How Are Perfumes Made?
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Collecting
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Perfume makers collect the raw materials that become the essential oil scents for the perfume including natural plants, and animal products such as musk and synthetic chemicals. Fatty portions of animals contribute musk and other animal products. Plant odors come from flowers, spices and fruits, but not all plants can produce scented components. A small number--2,000 of 250,000 plant species--can create the oils needed to manufacture perfumes. This requires that many of the scents in perfumes begin in a laboratory where artificial chemicals combine to create the basis essential oils to add to the perfume.
Extracting
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Synthetic and animal products already have an odor concentration sufficient for mixing for the final perfume, but plant materials require an extraction of their essential oils. A perfume manufacturer has several options from which to choose.
The oldest and simplest method, expression, manufacturers use today almost exclusively for citrus odors from the peel. The peels get pressed until their oil seeps out for collection.
Two similar processes used on flowers, enfleurage and maceration, soak layers of flowers in grease. For enfleurage, the layer of flowers rests on a glass sheet with a wooden frame with several sheets stacked atop one another. New flowers replace the old ones until the grease absorbs the fragrance. Alcohol then dissolves the grease. Heating the alcohol evaporates it until only the essential oil remains. Maceration replicates enfleurage with the substitution of warm oils instead of grease to absorb the flowers' odors.
Distillation extracts fragrance by putting plants into a steamer or boiling them. The resulting steam contains the scent of the plants, and as it cools, it condenses into the essential oil.
Extraction by solvents dissolves the plants in benzene. Essential oils from the plant get extracted from the solution by adding alcohol, which causes the oils to float to the top. As with enfleurage and maceration, the alcohol solution gets heated to evaporate the alcohol leaving behind the essential oil.
Mixing and Aging
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Combining the essential oils into perfume requires the expert senses of a "nose." The job of the nose is that he blends the oils to create the desired scent before it is diluted in alcohol. Mixing the base fragrance with levels of ethyl alcohol ranging from 78 to 95 percent creates varying intensities of odors. True perfume has 22 percent essential oils and 78 percent alcohol, making it the most expensive option. Eau de parfum contains 78 to 85 percent alcohol; eau de toilette has 85 to 92 percent alcohol, and eau de cologne has 96 percent alcohol, rendering a lightly scented, cheaper product.
Like a fine wine, perfume requires a months- or years-long aging process to enhance its attributes: the top, central and base odors. These odors describe the citrus, floral and woody components of the perfume, respectively. The expert "nose" smells the perfume at various points during the aging process, and might require mixing with other scents to achieve the right balance of top central and base smells. Once completed, the finished perfume gets bottled and sold to stores and consumers.
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Comments
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