Perfumery in a Sustainable World By Amandine Devillard
- Aromatika Magazine
- 16 hours ago
- 2 min read
Pg. 28-33 - 4-minute read
Perfumery has travelled a long path—from sacred rituals of ancient civilizations to a global industry rooted in chemistry and commerce. For millennia, scent was inseparable from spirituality, healing, and the natural world, shaped by flowers, woods, resins, and spices extracted through age-old methods like enfleurage and distillation. The 19th century, however, marked a turning point: synthetic molecules opened an endless creative playground for perfumers, making fragrances more stable, accessible, and reproducible for a wider public.
But today, the simplistic debate of “natural versus synthetic” is no longer enough. Some natural ingredients, though romantic and vibrationally rich, require massive land use, intensive labor, or fragile monocultures—and several iconic plants, like rosewood, agarwood, sandalwood, and myrrh, now stand endangered. Synthetic ingredients, meanwhile, can offer responsible alternatives when produced through biotechnology or green chemistry. Yet perfumery’s sustainability challenge goes far beyond the juice itself; it touches every link of the chain—from soil depletion and fair trade to packaging, transport, waste, and transparency. Consumers demand guarantees, but labels are often costly, ambiguous, or veer into greenwashing.
The future of fragrance lies in a more honest, hybrid approach—one that embraces both nature and science while reducing excess. A “less but better” mindset invites us to choose carefully, explore refills or artisan blends, and value traceability as much as olfactive beauty. Perfume is not a frivolous luxury; it nourishes identity, emotion, and connection. The real task is to reinvent perfumery so it remains meaningful without compromising the planet: a creative field grounded in responsibility, equity, and respect for the resources and people who make it possible.
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Over the 144 colourful pages in our Aromatika Magazine Perfume Special issue, we have some of the most passionate individuals devoted to the art and science of botanical perfumery from around the world.
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