Sorry, but Gertrude Stein got it wrong. In perfumery, a rose is hardly ever just a rose. The challenge facing perfumers is not so much to mimic nature as to go one better.
— Another article about the "naturals vs synthetics" debate, this one in the UK Times Online.
To capture the fragrance of a flower without having to kill it, IFF uses a kind of "smell camera" that detects and absorbs the particles that surround a plant to record its scent. The information is then translated into a formula with the help of chromatography and spectrometry, techniques that help identify the many components that make up a flower's scent.
— From The Smell Factory, in Time Magazine.
Thanks for these informative articles! I've been wondering about the natural vs synthetic arguments for a while… This is interesting reading for me.
You might like this one too (scroll down to “perfume in the news”):
https://nstperfume.com/blog/_archives/2007/4/8
I think it's just wonderful and rather funny that the mainstream perfumery world feels the need to repeatedly bleat on about naturals. Our tiny little new art has them on the defensive and we're loving it.
Me thinkith they protesth too much, but heck, they keep giving us a bigger and bigger audience we'd never have the star power to pull. Just think of all the readers of that UK paper who now say “hmm…didn't know there were natural perfumes available, and I don't like the strong stuff out there that makes me choke on an elevator….I'll give naturals a try.”
A, don't know if it is the mainstream perfumery world or the mainstream press — I think they jump on anything that sounds like a “us vs them” sort of thing. But whatever, as you say, more publicity for the naturals!