CHEMISTRY & BIODIVERSITY – Vol.

5 (2008) 1147

Perfume Formulation: Words and Chats

by Céline Ellena
Charabot, 18 rue Chartran, F-92200 Neuilly sur Seine
(e-mail: c.ellena@charabot.fr)

What does it mean to create fragrances with materials from chemistry and/or from nature? How are
they used to display their characteristic differences, their own personality? Is it easier to create with
synthetic raw materials or with essential oils? This review explains why a perfume formulation
corresponds in fact to a conversation, an interplay between synthetic and natural perfumery materials. A
synthetic raw material carries a single information, and usually is very linear. Its smell is uniform, clear,
and faithful. Natural raw materials, on the contrary, provide a strong, complex and generous image. While
a synthetic material can be seen as a single word, a natural one such as rose oil could be compared to
chatting: cold, warm, sticky, heavy, transparent, pepper, green, metallic, smooth, watery, fruity... full of
information. Yet, if a very small amount of the natural material is used, nothing happens, the fragrance
will not change. However, if a large amount is used, the rose oil will swallow up everything else. The
fragrance will smell of nothing else except rose! To formulate a perfume is not to create a culinary recipe,
with only dosing the ingredients in well-balanced amounts. To formulate rather means to flexibly knit
materials together with a lively stitch, meeting or repelling each other, building a pleasant form, which is
neither fixed, nor solid, nor rigid. A fragrance has an overall structure, which ranges from a clear sound,
made up of stable, unique, and linear items, to a background chat, comfortable and reassuring. But that
does, of course, not mean that there is only one way of creating a fragrance!

Introduction. – Having been born and raised in a perfumer4s family in Grasse, the
perfume capital of the world since the 16th century, talking about perfumery was
natural for me from infancy on. So, to me, perfume was self-evident, and, for many
years, I did not try to rationalize it – I simply sensed it. I used to think about my job
instinctively, in a very pragmatic way: 9Let s do a perfume!4
But, of course, it did not work out this way, though in the beginning it all seemed so
easy, just as if nothing could stop me. I could try any combination of perfumery raw
materials, mix them, and get a 9good perfume4. But the interaction with other people
changed me, because I wanted to communicate, explain my wonderful job, and how I
was translating an idea into a olfactory reality. Then, I discovered that I could not
achieve this goal, simply because I just did not know myself how I actually managed to
compound.
As all perfumers, I create perfume formulas with both synthetic and natural
perfumery raw materials. A common misunderstanding is that the difference between
these materials is mainly their respective costs. The difference between synthetics and
naturals is, in fact, far more crucial, and of imminent importance in the creative work of
a perfumer, though this is rarely communicated in such a straightforward way.
When we meet up with journalists and laymen, we talk most often about odors,
different fragrances, essential oils, brands, but almost never about the art of

D 2008 Verlag Helvetica Chimica Acta AG, ZFrich

1148 CHEMISTRY & BIODIVERSITY – Vol. 5 (2008)

formulation. It is such an abstract act that it is difficult to give a general explanation

easy to grasp for nonprofessionals. The way out, usually, is to simply switch the topic.
But, if a perfumer is forced to explain how he constructed a formula, he either
compares it to a culinary recipe or to a musical melody.

The Cooking Metaphor. – Using the metaphor of a 9culinary recipe4 stresses the
balancing act between all ingredients of a given formula, the process of reaching
harmony. This can explain that, for each component, a certain quantity is necessary, but
it does not explain why one should use a certain ingredient, or how one actually
determines the amount necessary.

The Musical Metaphor. – Music implies nice sounds, tones, and rhythm. Musical
notes are often compared with olfactory notes, which are arranged until they form the
right melody. This metaphor can explain that each odor/sound has a specific identity,
but it does not explain what this identity is made of, or how to use it.
These metaphors are useful in a way, but they say nothing about the differences
between naturals and synthetics in composition. That is the reason why a third
approach is proposed in this paper, an approach which was inspired by verbal
communication, explaining why the perfumer can be seen also as a form of linguist, and
what kind of words and sentences a perfumer works with.

The Linguistic Metaphor. – To be a perfumer is to communicate with a vocabulary

that people can listen to with their noses. So, writing a formula is like telling a story you
have in your mind. And to create a mental image, you try to translate this story into
9smell-words4. When a customer asks a perfumer to create a fragrance, recalling, for
example, a fresh fountain in a garden in the south of France on a spring day, surrounded
by olive trees and wild roses, the perfumer has to translate this story into smell-words.
In the mind of a perfumer, the adjective 9fresh4 is associated with one particular raw
material, and combined with another one it keys the impression of 9springtime4, then
there are other materials coining 9olive oil4 or the 9wood of olive tree4... The customer
has an image or a story in mind; the perfumer translates this into certain raw materials
that remind key aspects of this image or story. This is why I compare perfumery raw
materials to words. Many words form a sentence; many smell-words create a fragrance.
Today, I have my own mental dictionary with these smell-words. This dictionary is
the basis for my perfumery creations, and it took a very long time to fill, organize, and
explore it..., and this process is never over, of course. My perfumery dictionary contains
two indexes: natural raw material and synthetic products. When I create a fragrance I
obviously mix materials from both indexes, but before that I need to understand them
separately. When I look up the definition of a synthetic material, I find one word; but
when I check for a natural ingredient, I open the door to an enormous chat room,
comparable to a big mess in which one needs to search for individual items deeply
buried inside.

Synthetic Raw Materials. – At the end of the 19th century, chemists synthesized and
commercialized many new odorants, such as cinnamaldehyde (1; Fig. 1) in 1833,
coumarin (2) in 1868, vanillin (3) in 1877, ionone (4/5) in 1898, and hydroxycitronellal
 CHEMISTRY & BIODIVERSITY – Vol. 5 (2008) 1149

Fig. 1. The first synthetic odorants that revolutionized perfumery

(6) in 1908; perfumers immediately started to use these, and thus modern perfumery
began.
Synthetic odorants are totally abstract, and their appearance initiated an abstract
perfumery, based on emotions rather than imitation of, for instance, flowers, as it had
been tradition when perfumers had only natural ingredients at their disposal. A
synthetic raw material could be compared to a single word: What does this mean? It
means something easy to smell, because it is a single entity with very distinct olfactory
information. There is nothing around in its odor that disturbs or interferes, but this does
not mean that a synthetic odorant is easy to understand. Sometimes synthetics are so
artificial that one cannot link them to memories or emotions, for example,
hydroxycitronellal (6; Fig. 1), LilialJ (7; Fig. 2), FlorolJ (8; Fig. 2), LyralJ (9;
Fig. 2), and cyclamen aldehyde (10; Fig. 2). They all are rather artificial, and one would
generally describe them as transparent, fresh, clean, more or less cold, and more or less
pungent. But you do not get disappointed because you can rely on this information,
when you built a formula with those ingredients. These are the reasons:
1) They are linear. This means that from the beginning until the end of the
evaporation one gets the same information. It only becomes less powerful after a while.
2) All of these materials have a very distinct and exact scent, and most of the time
you can use them everywhere, in any kind of floral accord: lilac, rose, lily, peony,
mimosa...
3) They are strong and straight, and most of the time they provide to the formula
some kind of light: clean and obvious. Some synthetics are more flexible than others,
like some words that have an ambiguous meaning, but others can be very precise.
Two examples:
1) 2-Phenylethanol (11). Main smell-word: rose. But we use it also to create many
other floral notes like lily-of-the-valley, peony, or lilac. You could use it, however, also
for fruity fragrances in the context of peach, apple, and pear, just as some words in a
dictionary have different meanings.
2) (Z)-Hex-3-en-1-ol (12). Main smell-word: green – and that is all. This synthetic
raw material is just green. Of course, it reminds you of grass, fresh grass, juicy sap,
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Fig. 2. Exemplary odorants to illustrate the concept of the linguistic metaphor of perfume formulation

leaves, but, in the end, it only provides this green impression to your fragrance – it is
only green.
With just one word it is impossible to have a conversation with someone. You can
bring across singular information like 9hot4, 9cold4, 9bitter4, 9sharp4, 9sweet4, or 9wet4, but
that does not sound very exiting for long. So, you need to arrange many different smell-
words to formulate a sentence, to tell a story, to create a fragrance.
Because they are strong and straightforward in their olfactory message, synthetic
perfumery materials provide to a fragrance the expression, the phrasing, like a rhythm
or breathing (punctuation). One can imagine a fragrance created by combining several
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synthetic materials, which provide the main information. What you can sense with your
nose, as a pleasant accord, comes from the high personality of these few ingredients;
but it is not yet a story. A story needs more then just a few sentences, spoken one after
the other. This is where the natural ingredients come into play.

Natural Raw Materials. – Natural essential oils, absolutes or concretes, are chatting
elements. They contain a lot of information, and most of the time they are very easy to
understand because they are more or less familiar to everyone. They carry personal
emotions and memories. If you smell the scent of lavender, a picture of la Provence
immediately comes to your mind. But that does not mean that it is easy to use naturals
in a perfume formulation. A natural raw material is not totally clean; it is full of
divergent information, and this is the reason why it is so much more complicated to
apprehend.
A natural material is not only one word with a defined meaning. It is made up of
many words that are often very similar in their meaning, more or less loud, and during
the evaporating time these words talk a lot, until the very last whisper!
The work of the perfumer is to find what in all this chattering is essential for his
composition. That certain something that is interesting for the fragrance. Every natural
has a core message, by which one essential oil can be distinguished from another, but
most of the time, the material has something more to tell you if you take your time. Go
deeper and look for the right adjectives: green, metallic, watery, warm, bitter, woody,
soft; it all depends on what you do want to tell. There are two principal ways of working
with natural ingredients:
1) One smells the essential oil and imagines how one could build a fragrance from
one or a few aspects of this material. So you try to bring these forward, to pronounce
them, or to hide them by associations with other naturals or synthetic materials. Just as
in the movie *Out of Africa , where Robert Redford sets the stage and begins a story, and
Meryl Streep continues it working within the setting.
2) One starts with a picture in one4s mind, a story with a certain atmosphere, and
one is looking for the right way to translate it into smell-words. You find a big part of the
story already being told in one essential oil: you have already a few words, or even
whole sentences present. But, some parts of the sentences are not exactly what you
want to say. So you have to insist on the main subject you really want.
Of course, you could be disappointed with either way. It takes a very long time to
find the right tonalities, the perfect rhythm, because natural raw materials are naturally
undomesticated. Natural raw materials are somehow unpredictable. They are like a
charming girl, with a lovely smile and lovely big eyes, but when you try to touch her, she
goes away or shouts at you!

Natural Raw Materials Have Big Egos. – What does that mean? Well, use a big
amount of rose oil in a fragrance, and all you hear will be this message: 9I am the Rose!4
The tone is very loud, and all the little smell-words around it have disappeared
completely! So, one ends up with a smell of rose, wonderful but lonely, with a few
*satellite smell-words around it – like green, metallic, and watery – which also stem
from the essential oil of rose. It is a complete picture, a 9smell-sentence4, but you are still
waiting for the rest of the story, as other components are unnoticeable/inaudible...
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If you are, however, now afraid to use rose oil, and use it only in a negligible
quantity only to be able to say that you have rose oil in your formula, you will please the
marketing people a lot, but do nothing for your perfume. The rose oil will be lost inside
the fragrance; it will be less than a whisper. This is why it is so important to carefully
select every raw material for the good of the formula, and not for your own satisfaction.
This means you should not use rose oil – or any other natural ingredient – because you
consider it pretty, sexy, or exciting, but only – and really only – if it is necessary for the
fragrance.

Free Rein to the Chatting of Naturals. – What does that mean? Natural raw
materials, as we already know, provide a lot of diverse information: some of which is
interesting, some of which is not unmistakable, and some of which is even useless. That
is something you have to accept and to deal with; but it is also something you can make
use of and play with. So, when one approaches a natural perfumery material one could
have the feeling of looking at a nice mess, and when one uses this material in a
fragrance, one could still smell some part of this mess. Do not try to hide this, and do not
try to reorganize it! It is a very attractive concept to accept that there is something in a
fragrance that slightly disturbs the overall balance and provides contrast to the
perfume. Just like a little voice, totally free, which says something else, something
different, that allows you to sense a composition from a different angle.

Conclusions and Outlook. – To make a formula is not like creating a culinary recipe
by mixing several ingredients until one reaches the well-balanced amount for every
material. I prefer to compare perfume formulation to a way of flexibly knitting
materials together. This way, the ingredients can either attract or repel each other,
building a pleasant form, which is neither fixed, nor solid, nor rigid.
We have seen thus far that, in the olfactory language of a fragrance, synthetics are
akin to a single word: distinct information, linear, and with a faithful personality. In the
presented linguistic metaphor, natural materials are akin to a complex chat: diverse
information, messy, and with a meddlesome personality.
But of course that does not mean that there is only one way of creating a fragrance,
just as there is not just one way to smell and appreciate it. Sometimes, naturals behave
as if they were only a single word: they do not chat anymore – and some synthetics are
chatting much more then one could possibly imagine. b-Ionone (5), for example, is so
rich and such a chatterbox that you could use it for many different kinds of effects, in
many different fragrances. In the beginnings of modern perfumery, 5 was used only for
violet notes, but today all perfumers use it as a tea note, floral white (iris), yellow
(freesia), red (poppies), soft woody accord, and even as a powdery element of musk
accords!
However, labdanum absolute (Cistus ladanifer L.) is so heavy that it does not chat
anymore. When used in fragrance, it is like a monolith. It presents an amber note, and
that is all it can provide – only this single piece of information.
These might be the limits to my metaphorical approach of synthetics as *words and
naturals as *chats . Metaphors are very useful to get an idea about a complex context
across to someone else. When they are too widely used, however, people tend to think
about the subject only by way of the metaphor, and it then might become a sort of cage
 CHEMISTRY & BIODIVERSITY – Vol. 5 (2008) 1153

that limits the way one can grasp the complexity of the real problem. Still, this
metaphor allows me to think all in all more universally about a formula. And, I do hope
you will also find it useful in your way of understanding perfumery.

Experimental Part
General. To demonstrate on a very simple example what a formulation with synthetic and natural
raw materials really means, the following materials are mixed in different ratios and dilutions in 85%
EtOH. How is it when a synthetic ingredient is used instead of a natural?
Vanillin (3; Fig. 1). Synthetic raw material with very distinct information: sweet!
Ambrox (13; Fig. 2). Synthetic raw material with very faithful information: warm.
Labdanum oil (Cistus ladanifer L.). Natural perfumery ingredient with many connotations: warm,
sexy, animalic, fruity, burnt...
Vanillin (3) þ Ambrox (13)=Amber. Mixing these two synthetic odorants in different ratios does not
provide the smell of amber. They are two separate words that signify: warm, mineral, and ambery. The
combination is pleasant, but even though it is already more than the sum of its components; it is not yet a
full sentence, and very far from a story.
Vanillin (3) þ Labdanum oil (Cistus ladanifer L.) ¼ Amber. Mixing the synthetic vanillin (3) with
labdanum oil does, however, provide the smell of amber. The simple mixture already tells something of a
story. There is chatting in the background and depth, from which one can begin the creation of a
fragrance. Ambrox (13) and labdanum oil have similarities and affinities, but even though they are in the
same olfactory domain, they do not exert the same effect. If you now want to extend the fragrance, its
story with more details, you could add adjectives, synonyms, and antonyms to your formula.
Adjectives. These are synthetic odorants or smell-words like: (Z)-hex-3-en-1-ol (12) for the green, b-
damascenone (14) for the red, and a few drops of yellow/green with cycloananate (15). These are
generally used in small amounts as nuanceurs, and natural raw materials can be used as adjectives, too.
Synonyms. In the same formula, one can employ LilialJ (7), FlorolJ (8), or MayolJ (16), and
cedramber (17), BoisambreneJ (18), or KaranalJ (19), and everybody will understand what you mean.
Yet, these synthetics could be also boring. Basil oil, star anise oil, or tarragon oil can provide the same
message with more complexity!
Antonyms. These are smell-words with opposite meanings: LilialJ (7) and methyl anthranilate (20).
Both are floral odorants but one is cold, i.e., 7, while the other is warm, i.e., 20. Most of the time, this
strategy works also very well with natural ingredients: neroli oil (Citrus aurantium L.) against tuberose
absolute (Polianthes tuberosa L.), cold spices against warm spices.

Received November 30, 2007