The fragrance industry uses nature as its guide and source of inspiration. All perfumes and perfume ingredients that are produced are modelled to those found in nature.

    The methods used to extract perfume ingredients from their natural sources have changed over time as technology advanced. There are 3 basic techniques: expression, distillation and expression.

     Expression is the simplest technique. Odorants are forced out of the natural source by physical pressure, the process is referred to as expression and the product if called expressed oil. This method is commonly used to produce citrus oils.

    Distillation of perfume ingredients can be done in 3 ways: dry distillation, steam distillation and hydrodiffusion. These methods are common to obtain essential oils, like lavender oil.

    Solvents like ethanol, benzenes, petroleum ether, acetone, hexane and ethyl acetate are used commonly for simple solvent extraction. Carbon dioxide is also being developed as a useful solvent for extracting oils. It is easily removed and does not have problems with residual levels. However, the high cost of liquefying carbon dioxide limits its use as a common solvent.

    The high cost of producing natural materials required as ingredients limited its use to only the more wealthy until the middle of the nineteenth century. The development of organic chemistry began to make synthetic chemicals available and their use in fragrances began to grow. Synthetic materials are cheaper to produce than natural materials and more robust that can withstand various environments can be produced.

    There are several major groups of synthetic compounds. These include perfume ingredients developed from terpene, benzene, toluene, phenol, naphthalene, etc.

    3 major groups are described in the following pages :