Sweet Aldehyde and Synthetic Scents



Posted: Saturday, June 09, 2007

by
thePerfume-Reporter

In 1923, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was working with a Russian-born perfumist living in Paris trying to come up with a fragrance to go with her new fashion line. Coco Chanel had not yet hit the apex of her fame; she was only just starting to get noticed.

Still, she had some very specific ideas about fragrance. She told Ernst Breaux, the perfumist, to come up with something "completely artificial."

Up until that time, fragrances were completely natural. Natural ingredients were all that were ever used to create scents, which varied widely not only by geography but also from batch to batch. In regions that grew lavender, there were lavender scents. If you were fortunate enough to have gardenias and roses, they showed up in the perfume.

Exotic ingredients like sandalwood from India were rare and extremely costly.

Coco Chanel had a different vision not only for fashion but for fragrance. Her idea was that fashion, like art, was something contrived, invented, man-made … artificial. Coco Chanel designed her famous suit, long strings of beads, and pillbox hats as forms of art and she wanted a perfume to be just as artistic.

Breaux did not invent aldehyde but his sample fragrances for Miss Chanel used this particular synthetic fragrance. Aldehyde is best described as a synthetic fragrance molecule. There is no equivalent in nature; it is cooked up in a lab.

According to legend (and so many are told, it's hard to sort out what really happened), Breaux made six samples, numbering them Chanel No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 and so on. Coco Chanel picked No. 5 as her fragrance. There are versions of this story that say she picked No. 5 because she loved it best. There is another version of the story that claimed that since Chanel would be unveiling her new line on the fifth day of the fifth month, she decided to pick the fifth sample.

Chanel No. 5 was not the first perfume to use aldehyde but it is the first major perfume to take advantage of synthetic fragrance.

Like all great perfumes, Chanel No. 5 is a mixture of many different scents. Of course, some floral notes were mixed in as well.

The best way to describe how aldehyde smells is that it adds "sparkle" to the scent. Today, many perfumes use aldehyde and some perfume experts even consider aldehyde a fragrance family or category. A very powerful "hard-core" aldehyde scent was just released in early 2007; it's called Aldehyde 44 and it's by LeLabo, carried by Barneys. An aldehyde scent you can buy more easily (online even at http://www.sephora.com) is Greed by Gendarme.

With today's general sentiment that natural is better than synthetic, some might be perplexed that the perfume world is contrarian. While some perfumistas do claim to prefer natural scents, most perfume today is synthetic. And there are some good reasons.

Synthetic molecules are much easier to control for uniform product. Take a lemon note for example, used in a lot of fragrances. How can a manufacturer keep that same intensity and quality consistent over thousands of ounces with natural lemons? Natural products can vary in quality and odor intensity especially when they come from different regions.

More importantly, synthetic scents help preserve the environment. There is no need to threaten the indigenous sandalwood trees of India or the musk deer with extinction because perfume lovers can get those same scents without destroying plant or animal life.

A great example of why perfume is synthetic today is musk. True musk is actually a natural substance taken from the sexual glands of a male musk deer. Sometimes other animals could be used. In order to harvest the musk, the animal was killed; musk is mainly used in the base notes of certain perfumes. Today, it's synthetic.

Amber is sometimes listed as a perfume ingredient, but it isn't the golden fossilized resin that is sometimes used in jewelry. It's a nickname for ambergris, which is a substance that comes from sperm whales. During the whaling era, whales were slaughtered for their meat, blubber (rendered into whale oil and used for lamps), and ambergris for perfume. Today, ambergris is synthetic.

In fact, if you ever read through the various "notes" in perfume, you find a lot of things with strange names that have to be synthetic. Quest by Niel Morris has ozone notes, Coney Island from Bond No. 9 lists maragarita mix.

The original "artificial" perfume, Chanel No. 5, is still on the market. They don't keep such a thing as the perfume best-seller list but it is likely that Chanel No. 5 remained consistently popular over the past 80-some years.

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Joanna McLaughlin writes about fragrance. To read more of her stuff, go to http://www.theperfume-reporter.com . She also blogs at http://www.perfumecrazy.blogspot.com . She has very eclectic tastes in perfume and her favorite scent today is Badgley Mischka.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by Christian Moretti from France 2 years 78 days ago.
Hello, apparently here we have, one more time, a person that speaks about topics that she does not know. What a pitty!... I understand that in USA most of the people are addicted to synthetics and that you are almost all brain washed with drivels, but aren't you ashammed to display your ignorance to the world??? For your information, I am a French professional perfumer and I can teach you 3 things:
 
1) To harvest musk, the animal is NOT killed as the harvest method is a curretage of the EXTERNAL post sexual gland of the animal. what's more these animal are farm bred and are harvested many times in their life.
 
2) The Amber gris is a substance located in the stomach of the sperm whale and its formation is due to an inflammation of the stomach due to cuts made by squid beaks. The substance is vomited or defecated by the animal and the harvest happen on the sea or most commonly at beaches. The rarity of the product makes its very elevated price.
 
3) Finally, the synthetic molecules are very, very far to the real one in their olfaction, only rookies do not make difference.
» left by joannlequang from texas 2 years 78 days ago.
Thank you so much. I wrote this article very long ago and at the time, I had "learned" these things through research rather than exposure to real perfumers. I was initially interested in perfume, read about it online, and started to contribute. Since then, I have learned a lot and would not write this today.
 
I thank you for your comments. You are right. There is much that I have written in the past that I would "undo" if I could. I am surprised you could even find this article--I had rather forgotten about these and am surprised they are still available.
 
I am a bit curious though, in that I had read that in olden times--not in our era--that animals were indeed killed for musk. Is that not the case? I realize today this is not the case, but what did they do in the 1800s? I really am asking sincerely, I do not know.
 
At any rate, you are quite right in your critique, but I think you are one of only about eight people on earth to read that article!
 
I would love to know what perfumes you are working on and what you think the most important things to know about perfume are.
 
I am still a great lover of perfume, just more knowledgeable in 2009 (nearly 2010) than I was back in the summer of 2007.
 
In fact, right now I am wearing Green Tea by Bulgari. What do you think of that scent?
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