Read all the articles in Valentine’s Special
THE essence of a sports ground or the scent of a yacht may not sound like something you would want to dab on your wrists, but according to perfumers at Procter & Gamble, scents like this are the future of fragrance.
They recently captured the essence of in London, the “home of cricket”. Using a technology called headspace analysis they captured the odours of freshly cut grass, cricket bats, laundered cricket kit and the players’ changing room (minus the players), and are using these as the starting point for a fragrance.
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Lord’s is just one source of inspiration that perfumers are turning to in the hope of creating the next Chanel No 5. “Perfumers need inspiration, and this can come from people that surround them, places they’ve visited, or things that they love in the world,” says Will Andrews of P&G.
Headspace analysis uses a suction cup to extract odour molecules from the air and trap them in a chamber filled with polymer beads. The molecules are then identified using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and the main ones put together to recreate the scent. For example, the smell of coffee typically consists of around 800 odour molecules, but a good replica can be made using just 15 of them.
The P&G team is now using the cricketing odours to create a perfume. In a separate project, they are also trying to capture the essence of British yachtsman Alex Thomson’s racing yacht.
If these seem like unusual smells to make into fragrances, the scents of the future could get even stranger. “Ingredients in the future will be about the smells that bring comfort for people coupled with some ingredients that are interesting, so people go ‘Ooh, what’s that?'” says Andrews. For example, he suggests that the smell of warm electronics might resonate with people who have grown up playing computer games.
