Perfume company Moellhausen

Perfumery as a branch of the chemical industry has existed for over a hundred years, but in people's imagination the work of creating a fragrance still seems like something akin to magic. There really is something in a successful perfume that cannot be explained from the point of view of chemistry, physics or economics, since no one can calculate whether the fragrance will become popular or leave a mark on history. However, fragrance creators do not rely on inspiration or luck, but on high technology, knowledge and work. This is what a perfumer's workplace looks like.

I was recently lucky enough to see how perfumes are created today at the factory of the young (only 50 years old, very young by industry standards) Italian company Moellhausen, which proclaims its tasks as creativity and pragmatism in the art of perfumery.

Moellhausen's head office is in Milan, and its main production facility is located near the commune of Cambiago, which is half an hour's drive from Milan. Here they produce natural and synthetic perfume raw materials, perfume bases for creating fragrances, fragrances and ready-made perfume compositions for clients around the world. They make raw materials both for themselves and for sale - about 1,600 items! On the barrels in the packaging shop I saw the logos of Symrise and IFF, which means that the largest perfume concerns supplement their palettes of aromatic substances with something from the Moellhausen arsenal. Moellhausen has about two hundred partners in various industries - these are manufacturers of perfumes, detergents, medicines, food and even plastics.

Our tour of the Moellhausen plant began with the fact that at the entrance the group of guests were dressed like a surgical team: they were given shoe covers, disposable white coats and hairnets. The cleanliness at the plant is really like a clinic. Because of this, even the process of moving from a snow-white office to the bright corridors of warehouses and workshops is almost imperceptible.

The second thing that surprised me was that at the plant, where highly concentrated aromatic substances are mixed, there is almost no smell. The very smelly Evernil was barely detectable in one of the warehouses, but it is very difficult to contain even in tightly sealed barrels.

No smell, no dirt, no people. We saw high-tech modern production, glass, concrete, metal and space populated by robots. They are engaged in physical labor at the plant. Automatic lines themselves scoop up raw materials from large or tiny containers, exactly as much as the programs tell them to, drip them into the right jars and mix. Automatic equipment monitors how the mixtures are aged and filtered. Errors are excluded, since everything is encrypted in barcodes: the entire life cycle of the substance, its name, rack and shelf number in the warehouse where it is stored. No magic, clouds of aromatic steam, flasks, retorts and scenes from the movie "Perfume". We met people only in the control laboratory, where the resulting compositions are checked for compliance with the recipe, tested like astronauts with powerful ultraviolet light, high and low temperatures, vibration, to guarantee the stability and quality of the compositions for the entire warranty period. Such rigorous crash tests are mandatory for Moellhausen products. There are also organoleptic laboratories, where, for example, in special chambers with windows at different heights they measure the diffusion of the aroma of a burning candle. In another laboratory they spin the drums of washing machines to determine the effect of hot water on the fragrance of washing powder.

And, naturally, people work in the Moellhausen creative laboratory. It is headed by the company's vice-director and perfumer Dominique Moellhausen (pictured in the center). Together with his sister, research director and also a perfumer, Michelle Moellhausen, they represent the fourth generation of owners of the family business.

Dominique and Michelle studied at the Institute of Perfumery in Grasse, but they received their main knowledge of working with perfume raw materials as children, spending time with their father at the factory. Now the Moellhausen company has a whole team of perfumers in several offices around the world to be closer to the customer and better understand his needs. The largest team works in Italy, in Cambiago.

Moellhausen perfumers work in parallel in two directions. The first and very important for the company is the creation of the BoldBases modular system. Individual modules - perfume bases with a narrow perfume profile (tuberose, incense, vanilla) like building blocks help perfumers to assemble stable, long-lasting and inexpensive compositions. All BoldBases consist of a small number of components (no more than eight) emphasizing the beauty of each theme. If vanilla, then this is bitter, thick and balsamic vanilla, but much more budget-friendly than natural vanilla from Madagascar, where crop failure may occur. If tuberose, then this is live tuberose with green and fruity aspects, which are not present separately in either synthetic or natural raw materials, but are present in the base. For example, the very effective fragrance Love Twist Soul Couture is made from Bold Base Touberose, where powerful animal tuberose is surrounded by green-strawberry feijoa pulp. Beautiful and unusual. One of the strongest impressions of the Milan exhibition. Other Moellhausen bases are no less interesting, it’s a pity that I couldn’t try them all during my short stay in the laboratory.

The second and most popular area of ​​work is the actual creation of perfume fragrances for high perfumery, household chemicals, and home fragrances.

People turn to the Moellhausen laboratory if they need to optimize a composition. In other words, reassemble from more modern, more accessible, permitted, or budget materials. This is not an easy task, since it is very difficult to achieve complete similarity. Perfumers in this area of ​​work have a unique sense of smell and incredible knowledge of regulatory documents and raw materials. This is where the real magic happens. And to help them is a powerful analytical laboratory equipped with a gas and liquid chromatograph.

This area of ​​work also includes assembling a composition created by an independent perfumer from Moellhausen materials. You can choose a brilliant solo perfumer or a laboratory without its own production to create your perfume, but someone will have to professionally, with knowledge of standards and compliance with technologies, mix the perfume concentrate. That's what they come here for.

Well, and the main thing is the creation of original perfume compositions. A field in which it is very difficult for a young perfumer and a young company to break through. The environment is conservative and competitive. But it seems to me that Moellhausen has good prospects. From those developments that I had a chance to try, interesting multi-layered compositions can come out - real French perfumes (c), without magic, created exclusively by labor and talent.

Many thanks to Dominique Moellhausen, her company and Lyuba Berlyanskaya (Brocard) for the opportunity to visit a real modern perfume production.

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