oils are generally known as 'essential oils'.

Dry distillation

For more robust materials, notably woods, essential oils have to be extracted by higher levels of heat. This is achieved by applying intense heat to a vat containing the raw material, until it sweats out the oil. In some cases, burning is permitted to give the oil a burnt or smoky tang.

Solvent extraction

Many aromatic oils can be extracted by bathing the raw material in solvents, such as hexane and petroleum ether. The aromatic oils dissolve in the solvent, which is then drawn off and removed, leaving the essential oils in the form of a waxy 'concrete', which can be further purified into an oily 'absolute'.

Expression

Some plant materials, notably citrus peel, will yield their essential oils if crushed  just as olives yield their oil in an olive press. This method is known as 'expression'.

Chemical ingredients

All essential oils have a chemical formula. It is the task of the fragrance chemist to discover what this formula is, and to reproduce it  or at least to reproduce the most prominent characteristics of an essential oil. If they can succeed in doing so, they may be able to produce effective synthetic oils that are not only far cheaper than the natural version, but may also have advantages, such as greater stability and durability. Many fragrances are now produced from synthetic ingredients. The scent of lily of the valley, gardenia, honeysuckle and white peony, for instance, is almost always synthetic. Natural jasmine essential oil has to be made from millions of jasmine flowers hand-picked at dawn, and costs about £2000 per kilogram; the synthetic version of jasmine (called 'jasmone') costs about one-tenth of this price. Synthetic perfumes have been made since the 19^th century; being relatively inexpensive, abundant and robust, they have found their way into a growing range of domestic products, such as soap, shower gels, washing powder, deodorisers, and detergents. Synthetic perfumes are not to be sniffed at  so to speak. Chanel No.5, the biggest selling top-of-the-range fragrance, depends for its exquisite floral charms on a synthetic scent: aldehyde 2-methyundecanal.

Fixatives

Good perfume should be long-lasting and intense. To achieve this, perfume makers use powerful scents called 'fixatives'. These also account for much of the pungency of the 'base notes' (see the separate article on Analysing Perfume.) In the past, animals were the source of the most important and valuable fixatives. They included musk (from a gland of the Himalayan musk deer); civet (from a gland of civet cats); and ambergris (expelled from the intestines of the sperm whale). All of these are now produced synthetically, and very few (if any) commercially-produced Western perfumes contain animal products today.

The 'noses'

Fragrance designers are known affectionately as 'noses'. As the name suggests, they have very delicately attuned perceptions of smell, as well as a deep understanding of the ingredients that go into perfumes, how they react with each other, and how they perform over time. With this knowledge, they can design new fragrances, to match the desires of their clients and to fit a given niche in the market. All kinds of considerations come into play: not just the character of the perfume, but also the cost of the ingredients, their stability and longevity, and the need to be able to take trial formulae into production on an industrial scale.

The concept

Perfume is more than just a pleasant smell. It is an evocation of something mystical, half-remembered and sensual. Manufacturers of top-of-the-range fragrances work hard to create an associative aura around their products: their advertising shows a world of beauty, romance, desire and nostalgia, expressed in poetic language. Their packaging, with distinctive designer bottles, suggests a world of precious, exclusive luxury  as do their prices. This is a multi-million pound industry in pursuit of something elusive, powerful and subconscious: our sense of smell (for more on the mysteries of smell, see our Brief Guide to the Sense of Smell).