Climate change is stressing the jasmine, rose, vanilla, and sandalwood behind the world’s best perfumes and fragrance houses are turning to biotechnology to keep these signature scent alive.
In the jasmine fields of the Nile Delta, flower picking happens before dawn, when the flowers are still closed and their oil is most concentrated. Just a few years ago, a picker could gather around six kilograms of blossoms in a single night. Now, the same hands bring in two or three, and it can take more than eight hours to fill a single basket. The heat that has settled over Egypt is thinning the harvest and, with it, the scent itself, weakening the oil that makes the flower worth bending over in the dark to collect. Egypt grows close to half the world’s jasmine concrete, the waxy extract at the heart of countless designer perfumes, and its output from the largest processor has fallen from eleven tonnes a year in the 1970s to about 6.5 today.
A signature scent is among the few purchases people stay loyal to for decades, repurchased without a second thought, resting on an assumption that the formula is fixed. It is not. It shifts as the crops behind it shift, and the crops are growing in a world changing faster than anyone expected. Karim Elgendy of the Carboun Institute, a climate and energy think tank, explained the mechanism to Agence France-Presse: “Higher temperatures can disrupt flowering, weaken oil concentration and introduce stress that reduces yield.” Of the Egyptian villages that supply the world’s perfumers, he warned, “villages like this may lose their viability altogether.”
The crops behind your perfume are under pressure everywhere at once
The problem is not contained to one flower or one country. Lisa Hipgrave, director of the International Fragrance Association UK, told Cosmetics Business that “natural materials are particularly affected by the weather extremes – droughts, cyclones, tropical storms and flooding have hit many countries including France, China, Brazil, India, Madagascar and Indonesia, affecting all manner of the crops which supply many of the ingredients our perfumers use.” Ana Ripoll, a perfumer at the manufacturer Iberchem, says recent water shortages have affected the harvest of the rose centifolia and lavender in France. “This is something we will notice this year.” The rose centifolia is the May rose of Grasse, the cradle of French perfumery, which puts the loss at the genre’s doorstep.
Vanilla shows how little it now takes to upend an entire season. Madagascar, which grows roughly 80 percent of the world’s supply, can see a single storm gut its supply; Cyclone Gamane in 2024 cut the island’s harvest by as much as half. Sandalwood tells a similar story, its Indian trees taking 30 to 60 years to mature and harvested toward extinction, which is why Chanel maintains a conservation program protecting some 75,000 old trees in New Caledonia.
None of these ingredients are interchangeable commodities, and a perfumer cannot easily swap one origin for another without the scent changing significantly. The stakes are large enough to move an industry whose global flavor and fragrance sales are expected to top $61 billion this year.
How perfumers are rebuilding scent from the lab up
The response is reformulation, and increasingly it runs through biotechnology rather than agriculture. Fragrance houses now draw on more than 3,000 synthetic molecules, against natural ingredients that number only in the hundreds, and fermentation is widening that gap. The house now known as DSM-Firmenich developed Dreamwood as a fermentation-derived stand-in for the santalol that comes from endangered sandalwood, and Givaudan makes Ambrofix, a woody, ambery molecule produced by fermenting sugarcane in place of harvested ambergris. The aim is not to abandon naturals but to insure against their disappearance.
Some perfumers are treating that disappearance as a creative opening rather than a loss. The Boston biotechnology company Arcaea has built a fragrance line around molecules synthesized from the DNA of extinct flowers, and Givaudan master perfumer Olivia Jan described the freedom of working with an ingredient that has no precedent to The Boston Globe: “Usually, you start with the olfactory direction, and then you use whatever ingredient you need to achieve this direction. In this specific case, I had a starting point molecule, and I could go in any direction because there was no real guideline. It was total freedom for creativity.”
Jasmina Aganovic, the MIT-trained founder of Arcaea, makes the case that the science is not the enemy of the romance buyers are loyal to. “I viewed fragrance as this remarkable emotional storytelling category,” she said, “and people don’t view science as being associated with creativity, emotion, or storytelling.” The picker filling a basket before dawn and the chemist building a molecule from an extinct bloom are working the same problem from opposite ends, which is how to keep a scent alive once the field that made it possible no longer can.
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