I’m assuming that natural ingredients like jasmine and rose are extracted in some way for floral scents, but how do people mimic the scents of other things like leather, caramel, marshmallows, and fresh laundry?
Are the molecules used to create leather in perfumes the same as those found in actual leather? Do perfumers replicate the scent by analyzing and deconstructing the molecules in the real substances, or do they use different compounds that simply mimic the scent? How do you build a scent?
In: Chemistry
We’ve figured out what those aromatic compounds are (chemistry FTW). We know the chemical that makes caramel smell like that, and we can produce it and add it to a perfume. Yes, they’re usually the chemicals that you’d find in the actual odor (i.e. a compound that actually arises from caramelizing something), but also usually not all of them. E.g. caramel is like 90%+ one compound and then a tiny bit of other things… they may just use the major compound and that’s enough to give someone a whiff of caramel in the scent.
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