Olfactory Appreciation/Interpretation/Expectation ** Was: Ylang Ylang Iss

[Guest guest]

, Butch Owen <butchbsi@s...> wrote:

> For those who might be getting their knickers in a knot about me

selling> Mysore Sandalwood .. lemme say that Martin and other ultra

idealistic > Greens are showing you but a small part of the Big

Picture .. same goes> for Rosewood. Any who think they can/should

believe all they read or> are looking for purpose in their lives will

disregard any information> contrary to the positions shown by those

who have dedicated themselves> to so-called worthy conservation issues.

 

Hi Butch...

 

A few comments ;-)

 

That's a pretty generalized, sweeping statement, Butch. I can get

shocked by the thought that a multi-national corporation is going to

make another frivolous body care item to fatten its bottom line, while

at the same time taxing a resource that has been reported by many to

be endangered.

 

Sometimes I'm more upset that yet another product is adding to the

body burden and ecological burden soup. Businesses need to make money,

yes, but they're going hogwild with all these products, and do we

really need them? Don't answer, lol.

 

At the same time, I have never challenged any supplier, including you,

for selling sandalwood or rosewood. I try to keep a balanced view, and

not infringe on the personal rights, and business practices of small

suppliers. It's all in the intent and numbers, at least to me, and

many radical types attack me for the moderate stance. You just can't

win with some people.

 

There are more radical types, i will give you that, and they go after

the little guy, saying they're contributing to the ecological damage.

I'd rather stop huge corporations from gobbling up the resources than

stop Susie in WI from enjoying some sandalwood from you, and using it

to create something nice for her family or friends, or customers. I

guess I harken back to when small businesses were king.

 

> Folks who are looking for a cause need to look around .. there are many

> out and about that are worthwhile .. and not so controversial.

 

I think many on this list are involved in other causes, but since

they're not relevant to this list's subject matter, they don't write

about them. Me, for one. I do a lot of volunteer work locally, but it

isn't relevant here, so I don't speak about it here. Nor do I talk

about sandalwood or endangered plants when helping with wildlife

rescue efforts here, or the homeless, or water quality, etc., etc.

Right place, right time, is my motto.

 

 

> Folks like me risk the wrath of those compassionate liberal folks.

 

Well, if they're compassionate, I'm sure they won't attack you, that's

contradictory ;-)

 

> Back to Olfactory appreciation. If we all appreciated the same odors or

> appearances, etc., then there would be a shortage of some oils ..

 

And some think sandalwood smells like the person is " unwashed " --

that'll cut down on the demand in some sectors of the population, lol.

 

> > Any ideas?

>

> Yep .. don't buy Ylang Ylang again. ;-)

 

See, I disagree, Butch -- *if* Josh wants to use it in perfumery, not

AT, he should try playing with it, diluted. If he wants to just use it

for AT, yeah, ditch it, he'll never get beyond his prejudice. If he

wants to use tiny, tiny amounts in perfumery, he will be rewarded.

 

> Who .. like I said, is feeling a bit ornery today .. so if I can

find the time I will take on my buddy, Martin, over the Sandalwood and

> Rosewood issues .. and perhaps a few other issues too. ;-)

 

Hey, why leave Tony out of the upcoming donnybrook, lol? Everybody's

passionate, in their own way, and differing sides, like the Dems and

the 'publicans, all tend to get upset at the other side's information

and stance. I'll admit I'm trying to sort it all out now, there is so

much conflicting information, and I'm not expert. Therefore, the only

stance I take is to discourage large corporations from using

endangered species, and, in the bigger picture, stop bombarding us,

our waterways and watertables with all the wash-off from these

fragranced products. Enough is enough. Here's a great article that

gives a perspective that we fragrance users hardly ever think of, and

it really highlights the big corporation fragrance issues I'm addressing:

 

Green in Perfume

How to build a better rose

by Chandler Burr

(posted with Plenty permission)

 

When you next pick up a bottle of fragrance, give a second's thought

to the environmental impact of the Gucci, Thierry Mugler, or Dior

you're buying. Perfumes are believed to imitate nature—so what are the

effects of perfume manufacturing on our natural world?

 

Perfumes are made of scent molecules—single molecules or collections

of molecules, synthesized by chemists in labs or synthesized by nature

in trees, grasses, and flowers. The lovely natural rose and orange

blossom essences in your bottle of Jo Malone are collections of

hundreds of molecules, only some of which actually come from the

flowers. Like virtually all perfumes on the market, Jo also contains

cis-3-hexanol, galaxolide, and dihydromyrcenol—molecules made in

perfume labs.

 

Synthetic molecules are by no means bad; they are the heart of modern

perfumery. The key to Chanel No. 5, for example, is a molecule called

aldehyde, first synthesized in the 1880s. Shalimar, created in 1925,

is powered by the synthetic 3-methoxy-4-hydroxy-benzaldehyde.

 

Of course perfumes, like any other chemicals (think water, vitamin C,

aspirin), have an ecological impact, and the fragrance industry must

spend millions each year minimizing it. Synthetic or natural, it

doesn't matter—rose essence ends up in the air, water, and soil, just

like methyl dihydrojasmonate. When JLo sells eight million bottles of

Glo a year, she needs to worry about what they do to the environment

because, besides perhaps feeling a moral obligation to the planet, she

also has to comply with government standards. Likewise, Dior needs to

ensure every molecule in Eau Sauvage is eco-compatible.

 

One of the most popular perfume ingredients ever, found in some 90

percent of all fragrances, is linalool. It's a molecule found in

nature, so whenever you have lavender, bergamot, or coriander in How

to build a better rose your perfume, you've got linalool. It can also

be created by chemical synthesis as pure linalool (the first synthetic

linalool was created in the 1920s). This is called a " nature

identical " since molecularly, synthetic and natural linalool

are—surprise—absolutely the same.

 

Timbuktu, one of an exquisite collection of scents from the French

house L'Artisan Parfumeur, uses linalool. This is a mesmerizing

perfume; wearing Timbuktu is like waking late at night from a dream in

a dark, ancient desert hotel made of wood that has been blackened with

the smoke of incense and the smell of robed visitors, coming and going

over the centuries. It is the smell of a character from Kipling.

There's linalool in Carolina Herrera's new 212 Sexy, which evokes silk

and the promising, powdery smell that hits you when you open new,

expensive cosmetics.

 

And like every other ingredient, linalool's eco-effects were

stringently evaluated. How? There are four steps.

 

STEP ONE:

The majority of perfume ingredients are made by the perfume chemists

at the Big Eight—eight international conglomerates: IFF (the United

States), Quest (United Kingdom) Firmenich and Givaudan (both

Switzerland), Symrise (Germany), Takasago (Japan),

Mane and Robertet (both France). They make everything from aubepine, a

raw material used in perfume, priced at about $1.75 per pound, to

Basil Absolute, priced at more than $460 per pound. And a few

fancypants boutiques, such as the French houses LMR (Laboratoire

Monique Rémy) and Biolandes, make fabulous products like Iris

Naturelle, priced at nearly $4300 per pound. But these outfits do much

more than make raw materials and scent molecules. The carefully hidden

secret of the perfume world is that Yves Saint Laurent, Estée Lauder,

and Versace don't make their perfumes. The Big Eight's perfumers do.

An army of chemists create the ingredients, and a separate army of

perfumers employed by these same companies make the perfumes.

 

Say Miuccia Prada decides she wants a perfume. She never actually lays

a finger on a geranium extract. She (or more likely her marketing

department) writes up a " perfume brief, " a concept of the fragrance

she has in mind. The brief usually goes something like, " I want

the smell of bitter apples frozen in a Chinese snow " or " I want the

scent of a young girl swimming in a dark Mediterranean sea—and it

should sell a million bottles the first year. " Prada's marketing team

takes the brief to Symrise and asks the company's legendary perfumer

Maurice Roucel to create the perfume. Roucel puts the molecules that

the Symrise chemists have made or gotten from other suppliers into the

perfume he crafts for Prada, and the Prada house then names and

markets the finished product. That's how the business works.

 

Where does the environment come in? Let's say Symrise, the company

doing some of the most interesting work with fragrances these days,

wants to produce and sell linalool as a perfume ingredient. A certain

amount of this linalool is going to get washed from the bodies of the

lovely young women who mist themselves with Gucci every morning,

making its way down the drains of Manhattan's showers and into the

Hudson River. So Symrise needs to conduct tests to determine how much

linalool is going to build up in the environment. First, the Symrise

chemists look at U.S., European, and Japanese government regulations

on required safety data. In the United States, you have to supply

certain information according to what are called " thresholds of

production, " which simply means that the more you make of the stuff

(are you making one ton a year or 1,000 tons?) the stricter the

regulations get. Symrise also has to test what the linalool is going

to do to the ecology of the Hudson. The calculation is hazard +

exposure = risk. The hazard is the toxicity to plants and animals; the

exposure is

calculated based on the amount of chemical you put into the next

Chanel product. Symrise, like most manufacturers, tests its chosen

chemical on fish, shrimp, or algae; tracks the levels of linalool in

sediment; and measures its biodegradation. If linalool passes these

tests, it can proceed to step two.

 

STEP TWO:

When Symrise produces linalool and puts it on the market, the Research

Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM) evaluates it. RIFM is the

industry's international safety and ecology arm, responsible for

looking at the 2,600 materials currently on the market. The RIFM is

financially supported by its members—basically everyone in the

supplier- and-user chain, from Estée Lauder to Procter & Gamble (in

its detergents, soaps, and shampoos, Procter & Gamble uses many times

more fragrance than even JLo could hope to sell).

 

This is where linalool gets much tougher testing, since the RIFM goes

well beyond Symrise in both rigor and breadth. RIFM's more extensive

environmental testing results are submitted to independent experts for

review. For example, RIFM does environmental studies, or

what's called a Ready (the technical term for " fast " ) Bio-Degradation

Test. Studies have found that linalool biodegrades pretty quickly; it

doesn't hang around in the environment for too long before breaking

down into something less harmful.

 

Copies of the evaluations are then given to all members and published

in peer-reviewed journals, and here a limitation could be imposed on

linalool's use. " Based on this material's potential to cause skin

sensitization, " its expert panel might say, " it should be limited to

0.1 percent of the final product. " Then this recommendation is

codified as an industry standard by the International Fragrance

Association (IFRA). Toxicity standards for the target species of

interest— Homo sapiensin this case—usually cap out before

environmental standards do. Toxicity testing is the stricter of the

two and is generally the first to signal problems with a substance.

 

STEP THREE:

If Parfums Thierry Mugler wants a new fragrance, it goes to Symrise

and describes the scent it wants. A Symrise perfumer uses linalool,

combined with other ingredients to create a scent, it is called a

compound. The compound goes through yet another evaluation, this time

with all the ingredients together, since they may react with one

another in unforseen ways. (Top, middle, and bottom notes come from

different ingredients with different molecular weights. Benzyl

salicylates are molecularly heavier; linalool is lighter; and

limonene, from citrus oil, is superlight and so evaporates quickly,

jumping beautifully off the skin.) Symrise cross-checks the materials

with the restrictions of the IFRA and others worldwide for compliance,

then sells the compound to Mugler with the safety package completed.

 

STEP FOUR:

Mugler, or more precisely its parent company, Clarins, has the legal

responsibility to do a final evaluation, either in its own lab or by

sending the perfume to someone else's. Clarins takes the fragrance

compound it has purchased from Symrise and makes products from it. It

adds to the compound an alcohol (to make it liquid), a lubricant (to

make it flow), a wax (to add stability), polyethylene glycol, a UV

stabilizer, etc. From these, Clarins creates perfumes, sunscreens,

body lotions, shower gels, shampoos, and deodorants, all with the

signature Thierry Mugler scent.

 

Ultimately, Thierry Mugler's brilliant new masculine B-Men arrives at

the perfume counter in Saks Fifth Avenue. Created by the perfumer

Jacques Huclier, B-Men smells like a field of spices in a forest of

saplings growing under a fresh, clean, blue Indian sky—and thankfully,

it won't spoil any of them.

-----------------------------

Hope everybody's still smiling and their eyeballs aren't strained

after this long post.

 

Whew.

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