Scent solutions: scientists explore new ways to make flower-friendly perfumes and colognes.

Imagine going to the Valentine's Day dance wearing "eau de rain forest," a potion that smells like a fresh, exotic flower. You'd attract dancing partners like flies (or maybe you'd just attract flies). What's the secret behind your scent? A new perfume- and cologne-making technique that uses living flowers instead of crushed, dead ones. The best part: Not a single endangered rain-forest flower was plucked to produce your new aroma.

I got the scoop on this new flower-friendly scent-making technique at International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) in Union Beach, New Jersey. One of the world's largest creators of scents and flavors, IFF sells its scent creations to big-name companies, such as Calvin Klein, Estee Lauder, and Lancome.

KILLER AROMA

At IFF,I learned that to make perfume or cologne from flowers in the traditional way, you have to pick the flowers first. You crush the petals and place them in a liquid, usually alcohol, to release the flowers' essential oils. These aromatic oils give flowers their scent or "essence," says Anthony LeVorse, an organic chemist at IFF. The alcohol acts as a solvent, a substance that mixes evenly with a solute (the essential oils). Mixed together, the dissolver and "dissolvee" (solvent and solute) form a solution.

After getting rid of the petal pieces, what you're left with, says LeVorse, is a powerfully scented solution - and piles of decapitated flowers: 8,000 of them for just one gram of concentrated rose oil, for example. If you wanted to make "eau de rain forest" using this traditional technique, you'd have to prune quite a heap of rainforest flora. That would be tragic, considering that 51 million acres of tropical rain forest are destroyed every year for timber and other resources. If the flowers of these endangered ecosystems disappear, so do the bees, birds, and other critters that depend on them for room and board.

GREENHOUSE LAB

That's where IFF's "Living Flower Technology" comes in. With glass containers, some tubing, computers, and lots of ingenuity, the company has captured more than 200 floral scents - without bruising a single petal.

In one of IFF's labs - a greenhouse, really - chemist Mike Zampino grows and extracts the fragrances of plants from around the world, from lemon trees to lilies, pine trees to pineapples. To capture a living orchid's scent, say, he cups a bubble-shaped glass jar around the bloom. The jar connects to a vacuum tube that "inhales" gaseous molecules of the plant's essential oils. A sticky coating in the tube captures the aromatic oil molecules without damaging the fragile orchid.

Next, Zampino sends his gas samples to scientists in another lab to find out what molecules make up the orchid's unique scent so they can synthesize it from scratch. The technique they use: gas chromatography, a cutting-edge technique that separates the gaseous "scent" molecules by size.

Basically, the scientists bombard the molecules with electrons. The electrons act like a stream of cue balls on a billiards table, smashing into the scent molecules and scattering them. Big, heavy molecules move more slowly than small, light ones when hit by the high-speed electrons. A detector takes a "size reading" of each molecule as it zips by. The sizes translate into a chemical "blueprint" unique to that smell.

"Scent engineers then use the blueprints to figure out what raw materials (chemical compounds) to mix together to produce synthetic aromatic oils. "Think of [this process] as construction," says organic chemist LeVorse. "Look at [us] as carpenters on the molecular level. Some people build

houses. [We] build molecular [combinations]."

After making the scent, the engineers dissolve the aromatic oils (the solute) in unscented solvent. Result: large vats of sweet-smelling solution, ready for the expert noses of perfumers to take a whiff (see "Nasal appraisals," right) - and no dead flowers.

SCENT-SATIONS

Saving flowers isn't the only advantage to Living Flower Technology. Now chemists can capture the smells of an infinite number of plants that weren't suited to the traditional crush-and-dissolve scent-making process. For example, the scents of freesia, oleander, and orchids, flowers that contain few or no oils, can be turned into perfume, says greenhouse chemist Zampino. "Now we can take an orchid, analyze it, and give perfumers a new odor to work with that they've never had before," he says.

What's more, you get the true aroma of flowers. Your nose knows the difference between scents from living flowers and dead ones, Zampino says. Within 15 seconds of a flower being picked, the mixture of 60 or more chemicals that make up its scent begins to change form and decay. Just try it yourself: First, sniff a rose, then smell rose-scented potpourri. The new technique would give you the real thing.

And wouldn't it be a shame to kill a rare rain-forest flower and end up with a scent that didn't even smell like one?