What is it about?
Creating a perfume has long been considered an art, relying on the intuition of master perfumers and subjective human smell tests. This early work, presented as a poster, explored using an ultrafast laser technique to bring more science into that art. We zapped individual fragrance ingredients with a laser and measured the "thermal lens" effect—a unique signal created as the liquid heats up and bends light. We found that this signal was highly sensitive to the physical properties of the molecules, including previously overlooked effects like heat convection. Our central idea was that we could use this thermal lens "fingerprint" as a quantitative, scientific measure to help predict the optimal concentrations for mixing ingredients into a final fragrance accord, moving beyond pure intuition.
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Why is it important?
This work was an early, conceptual step toward moving fragrance analysis from a purely subjective art to an objective, data-driven science. It proposed a way to replace or augment slow and expensive human panels with a rapid, physical measurement that could provide real-time feedback for perfumers. By showing a clear link between a measurable laser signal and the key molecular properties of fragrance components, it laid the conceptual groundwork for a more advanced analysis of these complex mixtures. This poster was the direct precursor to our later, more mature work where we fully developed a robust quantitative metric for characterizing these systems.
Perspectives
This poster was the result of work I did at the very end of my undergraduate degree, right after an internship at a fragrance company. It was a degree requirement, but I was determined to make it a piece of real, forward-looking science. I was struck by how much of the industry relied on art and intuition, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to apply the advanced laser physics I was learning to a very practical problem. Looking back, this 2020 poster was a critical stepping stone. It was where I first started to build the bridge between my interests in fundamental optics and the challenge of characterizing complex, real-world chemical systems. The ideas presented here were the seeds that would eventually grow into a full-fledged research project and a journal publication years later.
Rohit Goswami
University of Iceland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ultrafast insights for predictive fragrance compounding, April 2020, American Chemical Society (ACS),
DOI: 10.1021/scimeetings.0c03998.
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