Process description for Perfume

Perfume is a mixture of many different products that give the human body, animals, objects, and living species a pleasant scent. "Perfume came from the Latin word "per" meaning "through" and "fumum" or smoke (Dorman, page 1)". Many natural and man-made materials have been used on perfume to make the scent usable for skin and clothes. Perfumes does not smell exactly same on different people because of their different body chemistry, temperature and body odors. Perfume was first created by the Egyptian, and during the 13th century, it spread throughout the Europe. Currently, "United States is the world's largest perfume market with annual sales totaling several billions of dollars (Doman, Page 1).

Perfumes are generally made from three different sources: plant sources, animal sources and synthetic sources. There are plenty of things that are being used to make perfumes from the plant sources such as bark, flowers and blossoms, fruits, leaves and twigs, resins, woods, seeds, roots, rhizomes and bulbs. Animal sources are ambergris which comes from sperm whale, castoreum from North American beaver, civet, hyraceum, honeycomb, and deer musk. Synthetic sources are something that has been artificially made by chemist using several natural or animal sources. Synthetic sources are made from many companies throughout the world such as International Flavors and Fragrances, Givaudan, Firmanich, Takasago, and Symrise. After gathering all the ingredients together, it is a three step process for making a perfume. Only after that you can determine the quality of a perfume.

The first step of making perfume is the oil extraction, which can be done in several ways: steam distillation, solvent extraction, enfleurage, maceration and expression. In steam distillation, plants are being passed through the steam, where the oil become gas. Then the gas passes through some tube to make it cooled and liquified. "Another way of extracting oil is to boil the plant substances like