Introduction to Aroma Chemicals Kits

Aroma-chemicals Blending Kit by Pell Wall

I've been asked a few times whether I have perfumery materials, especially the synthetics, available in small amounts for amateur perfumers and indeed for perfume collectors who want to learn more about what makes up the notes in their favourite perfumes.  I'm often asked what I would recommend for people who have already explored the widely available natural materials and now want to make a foray into synthetics, but struggle with the huge range and difficulties of availability.

In response to these I posted some time ago suggesting which materials I believed would be best to start with and what other equipment you need.

I've now put together a kit of 56 materials that newcomers to synthetics can use to educate themselves about the available options and explore the wonderful range of scent effects that can be achieved with them, which is available through the web-shop where you can also explore the detailed scent descriptions and other information on some 400 or so different aromatic materials used in perfumery that are for sale.

Aroma-chemicals Discovery Kit by Pell Wall

I'm making the materials available in two sets Discovery and Blending. Both feature the same selection of 56 materials (listed at the end of this post).

The Discovery Kit is intended to enable a wide range of materials to be explored at a reasonable cost and comes in 5ml bottles. This set is ideal if you want to get a better idea of what is in the fragrances you collect or if you are a beginning perfumer, wondering whether or not to add synthetics to your palette.  Most materials are supplied pure but some, either for ease of handling or because they are very powerful, are diluted as specified in the list.

The Blending Kit is a bit more expensive, suited to perfumers who already know they want to work with synthetics as well as naturals but may not be sure what to buy or able to afford large amounts of everything they would like to use.  It provides enough of each material to enable full exploration of its potential in blending so that you can discover how they interact with each-other and with your existing naturals.  Each of the 56 materials comes in a protective cobalt blue 30ml bottle and several more are also presented pure or at a higher concentration than in the Discovery Set.  The bottles come with a plain cap for shipping but bulb-pipettes can be supplied to go with them on request.

These are materials that I use myself and that are widely used in commercial perfumery at the same grade that professional perfumers use.

Ingredients in the kits:

Aldehyde C10 - Decanal 10%
Aldehyde C12 MNA 10% (1%)
Allyl amyl glycoate
Ambrettolide (10%)
Ambrofix 10%

Aroma Chemicals Blending Kit by Pell Wall

Aurantiol (10%)
Benzyl Salicylate
Calone liquid
Castoreum (synthetic) 1%
Cedramber
Cinnamic alcohol 50%
Citral
Citronellol
Civet (synthetic) 0.1%
Cyclamen Aldehyde (10%)
Dimetol
Dihydromyrcenol
Ebanol
Ethyl linalool
Ethyl Maltol @1%
Ethyl Vanillin @10%
Ethylene Brassylate
Exaltolide 50%
Floralozone (10%)
Florhydral

Fructalate
Geraniol
Geranyl Acetate
Hedione
Helional
cis-3-Hexenol (10%)
Indole 10%
Ionone beta
Iso e super
Kephalis
Linalool
Linalyl Acetate
Lyral

Aroma-chemicals Discovery Kit by Pell Wall
in it’s Really Useful Box

Melonal
Methyl anthranylate 50% (10%)
Nectarate
Norlimbanol 50% (10%)
Orange Terpenes (d-limonene)
Orange Power 2%
Oranger Crystals 10%
Phenyl Ethyl Alcohol
Rose Givco 217
Rose Oxide 1%
Romandolide
Saffraleine
SantalIFF
Undecavertol
Vanillin 10%
Velvione (10%)
Veramoss / Evernyl 10%
Vertofix 

All materials are full strength unless a percentage is given and the percentages in brackets apply only to the Discovery Kits (smaller bottles) with the higher strength included in the Blending Kit.

Please feel free to email me at enquiry@pellwall-perfumes.com with any questions or to discuss your requirements.  I can quote on request for a Blending kit with fewer materials too.

Discovery Kit of 56 Aroma Chemicals

 

Blending Kit of 56 Aroma Chemicals

 

The 26 Ingredients

Whether you look at the labels on fragrances you buy or make fragrances yourself and hope to sell them, an understanding of what is on the label and why can be useful.

Below I'm listing a lot of materials that you may see on a label.  Don't make the mistake of assuming that because these are listed they are the things that make up the fragrance though: they are a tiny subset of the materials used in manufacturing fragrances (there are between three and four thousand materials in regular use) but just 26 of them have to be declared on the label if the product is for sale in the EU.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The following list is a useful reference, it often comes up in the context of discussion about the IFRA rules, and indeed is often laid at their door: wrongly as it has nothing to do with them at all. It is the list of items required by the EU Cosmetics Directive to be listed on the label of any fragrance that contains more than 0.001% (the threshold is 0.01% of the finished product for wash-off products such as shower gel). This regulation was incorporated into UK law as part of the 2008 Cosmetics Regulations, Schedule 4 and as such has been in force for some years.

As a result of this requirement many brands required re-formulation of fragrances in order to avoid the need to put these things on the label, particularly those with long, difficult chemical names, which seem to lead certain groups of consumers to assume something is poisonous (obviously nonsense, but the power of fear is substantial).

Many of these ingredients also have IFRA restrictions on their usage, details of which are on the IFRA rules blog post.

Anyway here is the full list of what is often referred to as 'the 26 ingredients' using the nomenclature required by the EU even though in some cases that differs from usual practice even in the chemical industry, still more the fragrance industry.

Notice that the majority of these appear in nature as components of essential oils, absolutes and other extracts from plants.  I've marked with an asterisk * those that are not known in nature -  I'm not saying they don't occur in nature, just that if they do, we have not found them yet. Also notice that no animal derived ingredients are included:

Amyl cinnamal (CAS No 122-40-7)

Benzyl alcohol (CAS No 100-51-6)

Cinnamyl alcohol (CAS No 104-54-1)

Citral (CAS No 5392-40-5)

Eugenol (CAS No 97-53-0)

Hydroxy-citronellal (CAS No 107-75-5)*

Isoeugenol (CAS No 97-54-1)

Amyl cinnamyl alcohol (CAS No 101-85-9)

Benzyl salicylate (CAS No 118-58-1)

Cinnamal (CAS No 104-55-2)

Coumarin (CAS No 91-64-5)

Geraniol (CAS No 106-24-1)

Hydroxy-methylpentylcyclohexenecarboxaldehyde (CAS No 31906-04-4)*[almost universally known as Lyral]

Anisyl alcohol (CAS No 105-13-5)

Benzyl cinnamate (CAS No 103-41-3)

Farnesol (CAS No 4602-84-0)

2-(4-tert-Butylbenzyl) propionaldehyde (CAS No 80-54-6)* [commonly known as Lillial]

Linalool (CAS No 78-70-6)

Benzyl benzoate (CAS No 120-51-4)

Citronellol (CAS No 106-22-9)

Hexylcinnam-aldehyde (CAS No 101-86-0)

d-Limonene (CAS No 5989-27-5)

Methyl heptin carbonate (CAS No 111-12-6)*

3-Methyl-4-(2,6,6-tri-methyl-2-cyclohexen-1-yl)-3-buten-2-one (CAS No 127-51-5)* [commonly known as gamma methyl ionone]

Oak moss extract (CAS No 90028-68-5)

Tree moss extract (CAS No 90028-67-4)

Books about Perfumes and Perfumery

There are quite a lot of books about on the subject of perfumes, perfumery and the making of perfumes and many of them are not all that helpful, so I’ve tried to gather together here some recommendations for books I’ve found to be particularly helpful or interesting.

Some books from the Pell Wall Perfumes bookshelf

First of all if you have not read  Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: the story of a murder you really should: besides offering a wonderful insight into the early days of perfume making it’s a fantastic (in both senses of the word) story of murder and obsession that keeps you turning the pages long after you should have gone to sleep.

While we’re on the early days of perfume, The Art of Perfumery by G.W. Septimus Piesse, first published in 1857 is well worth reading if you are interested in how perfumes were made in the 19th century: the book covers production methods and gives formulae as well as anecdotes and trenchant opinions that together make for a fun read: elements of it are still useful to the modern perfumer too.

One hundred years on and we get Steffen Arctander writing Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin - his work is unmatched and still qualifies as the standard work on the odour of raw materials throughout the industry.  I also have his Perfume and Flavor Chemicals Volumes 1&2 in CD form and although the range of synthetics in use has increased enormously since this was published in the 1960s it still provides a very useful insight into the majority of synthetic ingredients in use in modern perfumery.

Of similar vintage, but very different form is W. A. Poucher’s Perfumes, Cosmetics and Soaps, with special reference to Synthetics Volumes 1&2.  I have the 6th Edition from 1959, which is excellent but I’m told by people who have more recent editions that they are not nearly as good.  My copies are stuffed full of fascinating information, formulae for accords, descriptions of materials and scent notes and much more besides.  Excellent stuff.

If you are planning on learning to make fragrances of your own then a great starting place is Tony Curtis and David G Williams’ An Introduction to Perfumery which gives you much the same range of information as Poucher, but slightly better structured and vastly more up to date.  In addition you get a well structured learning plan and a series of exercises to build your skills.

For an overview of the reality of fragrance creation and the way fragrance companies work, as well as a dip into the cultural history of fragrances and a wealth of information more obviously associated with the title I can recommend The Chemistry of Fragrances: from Perfumer to Consumer, edited by Charles S Sell.  This volume includes essays by a number of other authors so you get a few different perspectives, but Charles’s own work is a real highlight as he’s such a readable author even if, like me, you don’t have a degree in organic chemistry.

If you are looking for something to help you understand how one fragrance is related to another then you could do worse than to invest in Michael Edwards' Fragrances of the World 2012 which catalogues all the great fragrances of the world according to type.

I could doubtless go on, but for the moment at least I’m going to stop there and publish this post.  Please feel free to add your own comment on these books or to make other recommendations of your own.

Choosing and classifying fragrances

For those interested in wearing and using fragrances, rather than making them, and curious to know more about the industry and how to get the best out of it I would recommend Michael Edwards’ ‘Top 100 Perfume Questions' as a great place to start.

Michael himself is charming as well as highly knowledgeable about all things fragrance.

The Perfume Wheel, designed by Michael Edwards