Functional Perfumery

Most of the companies creating fragrances for alcoholic perfumes have usually to deal with functional perfumery as well. The main perfumed household products are shampoos, creams, candles, washing powders, liquid soaps, detergents and air refreshers.

The perfume creation for these products is quite different from fine fragrances. Starting with the average price of one kg of perfume concentrate for functional purposes, it is usually never more than 5-6 EUR. Also, the dosage is typically smaller, e.g. for shampoos and creams on average maximum 1%, in the case of candles, it goes up to 8%.

There are specific obstacles to overcome while perfuming functional products, depending on the carrier base we use. For instance, while making a candle, you have to avoid using a whole range of raw materials that are not in favor of burning, patchouli -among others - is known to disturb the homogeneous burning process.

On the other hand, most of the citruses and very light -hence too volatile - raw materials could already evaporate when mixing the hot wax with the concentrated perfume. Perfumers have to take specific classes of functional perfumery to be able create sophisticated and easily adaptable fragrances for household products.

However, the funniest moments of any perfumer's training is actually the preparation of testing air refreshers. To test their performance, we usually create some disagreeable scents typical of any household. The main players are rotten fish, garbage, used cooking oil, and wet dog, but sometimes we would just open an old sample of civet absolute in the testing room for the same purpose.

If an air refresher is able to neutralize those scents, it is ready to be launched!