The mouth-watering smell of a ripe melon, the arousing aroma of coffee, the fresh smell that hangs in the air after a spring shower… These are just a few of the 10,000 different smells that people can distinguish. Astonishing as it sounds, compared to our fellow creatures our noses are nothing special. Dogs' noses are up to 10,000 times more sensitive than ours. We do not pay much attention to it, but our sense of smell plays host to a variety of odours every day and gives us important information about the world we live in.
Scents can create a range of sensations. They can enhance our mood, or invigorate us, or calm us. A preference for a certain fragrance reveals something about an individual's identity. All this comes into play when designing washing powders and detergents. Wearing fresh smelling clothes is pleasurable. The right scent can put you at ease or make you feel confident. It also forms part of your identity. Whether you choose a product with a noticeable freshness or a barely traceable fragrance is all part of who you are. Throughout Europe, P&G offers a range of laundry detergents and fabric softeners that caters for all tastes. This is important because a product's inherent fragrance also influences the consumer's choice. In fact, one-third of consumers sniff products at the shelf before deciding to buy.
People connect certain smells to specific functions. This leaves the perfumer with the challenge of matching the right scent to the right product. For instance we associate almond with soft skin whereas lemon is linked to degreasing. And while we accept pine in floor cleaners we reject it in fabric softeners. Some smells we find inherently repulsive - even one-day-old babies' faces react to the odour of fish and rotten eggs - but most of our responses to smells are learned. Some perfumes are valued all over the world. Others, such as lavender, have different connotations in different countries. Whereas the French associate lavender with hot summer vacations in Provence and love it, for the English it is an old fashioned perfume they don't like in today's products. The long established "Savon de Marseille" soap is another example. It is a smell most Northern European countries like Germany and the U.K. can not relate to, but it is liked a lot by Southern European countries like France and Spain because it reminds them of good old traditions.
During the whole laundry process, our nose is more often used than our eyes. Before the wash we use our nose to decide whether a shirt or blouse needs washing; this simply reflects that it is often easier to smell than to see that a garment needs cleaning. And after the wash we smell the garment again to determine whether it is clean. Indeed garments laundered in unperfumed detergents are often considered by consumers not to be clean due to the absence of a fresh scent. When it comes to delivering a desirable laundry experience, freshness is essential.
Company surveys show that most consumers believe freshness delivered by perfumes on laundry is "extremely important or very important". In Southern European countries this is particularly outspoken (in France and Italy the figure is as high as 90%) but even in Northern Europe (Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, Nordic countries), where perfume is typically less important, laundry freshness is still a major consideration (importance
figures from 70 to 80%).
People interpret fresh-smelling clothes as the sign of a laundry job well done. When you ask consumers what they want in laundry detergents, the resounding answer is longer lasting freshness - freshness after washing clothes, after drying and above all in the wardrobe and in-wear. In fact, when clothes don't smell fresh and clean, people feel the need to re-wash.
Getting clothes to smell right during the different phases of the laundry cycle - washing, drying, ironing, storing and in-wear - makes the whole job of cleaning clothes much more enjoyable.
A perfumer needs to be able to identify thousands of smells and know how to classify and recognize them. At P&G, most of the perfumers start out as trained chemists who then spend about three years learning the art and science behind creating a fragrance. To help them refine their skills, they also spend time training in external perfume houses. P&G's perfumers need to combine all their skills when designing a product. They have to be able to select and blend the individual notes of the perfume, all at the right level, so that the perfume and the product form a compatible whole that will not degrade. It is no easy task though. So this is where P&G brings in its innovative technologies.
Throughout history perfumes have held up a mirror to society. The first scents were created out of plant and animal extracts. In ancient civilisations they were used in religious ceremonies, in medicines, as cosmetics and as gifts. Today's perfumes contain a huge range of ingredients to give a dazzling range of fragrances. Fashions change but the purposes behind perfumes remain constant. With thousands of raw ingredients to choose from, a perfumer needs talent and an excellent memory when creating a fragrance. These same skills are used by P&G's perfumers as the fragrances in today's laundry products can be just as complex as the fine fragrances created by their counterparts in prestigious perfume houses. P&G perfumers work with a smaller palette of ingredients - ones that will not "break down" during the wash cycle. But out of the 3,000 ingredients available, they use no less than 1,000. Each finished fragrance contains 30 to 200 ingredients. Compare this with the average fine fragrance, which contains a blend of 10 to 100 ingredients or even the most complex perfumes worn today, containing many hundreds of ingredients.
Try describing a smell. It is difficult. Perfumers learn the language of perfumery by using the "fragrance pyramid" system, based on how quickly the ingredients evaporate. Borrowing from music terminology, each individual scent is called a note. The perfumes themselves are a skilful blend of top, middle and base notes. The top notes evaporate the fastest, creating the fragrance's first brief impression. This is what you smell when opening a bottle of laundry liquid or fabric softener. Perfumers typically describe them as fresh, spicy, citrus and herbaceous. The core character of the scent comes from the middle or "heart" notes, which develop later as the fragrance intermingles with the skin's own smells. The same process happens on fabrics when clothes are washed; those are the notes you smell when taking the laundry out of the washing machine. These can be floral, spicy, sweet, woody and so on. Later the perfume releases the base or "dry down" notes, the most substantive ingredients. They can smell musky, woody, warm, mossy and so on. These are the notes that will make your laundry smell fresh when it is ready to wear.
So how do we identify all those myriad smells that we encounter every day? It all starts when odour molecules of whatever you are smelling hit your nose. These volatile molecules (meaning they evaporate easily) drift up the nasal passages to a postage-stamp-sized area of nerve cells lying just below the eyes (the olfactory epithelium). Each nerve cell is covered in minute hairs that each play host to one type of the 1,000 or so sensors known as odour receptors. The human nose contains several millions of odour receptors. Odour receptors are quite picky, they have different shapes each designed to hook up with a certain shape odour molecule - like a lock and key. So, some odour receptors will respond to cut grass molecules and others will respond to freshly baked bread. When the odour molecule hits the right receptor this triggers the neurons in your nose to send a signal to the olfactory bulb in the very front of the brain. The signals are relayed from the olfactory bulb to the brain's higher olfactory cortex, triggering patterns of activity in the cortex corresponding to certain smells and to the limbic system, which generates emotional feelings. One pattern of signals will mean coffee, another aftershave.
Creating a freshness experience is more than mastering the art and science of composing unique perfumes. The scent delivered through perfume has to push the right buttons to appeal to consumers and evoke the emotions that fit with their personality. To turn scent into a real freshness experience the colours, imagery and words selected to define the product have to all fit together and give the consumer the right expectations of the scent behind it. Visuals, colours and words carefully selected to target the group of consumers it is aimed at, convert the scent into a universally understood language. Successful communication of what the scent represents will greatly contribute to the perception of the brand, helping it to stand out from the crowd.
In line with its philosophy of keeping in close touch with people's needs, P&G constantly quizzes people about the sort of fragrance they want of their laundry products. When testing the variants of a fragrance, we ask consumers to smell neat products as well as washed items. What did they think of their intensity, their character? P&G then goes further, inviting people to use new detergents in their homes. How does the fragrance perform over the wash cycle? What is it people want from laundry detergents and fabric softeners? Careful listening is one step on the path to designing the perfect perfume.
Time and again, consumers say that what they want is more staying power or substantivity for the fresh smell on fabrics. Consumers feel that the freshness factor falls with each stage in the laundry cycle. Ideally they want the fragrance to keep on working, especially at two key points or "moments of truth" - when storing clothes and when wearing them. A wardrobe full of fresh-smelling clothes is satisfying. Wearing such clothes boosts confidence and gives pleasure. Getting the ingredients to keep working in our clothes after drying and in-wear is a tricky challenge for our perfumers. This depends on the ingredient's staying power. For instance, how well does it withstand heat and water plus detergent, or the sunlight if hung outside to dry - will it dissolve away or evaporate? When clothes are washed, water and detergent carry away the more soluble parts of the fragrance, and when clothes are dried perfume ingredients evaporate. In conventional perfumes, this mainly leaves the heavier ingredients (the base notes) on the fabric, giving the clothes their traditional fresh smell. The challenge at P&G is to extend the range of perfume ingredients with top notes that stay this long - and longer - on the fabric leaving a noticeable fresh scent. Traditionally, high levels of perfume were sprayed on the laundry detergent to boost freshness on dry clothes. The downside was that the scent of the detergent itself became too strong and turned people off. This led to the search for more balanced compositions that made the fresh smell acceptable during all stages of the laundry process.
One exciting development is pro-perfumes. The pro-perfume technology works like an anchor that keeps the perfume that is otherwise washed off the fabrics. The perfume releases over time in presence of heat or humidity (e.g. when the garment is worn, the body provides the heat and humidity to release the freshness notes).
This means the fragrance magically materialises in your clothes when it is most needed, such as when you are working out or stressed. Researchers are currently extending the range of fragrance characters delivered by pro-perfumes. In just 10 years P&G has filed more than 100 perfume patents, many of them relating to the delivery of longer lasting freshness on dry laundry.
Another breakthrough in perfume delivery is controlled freshness release via encapsulation of substantive perfume particles. Here the perfume is locked up in microcapsules that slowly dissolve in the wash, releasing the perfume and having a blooming effect on damp and dry laundry.
Recently, P&G also created a fabric softener, Lenor Stayfresh, which helps to neutralise unpleasant smells. The key ingredient, cyclodextrin, works by hooking up with unpleasant odour molecules and inactivating them. This technique was first used in Fébrèze, a spray used for eliminating bad odours on fabrics. By getting rid of unpleasant smells, Lenor Stayfresh helps clothes to keep their just-washed fragrance and delivers real in-wear freshness.
As with all our products the perfumes used in our laundry detergents and fabric softeners are carefully tested to make sure they meet the strictest safety standards. A perfume is a complex mixture of ingredients, each of which has been thoroughly assessed for its effect on humans as well as the environment. This includes a thorough evaluation by independent scientists, commissioned by the International Fragrance Association (IFRA). With the choice of ingredients we include in our perfumes, P&G follows more stringent internal policies in terms of ensuring safety to environment and human than legally required.
