Been hearing all the fragrance influencers mention "maceration" a lot recently..
None of those people took 1 day of organic chemistry. They're just running with a term that frag com misuses. It breaks my STEM brain.
Maceration (in both chemistry and perfumery - chemistry's artistic cousin) - is putting natural ingredients in a low temp solvent. The solvent pulls the aromachemicals from the natural ingredient. So with lemon peels, the thing that makes it smell like a lemon, is unsurprisingly limonene. That gets pulled from the zest. (if you want to make some really lemon-y tasting lemonade, put the lemon peels in a container of sugar. The sugar will draw the lemon chemical off the peel, and you'll have super lemon flavored sugar, that you can then use in your lemonade. I got a batch I'm working on right now actually)
Now that you've pulled that limonene off the zest, probably run that solution through some more processes to concentrate the limonene.
All the aromachemicals have macerated WAY BEFORE they even think of mixing them up to make a fragrance. Some of them jawns been on the shelf for years.
A perfumer gets a brief from the person wanting to make a fragrance. They grab these chemicals off the shelf, mix them up, and the there's a back and forth between the person paying the bill and the person doing the work on if it captures the story they're trying to sell.
Once the formula is agreed upon, they mix up
55 gallon drums of the stuff
It sits for a while and MATURES, aka MATURATION.
Just like before this is the aroma chemicals mixing, blending, and reacting with each other,
outside of presence of air.
It's like the way a soup tastes good the day you make it, but even better the 2nd day..
Now what's happening with old boy - is that air gets pulled into the atomizer every time it's used. And that air introduces oxygen to chemicals that had been largely just chilling by themselves.
That causes chemical changes.
These Arab perfumes and Clones - the mfr's rush to get them out, so there's less MATURATION.
So when you get a Dua Fragrance/Lattafa, and it smells harsh - it's mostly because they haven't been chilling for months.
Maybe if you let them sit for a while, they would smell better on first atomize, maybe not. I'm not gonna buy multiple bottles of something for science.
What does change the fragrance is using it, and introducing air to the bottle.
*rant mode off*
Not trying to offend anyone. So far removed from my Chem E days, yet folks still know how to rile me up
