Abstract:

When a person comes into contact with a given fragrance, he or she experiences sensations that are unique to him or her. But is it a reason why we could not try to describe 'objectively' or as 'objectively' as possible the fragrances of our industrial products? How could we seriously develop products if we are not able to characterize the ones we propose for consumer tests? Indeed humans do not have an unlimited capacity to judge the intensities of individual odour notes in complex smells (Lawless, 1999), but the food industry demonstrated a long time ago that well trained people are able to describe complex aromatic products with acuteness and reliability. In this paper we will come back to the main principles of odour perception to understand their complexity, then show how the food industry improves their products to meet the consumer's expectations using sensory descriptive analysis and finally present a current experimentation in fragrances.