Buying any Valentine’s Day gifts this year? Chocolate? How about lotion? A candle? Fancy soap? Or maybe something more extravagant, like perfume?
Whether you consider these offerings odoriferous or fragrant, scientists and artists are at work creating those scents. Francisco Lozano, an apprentice perfumer at Georgia-based fragrance company Arylessence, is one of them.
In the lab in Marietta, Georgia, Lozano and other perfumers use computers and even robots to study and compound the chemicals in fragrances. They examine the components of essential oils sourced from around the world. They also study what makes stinky stuff stink. “We all deserve a life free of malodor,” Lozano says. “Imagine a world without deodorant!”
For the Mexican-born perfumer, fragrance-making is all about serving others. Francisco’s widowed mom took care of her kids by selling Avon products, an occupation that delighted the boy. He enjoyed watching happy customers get their purchases—good-smelling lotions, soaps, and perfumes. When he stuck his nose into Avon boxes for a sniff, his mom had to remind him, “Stop opening that!”
Francisco enjoyed the free Avon samples too and says, “I was always that good-smelling kid.” But he also smelled well, so friends asked him to help them find bad smells in their houses or cars.
Lozano says having a strong sense of smell isn’t a skill you learn but a gift you’re born with. As a grownup, Lozano took a “smell test” at Arylessence—one of the major hurdles on the path to becoming a perfumer.
A wannabe perfumer receives strips of absorbent paper called scent identification blotters. He or she must identify the scents—hyacinth, gardenia, violet, amber, vanilla, something else? Next, the test taker gets three blotters, each dipped in a raw material or a man-made mixture of scents. Two of the blotters carry exactly the same fragrance while one is just slightly different. An excellent nose like Lozano’s can tell which doesn’t belong.
Lozano explains perfuming as part science and part art. On the artsier side, perfumers write recipes for scents, similar to a baker writing recipes for cakes. They’re serving clients by creating a smell—rather than taste—experience. On the technical side, perfumers figure out how each scent bonds with the molecules in the carrier of each product, whether that is wax, soap, oil, water, or powder. They also consider how each fragrance spreads throughout a space.
Lozano says a good perfumer must be resilient to accept criticism and humble to defer to feedback from others.
“We’re not mad scientists,” Lozano laughs. “We’re glad scientists.” He adds, “At the end of the day, the master perfumer is God.”
Why? Perfuming is an art, a science, and it even can be an act of service.
