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Synthetic ingredients are the real key to the perfect perfume

An employee at Givaudan mixes ingredients into scents at a perfume lab in New York last month. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Its scent is reminiscent of a mixture of a just-picked apple and a rose in its prime. But to Takasago International Corp, which manufactures this synthetic material, it smells even sweeter.

Last year, the chemical, whose trade name is Thesaron, became an essential ingredient in a new perfume, Silver Shadow Altitude, released by Davidoff.

Playing a role in one of the most successful international fragrance trade names -- Davidoff has had a scent on the top five perfume best-seller list for the last 20 years -- means that molecule is highly profitable for Takasago.

Thesaron is a perfume industry version of pharmaceuticals like Lipitor, the commercial name of the active ingredient developed by Pfizer that lowers blood cholesterol.

Drug companies have long made a lot of money by patenting new molecules.

Similarly, the scent makers -- Symrise of Holzminden, Germany; Givaudan of Geneva; International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) of New York; and Takasago of Tokyo -- spend billions on research to find new smell molecules, patent them and sell them.

The innovative scents of these "captives," as the patented molecules are known, are crucial to enticing consumers to buy the 600 or so new perfumes introduced every year and appealing to buyers of other fragrant products like soaps and air fresheners.

Captives have other virtues as well. Jean Jacques, Takasago perfumer, put Thesaron in Altitude, for example, because it solved some problems: Thesaron has the fruity/rosy note of a very expensive class of molecules called rose ketones, but it costs far less. It can also be used in unlimited amounts, while rose ketones are restricted because they set off allergic reactions at high doses.

Ned Polan, a vice president for fragrance ingredient research at IFF, pointed out another quality of captives: they allow perfumers to recreate smells found in nature and create new, wholly unknown ones.

"There are no new colors to see and very few new sounds, but we are actually creating new, unique smells no one has ever smelled before," Polan said.

It is, quite literally, as if a paint company could make a new shade of blue.

Givaudan produces natural and synthetic perfumery raw materials and employs the perfumers who use these materials to make fragrances. In 2006 Givaudan's sales were 2.9 billion Swiss francs (US$2.64 billion), and the double-digit sales growth of its fine fragrances division -- which that year made perfumes for Yves Saint Laurent, Burberry, Tom Ford and Hugo Boss -- was powered by Givaudan's captives.

Givaudan began creating molecules in 1902.

"Our new molecule platform drives our innovation and takes up a most significant part of our R&D budget," said Kate Greene, vice president for marketing at Givaudan. "We have over 50 researchers dedicated to new captives."

As with other scent makers, Givaudan does not break out the share of its research devoted to creating captives, but the company's total research budget last year was 371 million Swiss francs.

Greene said Givaudan had become the leading producer of captives; its perfumers put the captive Amber Ketal in Aqua di Gio from Armani and Polo Blue from Ralph Lauren.

Each year, Givaudan's scientists develop over 2,000 new molecules.

After scent evaluation, synthesis studies and toxicity testing, "only three or four per year are selected for launch," Greene said.

But they are crucial.

Captives "provide newness to our perfumers' palettes," she said, "which in turn brings innovation to our clients' brands."

Takasago's captive Hindanol is in the scent it makes for Johnson & Johnson's self-tanning product Holiday Skin. It smells of sandalwood, but it can do what no natural sandalwood can.

Where the natural is heavy and used as a perfume's "base note" -- what the consumer only smells after the lighter molecules have diffused -- Hindanol is highly diffusive and thus can be used as a "top note," allowing the user to smell sandalwood where she would not have before.

"Captives give us performance and functional attributes in different applications like soap or detergents where you might need specific attributes," said Michael Popplewell, vice president for corporate research at IFF.

One example is a molecule that stays firmly on fabric, perfect for scenting laundry detergents.

Captives also bolster environmental conservation. A captive synthetic jasmine can smell stronger than its natural counterpart, so perfumers can use fewer chemicals to get the same power, which reduces both the company's costs and the amount of water needed to wash it away.

India's sandalwood forests have been so decimated, further harvesting has been banned. Also, captives do not require polluting fertilizers or cause farmers to deplete the soil.
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