In this “How to” article we will see the technique to “make” a perfume and if discontinued perfumes can be reproduced on the base of their formulas, that is make “perfume replicas”.

Which is the technique behind a perfume?

There are hundreds of ingredients in a perfume but basically they can be grouped in four groups:

1. Primary scents: It is the main ingredient and the one that identifies the perfume. For example “lavender”. Lavender and rose can be mixed together for a more general “flowers” scent. Normally there’s no more than a few primary scents.
2. Modifiers: They are added to the primary scent to modify it in some ways. For example, adding the modifier fruit ester to a floral primary, fruit flowers is obtained.
3. Blenders: They help mixing the different ingredients of the perfume within each other.
4. Fixatives: The “enforce” and support the primary scent. They’re usually resins or amber bases.

Sometimes to perfumes are added anti-oxidants to increase the shelf-life of the perfumes and colorants for marketing purposes.

Re-create discontinued perfumes is not an easy task, mainly because of the machinery involved in the process. An unknown sample can be identified with a machine called “gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS)”. It is normally used for drug detection, explosive investigation, environmental analysis and so on. It is used by forensic and at airports for security reasons. It is known, though, that cosmetic firms use it to analyze the competition’s fragrances. It is relatively simple to know the formula of a perfume with GC-MS, but obviously cannot be done by anyone. Sometimes it’s harder due to the complexity of the chemical compounds but anyone trained to use GC-MS can come up with the formula in days.

As you can see it’s not really simple but indeed it is possible. If by any chance you know somebody with access to a GC-MS, let us know!