If you had an ingredient list and specific circumstances to create a smell, what would it be? What, if anything, is stopping science from creating specific smells in a lab?
In: Chemistry
Compounds with distinct smells are created all the time in labs. The real problems is natural things have many unique compounds that give them complex smells, many of these compounds are hard to create in a lab or unknown. Take vanilla, the primary flavoring is vanillin and is readily available and cheap, but it doesn’t taste or smell very good because it has no depth to it because it lacks that complexity you would associate with a natural vanilla.
Scents are just certain molecules interacting with special cells in your nose. The same way tasted are just certain molecules interacting with your tastebuds in your mouth.
And artificial scents do exist. there’s a decent amount of scented candles that’re made with artificial scents.
So they can be cooked up in laboratories.
It’s really more, why would you? There’s isn’t a huge demand for it.
Sure there’s scented candles of things like febreeze or car air fresheners, some of those use artificial scents, some use real scents.
Often times the real scents can be just as cheap to process and acquire as the process to make them in the lab.
Plus, when wanting to make any certain molecule, you can’t just say “I wanna make this” and do it. There’s a whole process, research and development, that you have to go through to typically find a multi-step chain reaction of chemical reactions to finally end up with the finished product you want.
That research can take a lot of time, and can be very costly, so you have to need to have a really good reason to go for it.
Plus, scents aren’t necessarily a huge in demand thing, I think I bought 1 scented candle all of last year? It’s not like you could create a scent that people would be willing to spend lots and lots of money on.
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