Nature printing and perfume making

Every year, new plants are discovered and perfumers scour the world to find new scents that could boost their creativity. However, sometimes, a problem arises: not all plants can be distilled. So it took a good dose of inventiveness to finally capture the scents of certain plants and make a perfume from them . This is how the Nature Print technique was born .

What is the Nature Print technique?

The Nature Print technique allows for a kind of photograph of a scent at a specific moment. The scent of a blossoming flower, that of a ripe fruit—with this innovative technique, it is possible to preserve the trace of the scent at a very precise moment.

The short story of Nature Print, also called Headspace

Headspace was developed in the 1970s, the principle being to capture the fragrance of a flower that cannot be transformed into essential oil. The work is carried out solely on the flowers; their scent is captured without the need to cut them. A glass bell jar is placed over the flower, then gas is injected into it. It captures the scent and layers it onto a wick made of a top-secret material. This wick is then analyzed in a laboratory. The list of perfume components is given to perfumers so they can reproduce the original scent.

How does Nature Print work?

This is a very advanced technique, requiring a solid knowledge of chemistry and cutting-edge equipment such as a chromatograph and a spectrometer. Gas chromatography allows us to create a sort of identity card for the plant by detailing the chemical elements that compose it. Mass spectrometry allows us to measure their mass. Thanks to the information collected with these two machines, our perfumers can then "see" the scent of a plant and preserve its olfactory identity card at a specific moment in its life.

This is how you can find new scents in our perfumes that have never been used before.

This new innovative technique boosts the creativity of perfumers and allows us to have surprising and unique perfumes. They can thus be combined with others which are extracted by other perfume manufacturing techniques , distillation , expression , extraction , Softact or by enfleurage , even if this technique is no longer used.