Word: smelling
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...Smell for Every Nose...
...execs love to crow about their deals with big, powerful companies. Not here. When you partner one day with, say, Colgate and the next with Crest, you're better off keeping your list of friends to yourself. "We're the ghostwriters," says Nicolas Mirzayantz, 44, head of IFF's smell division...
...come up with the next big things for the nose or taste bud, fragrance-and-flavor companies send their scientists on "scent treks." On a recent trip to Papua New Guinea, Roman Kaiser, director of smell research for Givaudan, collected more than 50 samples, including a rare hoya plant. "The scent reminds you of dark chocolate, with olfactory notes rarely found in flowers," Kaiser says. He has amassed more than 2,500 natural scents over the years and has reconstituted more than 450. To create authentic flavorings, Givaudan's researchers go on "taste treks" to gourmet restaurants and popular street...
Subha Patel, Kaiser's counterpart at IFF, has journeyed to Kenya and Guangzhou in China. In Southern India, she drew smell samples from cardamom flowers, local tea and fresh red clay. In lieu of bringing back buckets of samples or dead flowers, Patel records her findings chemically. Her primary tool, a solid-phase microextractor, is a $100 penlike device that can record the specific molecules present around anything with a smell. Fennel, cucumber, melon, tomato leaf, black plum and hydroponic celery might soon start to show up as notes in consumer fragrances. Scent notes of Japanese ginger, Indian mango, lantana...
Like top athletes or singers, IFF's best perfumers draw salaries that approach $1 million, including bonuses based on successful fragrance sales. Even for someone with a naturally strong sense of smell, it takes more than a decade of training and apprenticeship to develop a refined understanding of the thousands of compounds smell authors draw upon. "Not everyone who blends a few ingredients is a true perfumer," says Subrenat. "Just as not everyone who burns a steak at home is a three-star Michelin chef." The best scent specialists are so savvy that they can identify the most prominent three...