May I compare perfume to music？
Due to the highly volatile nature of the chemical molecules of the top tone components, people can smell the "sharp", "rushing", "unstoppable" taste from the top, like the members of the citrus family (bergamot, lemon, neroli, etc.), all have this characteristic. The middle notes is more like a tenor classical guitar, less catchy than a violin, but more expressive than a bass. and in the middleand in the middle. It acts as a link between the middle and the base notes. The base notes of a perfume, like the bass, is hard to find at first, covered by the top and the middle, and it needs to be smelled (listened to) carefully. But the role of the base notes is wonderful. Such as Ambroxide can improve the strength of the wooden tone.
Flavoring basis
Now that you're familiar with the concept of front, middle and back notes, let's take a look at what fragrances are. Fragrance is used to describe the overall style direction of a bottle of perfume, just like the style you dress. Briefly, there are citrus, flora, woody, ambery, fougère, and chypre. The most famous are citrus and floral notes. Citrus fragrances now dominate the market, such as the well-known Hermes Garden collection by Jeau-Claude Ellena, CK One, which was created in 1994 but is still popular today, and Dior's first men's perfume sauvage in 1966. These are not mutually exclusive. You can have a citrus and wood tone as the same time, like the Hermes Garden, or Armani pour Homme.
Flavoring materials and extraction methods
What is the composition of the fragrance? What are the ingredients we are talking about? It is common to see the information sheet at the perfume counter with a list of various plants, such as roses, freesia, lavender, etc. How do you get the smell of these plants into your perfume? First of all, there are two kinds of flavoring materials. One is natural, like the plants mentioned just now, and the other is synthetic. Both of these materials are very important. Natural flavoring materials involve not only flowers, but also plant fruits (orange), plant leaves (Fulmedium), plant roots (ginger), moss, bark, oriental spices, etc.
The extraction methods are selected according to the characteristics of different raw materials. The most common citrus fruit is cold expression, in which a large number of oranges are broken and filtered at low temperature to produce orange oil. This process does not require organic solvents, so the fresh feeling of the plant can be kept to a large extent.
The second method is distillation, pouring a large amount of raw materials into a large tank and adding water and boil, so that the odor molecules dissolve into the solvent, and then collect the essential oil by condensation. The downside is that delicate plants don't have the means to extract essential oils this way.
The third method is quite old, called enfleurage. Those who have seen the movie Perfume should be familiar with it. It is to attach plants to oils that can absorb fragrance molecules, and finally boil the high-quality oil and extract it with essential oil.
After the above steps, you can get a preliminary liquid form of essential oil. And then through the different characteristics of each raw material for different dilution, you can finally get the primary raw material.
These are natural ingredients, let's talk about artificial flavoring ingredients. Artificial raw materials are finished products made by chemical synthesis, which have their own advantages. In the eyes of the earliest perfumers, especially before the 19th century, everyone was keen on perfumes made with natural ingredients. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the invention of artificial perfuming ingredients brought revolutionary changes to the whole era. The successively excellent works were produced, such as Dior Eau Sauvage mentioned before. It was the first perfume in history to use a large amount of synthetic fragrances, and sold surprisingly well. The first advantage of artificial flavoring materials is that some natural materials can not be made into essential oil, so they can only be replaced by artificial, such as strawberry. Another advantage is the ability to create unique smells, such as calone, created by Pfizer in 1951, which has a unique oceanic smell (fresh, slightly smelly) and is now used in a wide range of ocean-concept perfumes. David's Cool Water is probably the most famous. The third advantage is that it can save costs and replace expensive natural materials.