Scent Trek

In many of my earlier posts I have already mentioned the magic machine that captures a trail of scent and analyses it.

Perfumers are using them mostly to create natural identical perfumes, the machine is capable of analyzing the faintest hint of aromatic molecules in a given space. Before I give you Givaudan's description of their Scent Trek, I want to share with you the story of perfumer Alain Astori on how this technical evolution helped him in one of his creation.

Astori was working on a flanker of Hugo Boss that was "briefed" to be inspired by NYC. He decided to literally put a sample of New York into his creation. With his team, they went to a hill nearby and collected a sample of the air of the city. Later, while analyzing the results, they have found that it contained quite a few variants of aldehyde, which he later added to his composition. They have won the brief due to their creativity and indirectly to the Headspace technique too.

(I miss Astori. The morning before our meeting, I have decided to finally open up the sample of Aromatics Elixir that was laying around in my room for quite a long time. Later, towards the end of our meeting, I asked him which perfume he wish he had created. He said that Aromatics Elixir from Clinique is such a well balanced chypré, that he really wish he had made it. )

Anyways, get a more of a less personal introduction of the Headspace techinque from answers.com:

Givaudan Roure developed its revolutionary technology Scent Trek in 1996, earning the Fragrance Foundation's first Fifi Innovation Technology of the Year Award. Scent Trek expanded the capabilities of the older Headspace technology by allowing perfume scientists to gather scents from plants and flowers outside the laboratory. The new technology was a boon for perfumers and ecologists alike.

A much wider variety of scents was now available, as scientists could now extract scent from plants that could not be grown in a laboratory. Scent Trek extracted the essence of a plant without killing it, allowing for the capture of endangered rain forest scents. Scent Trek could also reproduce non-plant-based scents and undetected compounds of scents, called "notes," to add complexity to perfumes. For example, when Givaudan created the Michael Jordan cologne Bijan, it used Scent Trek to sample notes from Jordan's favorite golf course, a leather baseball glove, and a Costa Rican beach.