Science of Scent & Shout Out to Maine

Courtesy of The GoatA few weeks ago I attended the 3rd lecture in a series called The Science of Scent at the Royal Institution of Great Britain hosted by Will Andrews from Proctor & Gamble.  Putting my feelings about synthetic fragrance and P&G aside, I was really interested to look at scent from a scientific perspective as well as olfaction and the process that goes into making a scent for commercial purposes.  Of the many interesting things I learned is the strong connection between scents and our memory.  A lot of the way we individually evaluate a scent is largely based on associations with a particular scent (especially those from our childhood).  For example, some play doh was passed around and even though the rubbery smell is totally bizarre I couldn’t help but feel happy remembering playing with it as a kid. 

Our noses were tested as different scents were passed around on smell sticks.  The first one I instantly recognised as grass.  I believe it was the Gap that used to have a fragrance that smelled like grass and I loved it because it reminds me of my parent’s house.  (My father is compulsive when it comes to manicuring the lawn.)  I can picture him driving around the John Deere ride-on lawnmower for hours.  The next smell strip that came around I also recognised.  It had a strong element of pine and other woody fragrances.  I couldn’t quite determine all of them.  We were told that this particular scent was the inspiration for Hugo Boss’ best selling fragrance Hugo.  You can imagine my surprise when Will pulled up a map of Mt Desert Island, Maine and asked the audience if any of us had ever been there.  “Er, I’m from there!” I blurted out.  (For those who do know me, this isn’t entirely accurate, but what’s 100 miles between friends compared to the ocean that separates Old Blighty from Maine.)  So there you have it, Hugo by Boss was inspired by the wilderness of Acadia National Park!

Other interesting facts include that it can take around 25 years for perfumers to learn around 2,500 scents that they will work with (out of about 5,000 available).  Senior perfumer Jose Maria Velazquez at P&G Prestige explained the he works with about 1,000 synthetic and 500 natural scents.  I also had the pleasure of hearing from another perfumer who explained how he created a fragrance called Kodo which was inspired by him attending a Japanese tea ceremony in Paris.  One by one we smelled the key scents that he used- incense, orris, benzoin, and orange flower to understand how he arrived at the finished product.  Fragrances can take anywhere from 2-4 to get on shelves from the moment of inspiration to the finished product.  Hopefully you won’t have to wait that long for Kodo, it smells delicious.