Posted by Robin
on
25 April 2008
“Headspace” (a term borrowed from the beat generation, where it connoted psychological privacy) is the technical term for the area surrounding an object or person in which their odour can be analysed. But odour detection is not limited to the discovery of drugs and explosives. Scientists and electronic nose entrepreneurs claim headspace analysis can reveal everything from the substances people have been in contact with and their emotional state, to their personal identity and ethnic origin…
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Posted by Robin
on
15 May 2007
Sorry, but Gertrude Stein got it wrong. In perfumery, a rose is hardly ever just a rose. The challenge facing perfumers is not so much to mimic nature as to go one better.
— Another article about the "naturals vs synthetics" debate, this one in the UK Times Online.
To capture the fragrance of a flower without having to kill it, IFF uses a kind of "smell camera" that detects and absorbs the particles that surround a plant to record its scent. The information is then translated into a formula with the help of chromatography and spectrometry, techniques that help identify the many components that make up a flower's scent.
— From The Smell Factory, in Time Magazine.
