YOUR PERSONAL CARE PRODUCT
Jill B. Costa, Ph.D.
Bell Flavors and Fragrances
500 Academy Drive
Northbrook, IL 60062
1-800-323-4387
ABSTRACT
It has been said that no matter how good the technology in the bottle, when the consumer opens it, if it doesn’t smell good, look good, feel good, and rub in well, then they won’t buy it. As such, fragrances play an incredibly important role in the presentation of a cosmetic or personal care product.
Fragrances are a complex mixture of natural and synthetic materials designed to cover the malodor of a product base, make a cosmetic and personal care product smell appealing, and most importantly, reinforce the product’s benefits to the consumer. They are used in nearly every product type and category!
The overall performance of a fragrance in a product is therefore critical to its commercial success. While products are typically developed with technology that works and claims are made as to what to expect, it is common practice for product developers to approach fragrance houses for advice as well as for recommendations as to what to purchase that will enhance the overall presentation of the product and achieve the goals of the brand.
This unique chapter is essentially divided into two parts. The first provides guidance and a general understanding of what, and how, to request product and services from a fragrance house. It also describes what can and should be expected of the fragrance house.
The chapter then goes into detail about the composition of fragrances and introduces the reader to the detailed thinking and tools that describe how a fragrance is composed by the Perfumer, and the best way to evaluate the performance of the fragrance in a product. This approach is key to choosing a successful fragrance. The chapter also contains discussion of the impact of EU (European Union) regulations on fragrance formulating and labeling relative to alleged allergens. Finally, it concludes with a focus on three important points: 1) a comprehensive discussion of the many different types of fragrances; 2) insight into making the best choice of asking about what the product formulator and marketer want to achieve; and 3) tips on how to best label these emotive actives.
1.2.3 What Is A Fragrance Composition?
1.2.4 Creation / Construction Of Fragrances
a. Top, Middle, and Base Notes
1.2.5 Interaction Of Fragrance Materials With Product Bases
b. Hydrophobicity / Hydrophilicity
(Octanol-Water Partition Coefficient, log KOW)
1.2.6 Evaluation Of Fragrances
1.2.7 Limitations Of Fragrances
1.2.8 Cost Structure Of Fragrances
b. Concentration-Cost Considerations for Fragrances
1.2.9 Troubleshooting Fragrances
1.2.10 Fragrance Types Defined
b. EU Allergen Label Free or Allergen Free
d. Water-Dispersible Fragrances
2. Allergen-Label-Free INCI Blend
2. Essential Oil Natural Blends
g. GRAS Fragrances (Generally Recognized as Safe)
AS the phrase implies, a fragrance house specializes solely in the creation of fragrances. Most fragrance houses are structured in a similar way with respect to personnel and project flow. Usually, a Salesperson interacts with the cosmetic chemist to obtain information about the potential project. The Salesperson may ask the cosmetic chemist a variety of questions to help define potential fragrances for their products. For example, questions would be asked about the type of products in which the fragrance will be used; the type of fragrance or odor character desired; and any benchmarks or olfactive targets to consider; information would be required about the brand and target market, the desired price point of the fragrance, or the dosage of fragrance in the product. Other areas of interest will be the price per unit, regulatory considerations, and the expected volume of the fragrance to be sold per year if the project launches. This information is provided to the Sales Management team in the fragrance house to determine whether enough information has been given to assign a priority to the project.
Overall decisions are typically made using the financials of the project and the relationship of the fragrance house with the requesting company. If the project passes review, it is passed to the Evaluation Department to determine whether the fragrance requested already exists in the “library” (fragrances already created and approved by an Evaluator, but not sold to any company) at the fragrance house, or whether the request needs an investment of a perfumer to create a fragrance to fulfill the request. If suitable types of fragrances exist in the fragrance house’s library, these will be chosen by the Evaluator, compounded, evaluated in a product base, and sampled to the cosmetic chemist for review. If no suitable fragrance exists internally, a Perfumer or Perfumers will have to create a fragrance for the request. The new fragrance creations will be reviewed by an Evaluator iteratively in accordance with the protocol described above, until they meet the requirements of the request.
The Perfumer–Evaluator team is a very important part of the fragrance house. An Evaluator is much like a food critic, or a golf caddy, whereas the Perfumer is much like a chef, or a pro golfer. Part of the role of an Evaluator is to understand the cosmetic chemist’s request and extrapolate the request into an olfactive structure that a Perfumer can create against. Evaluators also have a good understanding of current olfactive trends in their specialized product areas, and will use this information to guide the Perfumer to ensure the result is “on-trend” in odor, but is also pleasing overall. Evaluators don’t tell Perfumers which specific materials to use, but rather what odor impressions or characters should exist in a creation and whether they are on-trend as per the Evaluator’s understanding of their specific area of expertise. Evaluators provide a sounding board for the Perfumer to discuss olfactive directions and act as an impartial critique of a creation, much like a caddy provides a technical view of the shot at hand. Using the feedback and input of the Evaluators, Perfumers are free to use the materials that would be appropriate for the product type but also meet the regulatory restrictions of the particular geographical targets for the product. Due to the broad knowledge of the olfactive market involved, Evaluators generally specialize in fields such as Air Care, Household Care, or Personal Care. In the case of cosmetics and personal care we are primarily concerned with the evaluation points of personal care products that are used on skin and hair.
The Perfumer is a very specialized position. Most Perfumers have been trained by experienced Perfumers in an apprenticeship-type job training that takes from five to ten years. Many start as Fragrance Compounders and then move up to Perfumer’s Assistant to Junior Perfumer and then Perfumer. During this time, a potential Perfumer studies and understands the general structures of classic and current fragrances as well as developing their own new creations. A Perfumer has committed to “olfactive-memory” up to 3,000 individual fragrance raw materials during their training. The majority of the required talent and creativity of the perfumer is in understanding how combinations, or “recipes” or “accords” of these materials interact with each other in a product base to form beautiful fragrance compositions that will meet the requirements of a request. The Perfumer is also expected to understand the current regulatory landscape and to know general stability parameters of the individual fragrance components in a variety of product bases such as shampoo, bodywash, conditioners, lotions, and styling gels so that the fragrances will be likely to perform as intended. Additional support is given to the Perfumer–Evaluator teams by the fragrance house’s Applications department, which incorporates fragrances into product bases. The bases may be those supplied by the requesting company for a specific project, or may be a “house-base” developed by cosmetic chemists within the fragrance house.
An additional part of the Applications department’s responsibility is to handle any requests for stability testing and to create various product prototypes needed for Sales, Evaluation, and Perfumery. Other key teams that support Perfumery and Evaluation but have different duties include Marketing, which interacts heavily with Evaluation for defining overall trends and providing other marketing support.
The Analytical Department, extracts and analyzes the composition of specific fragrances of interest on the market that have not been created by the fragrance house in order to provide current “competitive” information to the Perfumery Department. The Regulatory Department provides the final determination as to whether a submitted fragrance meets all the requirements necessary for the request, and their information is invaluable not only to the Perfumer for a creative project, but also to the Evaluation department in the case of a fragrance chosen for a project from the library.
The actual creation of a new fragrance by a Perfumer generally occurs in front of a computer with a specialized software system that has a list of materials available to a Perfumer, and the final formula based on a weight or volume percent is quite like a recipe for baking or cooking. As the formulas are optimized over the Evaluation process, they are streamlined to include only the necessary materials at the proportions required for the performance of the fragrance. The Perfumer can recall the odor of several thousand materials and will first develop the beginnings of the fragrance formula in their “mind’s-nose,” or they will start with a part of a formula that they have worked on in the past. The Perfumer may start a new project by putting together a fragrance formula that is about 85–90% complete and use the materials they are sure they want to use, in a ratio that they know, or can reasonably be sure will be appropriate for the request at hand. This methodology is highly useful in order to streamline the required iterative creative process. This “partial fragrance” is compounded by the Fragrance Compounder and returned to the Perfumer. If it is what the Perfumer was expecting, the Perfumer may ask the Applications department to apply the fragrance to a product base.
After evaluation in product base by the Perfumer and/or the Evaluator, the Perfumer may create several trials to complete the last 10–15% of the fragrance composition. Each trial is a specific twist on the fragrance that uses materials whose effects are more difficult to predict, or some untried out-of-the-box ideas that may or may not work well. These trials are also applied to the choice of product base, and these choices are evaluated and compared to each other and to the cosmetic chemist’s request by the Perfumer and Evaluator. One or more of the trials may go forward, or the Evaluator may ask the Perfumer to continue to further develop the concept and create more trials. This process is repeated until there are several fragrances ready to submit to the cosmetic chemist.
Usually from five to 15 trials are needed by a Perfumer to create a new fragrance that is deemed worthy to show to a cosmetic chemist. Depending on the project, several Perfumers may be assigned and then the Evaluator will make a selection of the chosen fragrances across multiple perfumers to give to the Salesperson to show to the cosmetic chemist in order to ensure each submitted fragrance is different enough to stand on its own. The cosmetic chemist will also be informed that the entire chosen range of fragrances is appropriate for his/her request. The fragrances that are completed, technically acceptable, and olfactively sound but are not chosen by the Evaluator are placed into the fragrance house’s library for possible future use.
As a result of this process, a Fragrance House’s library may have tens of thousands of finished formulas available for internal use. This is why most creative fragrance houses do not offer a “catalog” of fragrances . . . there are simply too many to catalog, they are too difficult to describe thoroughly, and since they have to be designed for a specific product type (for both regulatory and technical reasons described elsewhere in this chapter), it would not be a useful exercise.
If a Perfumer is unable to smell due to a cold or other reason, creative work continues since the formulations created by the Perfumer on the computer can be compounded and then smelled by the Evaluators or other Perfumers in a group setting. As the cosmetic chemist’s request is always used as the criterion for being chosen, the team members can provide feedback to the Perfumers to help them improve the fragrance until they are able to smell again. When smelling for a living, the Perfumers and Evaluators learn to take very shallow breaths and to clear their airways in between evaluations. Most professional Perfumers and Evaluators simply space their smelling sessions strategically throughout the day rather than pollute their noses with strong-smelling materials such as coffee beans. After the Evaluator and Perfumer decide on the fragrance selection to be offered, the Salesperson shows the chosen fragrances to the cosmetic chemist. After some form of evaluation, the chemist should give feedback to the Salesperson on each of the submissions. This feedback goes to the Evaluator–Perfumer team and helps them for future requests, or helps to optimize a specific fragrance for a current request. The feedback can be about the fragrance’s performance in the product base, the overall odor character, or any comment about how well the fragrance fulfilled the request. All feedback is helpful to the fragrance house to understand their customer (the cosmetic chemist).
Once a fragrance is chosen by a cosmetic chemist and the decision is made to purchase the fragrance from the fragrance house, the Perfumer’s formula is activated into the fragrance house’s Production system, and is removed from the fragrance house’s library so that it will not be used again for other customers. The Perfumery department sends a sample of the fragrance to be purchased to the Production’s QC Department to be used as a standard. The flash point, refractive index, general color range, and specific gravity are already known from the trial samples sent to the cosmetic chemist. The QC chemists are trained to compare the standard to their productions via a “triangle test” to determine if the odor is comparable to the standard. (Each panelist is presented with two samples of the control and one sample of the test material, or two samples of the test material and one sample of the control, and they are asked to locate the “odd” sample; the results are statistically analyzed to determine whether the samples are different or not.) In addition, the refractive index, specific gravity, and color specs are compared to those that exist for each formula.
Individual fragrance raw materials may be natural or synthetic. Each of these materials is carefully characterized by RIFM (Research Institute for Fragrance Materials—http://www.RIFM.org) and is regulated by IFRA (International Fragrance Association—http://www.ifranaorg). RIFM conducts safety and environmental studies on the fragrance raw materials and maintains the “master list” of materials that are permitted as fragrance materials. IFRA regulates the amount of each material that can be used in a fragrance and ultimately in a finished cosmetic product, for specific product categories, which is delineated in the QRA (Quantitative Risk Assessment) document. There are currently 11 product categories addressed in the IFRA regulations. They range from lip care to shampoos to wipes to candles. These categories are based on the expected dosage of a fragrance material that the public is expected to be exposed to and depends on the type of product used. It is useful for the cosmetic chemist to know in which of the IFRA categories their product falls, particularly when requesting paperwork from the fragrance house. IFRA actively educates the public as well as the chemist about the safety, history, production, creation, and use of fragrances via video and statements on their website and through social media.
Natural fragrance materials are most often categorized as essential oils, absolutes, concretes, or natural isolates. Essential oils are usually obtained by steam distillation of the part of the plant that contains the essential oil. During the distillation process, the essential oil floats on the water. It is then separated from the water and any remaining water is removed. The odor of the essential oil is compared to standards for composition and overall odor. In the case of citrus oils, the essential oil is obtained by squeezing the peels of the fruits. As with other plants, the citrus oil is removed from any water that may be present after squeezing. Essential oils generally are relatively expensive versus a synthetic material (except, depending on the year, citrus oils—since the citrus industry produces a large amount of food products, and the peels are byproducts that can be used for the fragrance industry).
Essential oils are normally used in a standard fragrance (one that is not designed to be all natural) at levels from ~1 to 20%, while the remainder of the fragrance is synthetic. Essential oils add complexity and a certain “naturalness” to a fragrance, but they also add cost, as their pricing is dependent upon supply. These oils can fluctuate in cost dramatically depending on yield, political climate of the producing country, and even time of year. Weather disasters in citrus regions can create serious supply issues.
Concretes are obtained by the extraction of a plant using a hydrophobic solvent. This approach yields a product that is an essential oil mixed with waxes and any other hydrophobic material soluble in the solvent employed. A hydrophobic solvent is removed to yield the concrete. Further extraction of the concrete with ethyl alcohol and removal of the alcohol yields an absolute, which is the essential oil that contains any other materials soluble in ethyl alcohol. The waxes and other ethyl alcohol-insoluble materials are then removed, yielding a product that is completely soluble in ethyl alcohol. Absolutes of extremely faithful odor quality may also be obtained by supercritical carbon dioxide extractions of the plant as well. Concretes and absolutes are very expensive and are used as “touch” ingredients in fragrances. This means that in a fragrance they may each range in concentration from 0.001 to 0.100%. Even at these low levels they add significant cost, but they also add significant “odor value.” If they are removed their removal is quite noticeable, as the fragrance would smell less “rich” and less “extravagant.” Most of the time, these materials are only used in expensive, fine fragrances and very high-end creams and lotions.
Natural isolates are obtained by varying physical means from essential oils by crystallization (such as crystallizing menthol out of peppermint oil), or fractional distillation, where an essential oil is distilled using heat and the various raw materials are isolated by means of separation, employing their differing boiling points. There are no chemical transformations made on natural isolates—they are merely components of essential oils that have been removed from the intact essential oil. These materials are generally also expensive since one must first obtain the essential oil, then put in some additional amount of work to obtain the isolate (usually by distillation). The use of these materials is discussed later in this chapter.
Synthetic fragrance materials are made by chemical reactions on starting materials. Many synthetic materials are derived from crude sulfate turpentine chemistry (as an example, see http://www.renessenz.com/site/production). Some are derived from petroleum products, and yet others are made starting from complex molecules isolated from plants. The majority of the commonly used fragrance materials are synthetic and form the framework of the fragrance. Advantages of synthetic materials are that they are typically very completely characterized by the supplier, are in plentiful supply, are relatively stable in cost, and are not seasonally dependent. There are more varied odor characters available in synthetic ingredients, and they are currently what consumers are used to smelling in their products.
Botanic materials are different than fragrance materials in that they are typically not used to impart an odor to the finished product but are used for marketing or performance reasons. These materials may be derived from any part of the plant, even those parts of individual plants that are not used to provide an essential oil (which vary per plant), with almost any appropriate solvent. Botanics are regulated on the cosmetic product’s label by the PCPC (Personal Care Product Council, formerly the CTFA—http://www.personalcarecouncil.org/).
1.2.3 WHAT IS A FRAGRANCE COMPOSITION?
As we have stated earlier, fragrances are complex, well-balanced mixtures of individual natural and synthetic fragrance materials. A fragrance is perceived as an entity with its own aesthetic identity. The unique characteristics of each of the individual fragrance ingredients stay in the background and contribute to the fragrance as a whole without being suppressed.
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– AN OVERVIEW OF HAIR FOLLICLE ANATOMY AND BIOLOGY
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– MECHANISMS OF CHANGES IN HAIR SHAPE
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