April Long in Scientific American:
On the 11th floor of a nondescript office building on 57th street in Manhattan, pipette-wielding technicians in white lab coats hunch over glass vials and digital scales, carefully concocting perfumes. This is the Experimental Lab at Givaudan, one of the world’s largest fragrance manufacturers, and the work these technicians are doing is as meticulous as that of engineers layering silicon on a microchip. Their job is to produce trial batches of perfumers’ scent formulas—typically as many as 250 a day—which will be evaluated, tweaked and made again until one version is finalized. The walls are lined with thousands of jars and containers, each holding a unique aromatic substance—and in the room beyond sit another 50,000 trial vials, stacked on shelves that seem to recede into infinity.
“You come in, and it just looks scary,” says Givaudan vice president perfumer Stephen Nilsen. “But each bottle is a secret, a mystery. There’s a story in each one.” For thousands of years perfume ingredients were simply distilled from flowers or extracted from plants. Then, in 1868, the first organic scent molecules were synthesized, opening a panorama of new olfactory possibilities. The market may celebrate a perfumer’s artistry, but innovation in the luxury-fragrance industry is ultimately driven by the chemists whose experiments bring new aroma molecules into existence.
More here.
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