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| Safety Of Perfumery Materials
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The vast majority of fragrance materials in use now are either synthetics or isolates. Isolates are obtained from materials with primarily a single chemical being extracted. Synthetics are made in the lab. Often materials are neither fully synthetic nor fully natural, but rather a combination of the two.
Synthetics are usually derived from chemical reactions using crude oil or turpentine oil as the starting material. Synthetics are usually single molecules that are very different than the complex mixtures found in nature. Many synthetics are not found in nature at all. There are trace impurities left over from the reaction process, and these impurities affect odor quality and safety of the synthetic material.
Natural materials typically come from plants, though in the past animal sources were also in common use. Some materials are complex mixtures that contain much the same components as found in nature, only in a very concentrated form. Essential oils, absolutes, concretes, and resinoids are examples of this. Some "natural" materials are isolates where individual compounds are extracted. Still other "natural" materials are made using fermentation processes. The odor quality of naturals, even when the same chemical, is usually different than synthetics. There are usually trace compounds that give it a different odor quality than the synthetic version.
Natural materials are not necessarily safer than synthetics. However, they have a much longer history of use so the adverse effects are better known. Natural materials are mixtures of sometimes hundreds of compounds. There are both synergistic and modifying effects of combinations of chemicals. The actions of these combinations are often very different than isolates or synthetics.
Most fragrance materials are on the Generally Recognized as Safe List (GRAS). This designation is for these materials when they are used as food additives. Adequate testing has not been done to determine safety via other routes of exposure and in many cases safety testing was not done on safety of ingestion. Materials that were in use before 1958 as food additives were certified as GRAS based on their history of use. Very little actual safety testing was done.
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