Looking for the origins of fragrances and perfumes in your surroundings as chemistry teaching materials

Introduction

Utilizing scents in our daily lives adds a touch of richness. As a topic for chemistry or biology exploration, such familiar materials are easy to get students interested in. They also seem suitable for summer vacation independent research projects.

I look around. Since I started living alone and moved to the city, what about fragrance materials...? They were right in front of me. The Amanatsu orange I was just popping into my mouth. The peel is available this season. Yes, I'll go with this. I'll make a tincture with this. What else...

Today is a story about that.

(Title photo: Apple mint from my original home)

Familiar scents

There are various things around us that have scents, or that indicate their presence through their smell. If you look around calmly, you are quite surrounded by such materials. Natural ones, synthetic ones—the list is endless.

Among them, the scents of flowers in the garden of my original home vary throughout the four seasons. What remains now is the gardenia. The scent of the white flower is in my top five. The season is already over, but the same goes for the Easter lily.

The scent of the narcissus at the beginning of the year and the white Mary freesia in early spring is indescribable.

And the best is the orange blossom.

I always think I wish I could recreate this scent. It seems all the scents I like are white flowers. Perhaps they rely on the wind rather than color to attract insects.

I want to present all of these as teaching materials, but the timing of the blooming and the date of the experiment do not match. So, I have no choice but to bring Amanatsu peels or apple mint leaves to use as experimental materials.

How to utilize scents

I want to collect these scents and make them last. For a long time, humans have been improving various techniques to fulfill that wish. A relatively familiar method is steam distillation.

Unlike general distillation methods, this is a method of using water to condense and collect volatile fragrance components in a mixture under mild conditions. It requires some ingenuity in the equipment. In a chemistry laboratory, you can build it by combining ready-made glass apparatus, and such specialized tools are also commercially available.

Furthermore, there is a method to devise the apparatus to perform it under reduced pressure to collect them more precisely. This can also be assembled in a chemistry laboratory using an aspirator or a rotary evaporator.

Besides that,

Currently, various methods have been devised. A method of separating components using the supercritical fluid extraction process is also being utilized. A common example is the technology used to remove caffeine from coffee. This allows for the removal of caffeine while preserving the aromatic components. This is also possible in a laboratory if specialized equipment is available.

This time, instead of using the above method, we will create a tincture by soaking the material in ethyl alcohol to extract mainly the aromatic components. Based on this, we will create a simple lotion (an astringent type) consisting of purified water, glycerin, and the scented ethyl alcohol. All three materials are readily available to the general public at pharmacies and drugstores. The goal is to learn about tinctures, which are made by extracting aromatic components into ethyl alcohol.

Conclusion

Therefore, I set aside some apple mint while mowing the grass. By soaking the leaves in ethyl alcohol and storing them in the refrigerator for two to three weeks, the scent transfers to the alcohol. The idea is to use this in place of the ethyl alcohol in the lotion mentioned above. I am not sure if it will work well. I also tried the peel of Amanatsu oranges (separating the yellow and white parts into two types) as mentioned above. After adding water, store it in the refrigerator and use it up within one week.

If you try this steadily, you will likely find materials that are suitable for each person eventually. I intend to try selecting various things throughout the four seasons.

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