INGREDIENTS FRAGRANCE
products used in perfumery. According to David Maruitte, Senior Perfumer & Creative Director at Sozio Middle East, war-impacted materials include “sage essential oil – used as is, but also as a synthesis intermediate, sclaréol, for the production of aromatic molecules – and also lavender essential oil”.
From the climate side, meanwhile, de Vogel adds, “through climate change and natural disasters, we’ve had real issues with certain essential oils”; like Ripoll, she flags cedarwood as an example of an oil “where we’ve had a really hard time getting enough supply, or any supply at all”. Thomas Kerfoot, Director of O&3, which supplies natural essential oils and carrier oils, highlighted adverse weather conditions in Australia as having harmed tea tree and lemon myrtle crops, while, on the carrier side, one of Spain’s hottest ever summers last year (and the resulting drought) bumped up the price of olive oil.
Kerfoot explains that, much of the time, the issue surrounds irrigation. “The problem is predominantly access to water,” he says. “A lot of farmers now are investing heavily in trying to fix the problem of irrigation and recycling the water used to do that.” However, as well as the pressure of water access, farmers are under an equal squeeze from the demand side, with Kerfoot noting that “demand for naturals is growing substantially”.
“The obvious reaction is that we’re seeing major increases in prices on crops that are sensitive to weather patterns,” he adds. “So, as soon as the weather doesn’t go the way in which we want, we see a massive hike in pricing. This then pushes up finished product cost prices and people look for alternatives.”
While naturals are the more obvious victims of the climate crisis, synthetic fragrances are not exactly immune. “Due to the lack of water, a portion of the Rhine has dried up in Germany,” Sozio’s Maruitte tells Cosmetics Business. “This water was partly used to cool down the facilities of a large raw material manufacturer, which had to slow down its production rate and thus created some shortages of a certain number of commonly used raw materials.
“In the same vein, this drought has also slowed down the manufacturing of synthetic intermediates that are necessary to produce other types of raw materials for perfumery.” De Vogel notes that “usually with naturals it comes and goes, they don’t really fully disappear”. This, for instance, was the case in 2002, when the industry experienced a temporary Indonesian patchouli shortage following the devastating 2001 Boxing Day tsunami, which killed an estimated 230,000 people. However, she adds that some resources are simply not renewable and are likely to be phased out. She gives guaiacwood (from the heartwood of palo santo) as an example, observing that there is “very little supply”, in addition to import restrictions from CITES (the Convention on
18 January 2023
Recent water shortages have hit the harvest of Rosa centifolia (below), while there are CITES import restrictions on Guaiacum officinale (right) to prevent its exploitation
International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), which has been working to prevent the exploitation of guaiacwood in Paraguay since 2011. As such, de Vogel doesn’t expect the wood as a fragrance ingredient to make a full recovery in future.
CREATIVE SOLUTIONS However, such developments are not necessarily a cause for shirt rending and tears. Perfumery is an industry used to thinking on its feet and mining creativity in the face of change, be these short-term supply hitches or permanent regulatory edicts. As an example, de Vogel flags up her approach to the phase-out of lilial, which was officially banned in the EU from 1 March 2022 and in Great Britain from 15 December 2022.
“Lilial was wonderful, it was one of my favourite ingredients,” she says. “You’d put it in something and it just created something magical. But unfortunately you can’t use it anymore. “Sometimes, when a material gets banned, you
don’t have another single material that you can replace it with. But often a combination of certain materials can, at least, create a similar effect, or a similar performance in your fragrance. “It’s all about trying things out, smelling lots and working together with colleagues, bouncing ideas off each other, because everybody has their own creative ways of solving problems.”
Maruitte from Sozio provides a similar sentiment: “It would be a lie to say that prohibitions and restrictions are not challenging and sometimes frustrating,” he says. “But they are routine. “We have to use innovative thinking to overcome these regulatory challenges and still provide unique and sophisticated fragrances to our customers. “Somehow, these regulatory changes are also serving our industry by forcing us to develop new raw materials.”
PROBLEM SOLVING CONCEPTS So what materials are out there to help navigate fragrance ingredient scarcity?
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David J. Stang via Wikimedia Commons
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