Any natural perfumer who reads this knows why I have to comment on this: Burr is pretty clearly not a fan of natural perfumery, and from listening to an NPR interview he did awhile back, he’s actively campaigning against naturals.
But when he does do that campaign, I don’t get the impression, after reading this book that he’s thinking of us, directly. By us I mean those of us who are fledgling houses, most of us working from makeshift studios in home, the majority of us never intending for a minute to get one of our perfumes under his nose. If it turns out he actually is, then he’s remiss in not interviewing a single one of us. My perfumery is netting on a good month around $100 - I’m actually surprised and elated when I have to pay taxes. I have no celebrity, no tradition, and despite some rumblings of politics in my sphere, no one but my own conscience to answer to. To someone such as Burr, I’m nonexistent. Yet this guy’s campaigning could do me some serious damage.
But I’m going to be giving him the benefit of the doubt for one reason and one reason only: he’s actually kind of trying to do what I’m trying to do.
When he’s speaking out against naturals, I get the impression that he’s really speaking out against using natural labeling as a marketing tool. I’m with him on that. Heck, a good portion of my posts about greenwashing and differentiating between fragrance and essential oils is about that.
I do find his additional comments about the use of naturals not so much uninformed as underinformed. While certainly I was annoyed as any other natural perfumer would be, Burr says himself that his opinions do not come from malice and I believe him. The two keys Burr points to in the naturals versus synthetics argument is in regards allergies and expense, and while among my fellow tiny bath and body makers fragrance oils (the synthetics) are the lower cost option, I’m willing to accept this may not be the case for large-scale manufacturers.
He rightly points out that some synthetic materials are just as expensive or moreso than their natural counterparts. He also expresses something I’ve mentioned often: Indian sandalwood is endangered, and with endangered plants it’s often preferable to switch over to a synthetic rather than continue depleting natural, oxygen-giving resources. 1
That said, there is a slight hole in all of this: how the synthetics are made or extracted is a lock-and-key secret. Should the FDA require full disclosure of perfume ingredients as recommended by the National Coalition of the Chemically injured, then how those ingredients are created will quickly2 become part of the required disclosure. There’s going to be a whole bunch of angry vegans, because some of those molecules, just like their pharmaceutical counterparts, are extracted from animal parts. Right now much of vegan-labeled products using fragrance oils are labeled on faith alone, because the relevant data about those smelly molecules is well-hidden.
His next argument involved allergens. Yes, a fair number of my patrons come to me because they insist that their experiences with the synthetics at the perfume counters triggered allergic reactions, reactions they don’t experience when exposed to my perfumes. (This does NOT mean my perfumes are hypoallergenic. I’ve met people allergic to water, you might be allergic to something in a natural fragrance.) Burr posits that because a synthetic can be composed of a single molecule, and a natural of equivalent scent is composed of many molecules that statistically speaking the natural has a greater chance for allergic response than does the synthetic. If you look at it mathematically, that follows, but unfortunately, that’s not quite how allergy works.
Looking at it from my perspective as someone with an allergic disease who as a matter of survival has to spend a portion of my week reading up on the latest discoveries about allergies and histamine responses, that’s just not how it works out. Our bodies know the real things from the fakes, even when the fakes are exquisitely structured to match their natural molecules. So if someone spritzes that synthetic, the human body will first look to that molecule obviously not nature-made, because after thousands of years of evolution, our DNA has a reasonable idea what a rose or tangerine molecule set should look like.
And here is where both Burr and I are both guilty. If we really wanted to sort this out, we’d need to get our hot little hands on long-term allergy studies that are in no way funded by a pharmaceutical company or by one of the big chemical companies that sell perfume notes. I’m willing to bet that if there are such studies out there, they’re still much, much too small (under 1000 participants) to give us valid empirical data.
I haven’t spent much time reading up on the opinions on perfume blogs or discussing this book with other natural perfumers, but from what little scanning I’ve done I get the jist that they’re not happy, especially as Burr has been quite vocal about his opposition to the natural. While I’m absolutely fine with him taking that position aesthetically and possibly environmentally speaking, I don’t think he has much more in the way of facts on the subject than I do. What he’s got is the inevitable indoctrination that happens when you spend days winning over interviewees you personally like; because you want them to like you, you start to be like them.
But if he takes on the Burt’s Bees “naturals education” campaign as the result of this, I’m sending him a bottle of nice synthetic Chanel. As a sincere thank you.
