Join the Senior Chemists Committee for lunch, networking, and a scientific talk on the chemistry of fragrances.

Friday, June 7, 2024
12:00-1:30 pm
371 Willard Building
RSVP in Registration

Title: Understanding the Fragrance Volatility: The Quest for Longer Lasting Scents

Abstract: People love fragrance, but they can be fleeting. How can we make that scent last longer? Perfumers have been doing this for years by manipulating the volatility of fragrance molecules as they empirically create their scents. We will be discussing several strategies that perfumers use for fragrance longevity, but in a more quantitative and physicochemical way. Approaches can be as simple as creating new molecules that mimicking the molecular shape of a less volatile molecule, to the more complex, adding non-volatile fixatives to adjust the evaporation rate from a non-ideal mixture, to fragrance precursors that by-pass the typical restrictions of vapor pressure. The key to all this "fragrance engineering" is modeling the evaporation kinetics and recent findings and experimental techniques will be discussed.

Bio: Dr. Robert L Fuller is currently teaching at Muhlenberg, Rutgers, FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) and Farleigh Dickinson colleges, including an active Fragrance research program at Muhlenberg. He has over 30 years experience in the consumer products industry and has worked at Colgate Palmolive, Firmenich and Johnson & Johnson in Product Development and Fragrance Application roles. He received his PhD degree from Princeton University in Physical Chemistry in 1990.