The purpose of this article is to inform consumers about the real composition of fragrances, as opposed to what brand communication would have them believe.
My motivation for writing it is not that I’m against synthetics, but that I have a lot of trouble with manipulation and lies.

1. Conventional fragrances and greenwashing.

The biggest brands use beautiful fields of jasmine and delicate rose petals in expensive advertising to sell their perfumes. Documentary films show their perfumers criss-crossing the world in search of the rarest raw materials, helping with the picking, assessing the distillation, and that’s what you’ll expect to find in the bottle. Of course, it’s in the film!

Unfortunately, the reality is quite different: it’s true that we still grow in Grasse, and tons of essential oils from citrus fruits, aromatic plants, spices, etc. are produced around the world every year, but what percentage of these essences (or hexane-derived absolutes), which are also used in aromatic foods and pharmaceuticals and sold at retail, ends up in your perfume? Let’s say…not very much! Not very much at all! If anything, not at all.

At perfumery school, we learn how to recompose essential oils from their constituent molecules to minimize the final cost: a bergamot made from synthetic molecules will be 20 times less expensive than a real one. We also train on “briefs”, and it’s obvious that the costs of concentrates imposed on perfumers don’t leave them the leisure to include rose at 15,000 euros a kilo in their formulas. And there’s nothing to stop you showing rose petals in an ad, even if there aren’t any. The famous “olfactory pyramid” that says lemon top, rose heart and sandalwood base is there to give you an idea of what you’ll smell, but in no case does “lemon, rose and sandalwood” mean that there’s lemon, rose and sandalwood, it means that you’ll smell lemon, rose and sandalwood, probably the accords that illustrate them and not the raw material itself. This is due to cost considerations. In any case, if someone says “peony”, “bamboo” and “cotton flower” to you, you can be sure that there isn’t a gram of it, because we don’t extract it.

When we meet our customers, we see that some are so convinced that their perfume brand is “natural” and uses the finest materials that the truth won’t be accepted tomorrow, but we’re confident in the beauty and strength of our “real” whole raw materials.

What sets us apart, and what you won’t find elsewhere (to our knowledge), is that we indicate in our leaflets the percentages of our raw materials (conventional cultivation, organic cultivation, wild harvesting, biotechnologies and water).

At least some brands don’t use these lies and rely on other arguments to sell.
In a future article, we’ll look at the “official” ISO definition of natural, and you’ll see why it’s debatable.

Véronique Remblière
Founder and perfumer of Isotta parfums biologiques