Michael Cook, age 13, of Rochester, New York, for his question:
How do they make perfumes?
Quality perfumes are brewed from secret recipes. Some 150 of the precious fluid is composed of various flower oils and other sweet smelling substances. This basic mixture is thinned out with about 85% pure alcohol. Cologne, or toilet water, contains no more than three to five percent of the rich basic recipe. Quality perfumes are made from natural substances, often by hand. But our wonderful chemists have come very close to copying their natural fragrances with synthetics.
It takes a thousand pounds of orange blossoms to make one pound of flower oil. It takes four thousand pounds of rose petals to make one pound of oil of roses and the fob of extracting this oil takes all summer. A pound of rose oil sells for $2,000. No wonder those quality perfumes are so expensive.
A plant makes and holds its fragrance in countless tiny sacs in the petals, leaves, stems and even roots. It is no easy job to extract this pure, fragrant oil. Some plants, such as lavender, yield up their sweet smelling oil when distilled. Stems, leaves and flowers are packed into a kettle and steamed or boiled. The heat breaks open the perfume sacs and the oil rises with the steam.
This sweet smelling steam is run off through a pipe and condensed into a barrel. The precious oil floats and is removed from the surface. Citrus oils also yield sweet smells to be added to a perfume recipe. This may be extracted by simply pressing the peels of oranges, lemons and limes.
Other plants refuse to give up their sweet oils either by pressure or steam. One of these is the rose. The petals are gathered and placed between glass sheets which have been covered with purified fat. The fat absorbs the scent. The petals are changed every day throughout the rose season, at the end of. which the fat is ready to be processed into oil of roses.
A good perfume contains some gum resin, maybe from pine or myrrh. These substances are long lasting and help fix the flower essences. The recipe also contains some musky animal fat. This substance may be taken from the musk deer, the civet cat or the beaver. It may also be ambergris, the fatty stuff thrown off by the sperm whale.
The perfume manufacturer may work many years to create a new recipe. It may contain 20 or 30 different ingredients in the right proportions to make a pleasant, unforgettable fragrance. What's more, the recipe mint prove that it can wear well. It must not lose or change its smell with time.
In this recipe there will be fragrant oils from a dozen or more different kinds of flowers and plants. This blend of odors gives the perfume its character. There will be gums and resins to help the flower oils last and there will be a trace of musk to blend the odors and add to the life of the perfume.
The manufacture of perfume is by no means a new art. The Romans made perfume and some of them bathed in it. The Babylonians and the Persians used it. King Tutankhamen used perfume distilled from flowers. A jar of such perfume was buried with him and was still fragrant after 3,000 years.