Cleaning - ‘Super’ Molecules
As Octavian mentioned in his last comment, cleaning a formula must be an interesting process in finishing a fragrance. I suppose this is not something any perfumer can do. For a multi million dollar project, you got to bring in the expert of experts to perform the operation.
I find beauty in a certain kind of “cleaning.” I used to enjoy cleaning HTMLs after building web pages with a software. Web design softwares usually leave useless “frills” in the html or scripts. I believe the most beautiful form of html is written with a minimum number of tags and in a single line without any indents or line breaks. There are scripts that won’t work without line breaks, and sometimes I chose not to use a script just to make a single-line html.
There’s another cleaning job related to perfumery. It is cleaning raw materials, more specifically, cleaning a natural material and cleaning a molecule. I’m not sure if there’s something close to mathematical beauty in cleaning a natural material, but there must be something close to it in cleaning a molecule.
A well known Firmenich molecule Hedione has a sister called Hedione Super. The way I understand is that the frills in the molecular shape of Hedione which have not much to do with the smell has been removed in the “Super” version.
I’m sure many of you have heard of Galaxolide, one of the most known molecules by IFF used in perfumes (I’d say most perfumes today), detergents, and many other household products. Galaxolide seems to have frills. Givaudan had wanted a slimmer, cleaner version of Galaxolide. There had been some discussions between the two rivals, but anyway, in the end Givaudan took the matter in their own hands. They successfully, well, not exactly… slimmed down the original molecule and obtained the patent for the new version. However, there was a problem - this new molecule, quite contrary to the original, cost too much to manufacture, and Givaudan had to give up the idea of using it for fragrances and other related products.
… what a shame. I will be willing to pay a few hundred bucks for a small bottle of clean and lean “Galaxolide Supermodel”… and I hope there will be a market in the future for superb molecules that are almost too expensive to produce.
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The Hedione HC or high cis is a isomer of Hedione. The comercial available Hedione is a mixture of isomers. Trying to “clean” or to see the exactly benefit by each isomer…Firmenich “saw” that one of the isomers had a much more interesting smell and more powerful. The Hedione HC is a “version” of hedion enriched in that isomer.
The same history happened with IsoESuper. One of the isomers, in very low concentration gave the “special” profile of the commercial raw material. The synthesis of that was quite difficult on an industrial scale but…. Givaudan found a similar one that now is… Georgywood.
for the “cleaning” of a raw material I have 2 other good examples.
- at Chanel (at least in old days of Henri Robert) they used to do a faboulous “haute couture” treatement to the jasmin put in NO5 parfum. The absolute was fractioned to have a terpene free jasmin absolute!
a similar fractioning process is done for the patchouli for Coco Mademoiselle to obtain a lighter one… and the supplier if I’m not wrong is Charabot.
Comment by Octavian — June 17, 2007 #
The molecules… too expensive to produce on a large scale can be a next “niche” - really expensive fragrance, simple and innovative, and too hard to copy or imposible because raw materials are unavailable or “tailor made”.
The “tailor made” molecules/bases are not new in the business. Even in the 30’s-50’s Givaudan did special quality of ionones for some of the clients.
I prefer to buy an expensiv niche with novel molecules than to hear… the bla-bla of marketing, smell almost copies and pay a lot…
sometime there is a big gap between the very nice story and the… extra ordinary fragrance. :(((
Comment by Octavian — June 17, 2007 #
I’m sure there’s a market for it, if you advertised it right
I agree about the frills that a lot of HTML editors add to HTML, but I am quite partial to line breaks and indents. How do you read the one-liner?! 8B
Comment by kuri — July 12, 2007 #
I’m one of those people who is unable to smell galaxolide at all– i can wave a bottle of it under my nose, and it has no smell, meanwhile my friends can all smell it. I wonder if I would be able to smell the galaxolide molecule if it were in a different structure?
Comment by Ted — July 21, 2007 #