LEFTOVERS TO LUXURY
Sustainable perfumes made with upcycled ingredients are key to the future of the fragrance industry.
As sustainability in the beauty and personal care industries continue to advance, new possibilities are being uncovered for raw materials that once would have been waste.
One area in particular making strides is the fragrance business, with the use of upcycled ingredients being explored by some of the world’s biggest fragrance houses.
Given the scarcity of certain precious natural ingredients necessary to create perfumes traditionally – and the large amounts of these ingredients needed – looking for alternatives has become a top priority.
Givaudan, one of the world’s largest flavour and fragrance manufacturers, and supplier to many of the most familiar perfumes on department store shelves, has been working on the idea for several years. One of its approaches involves extracting the olfactive components from rose petals a second time after they have already been processed. Instead of being discarded, they offer a new product with a markedly different – but still desirable – scent profile. Another, a cedarwood extract, is made from sawdust collected as a
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byproduct of the furniture industry. Its first round of processing results in cedarwood oil; its second, a new aromatic ingredient for perfume use.
These ingredients are beginning to reach the shelves in new perfumes, including in those by Mugler, Etat Libre d’Orange and The Nue, with more to come this year.
LMR Naturals, the naturals division of fellow global fragrance ingredients supplier IFF, has also developed a number of new options using upcycled materials, including harvest byproducts such as seeds, spent extraction material such as pulp and side streams from processing facilities, such as wastewater.
The results include new scents created from turmeric leaves traditionally discarded in production of the root, as well as reusing the traditionally discarded wastewater from cinnamon bark distillation.
The approach is being extended into beauty products in other areas, with nutrient-rich active ingredients being diverted for use in skin and haircare. Vetivyne by Givaudan is a repairing, moisturising and anti-ageing ingredient for skin care. It is made from a water-soluble extract from exhausted vetiver roots, a byproduct of the extraction procedure used to produce vetiver oil for fragrances.
Swiss cosmetics ingredient developer brand Rahn offers a skin-renewing active called ReforcylAion, made from the waste of pumpkin seeds pressed for their oil.
And in the UK, University of Leeds scientists lead by Dr Richard Blackburn and Professor Chris Rayner devised a purple hair shampoo – commonly used for balancing brassy tones in blonde hair – using blackcurrant fruit waste used in the production of Ribena. It is sold under the brand Dr. Craft.
Of course, upcycling is not entirely new to the beauty industry. Upcycling has long been used in more familiar ways, such as discarded coffee grounds used in body and face scrubs, and lanolin extracted from wool during processing for the textile industry and then used in skincare products.
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