Three 'nose-it-alls' launch many successful fragrances

Successful scents are a combination of science, top ingredients and intuition.
NEW YORK (AP) -- The nose knows.
Actually at Estee Lauder, one of the world's largest beauty companies, there are three fine-tuned noses that make or break huge perfume launches.
Evelyn Lauder, head of fragrance development worldwide, with Karyn Khoury and Ray Matts, who oversee fragrance development for the company's stable of brands, work as a team. They are charged with creating new perfumes and other scented ancillary products, and there can be dozens each year.
Just about any smell in the world is fair game for inspiration, says Lauder.
Beyond Paradise, for instance, is supposed to take the wearer on a trip to Bali through a blend of palm trees, jasmine, tamarind and "the smell of the earth"; Pleasures mixes the freshness of flowers after the rain with the feelings of inner-peace, love and happiness that rose quartz crystals are supposed to bring.
Clinique Simply is the rather unique blend of a shopping trip to Manhattan's Takashimaya flagship store and a newborn baby.
Link to memories
Lauder says it's Estee Lauder's aim to make women feel beautiful physically and emotionally, and one of the quickest ways to lift women's spirits is through smell, which has such a close link to our memories.
A scent can take you back to a happy time and place with a single whiff, she says, and the possibilities of smells that can be bottled are endless.
"Why do designers create new shoes and new clothes, and cooks new recipes? There is a creative spirit within us that is ours to explore and there is a desire to make people feel good," says Lauder.
Fragrances to fit mood
Lauder says she has tried to create an all-encompassing fragrance "wardrobe," offering different products -- ranging from light and spicy to sweet florals -- depending on mood and occasion. She's not a believer in a signature scent. It's too limiting and you risk "nasal fatigue," when you get too used to a fragrance so that you no longer smell all the notes, she says.
The secret formula used by Lauder, Khoury and Matts for turning out successful juices is no more precise than having good instincts, an appreciation for the emotional side of smell and a willingness to hunt down the rare botanical that will shape a new product.
The company's first fragrance was created by Estee Lauder herself. (Lauder died in late April; she hadn't been active in the business for 10 years.)
Until her Youth Dew bath oil hit stores in the 1953, almost all fragrance purchases were made by men for women.
Estee Lauder was convinced that women should be doing the buying so they could get what they really wanted. She packaged Youth Dew, which features Bulgarian roes, lavender blossoms, carnation and patchouli, as a bath product but instructed retailers to share a little secret with female shoppers: It can be worn as a skin perfume, too.
"Heritage and intuition -- it's what runs our business. It's the instinct of two to four people that we base a multimillion-dollar launch. It's actually kind of scary when you think about it," says Khoury.
Inspiration floats by
The inspiration for Knowing, introduced in 1988, came to Lauder literally as a breath of fresh air. She was in the south of France, waiting for her husband Leonard to finish up a phone call so they could go to lunch.
"I went out to the balcony to wait for him and I got a blast of heat. I smelled a heady, beautiful fragrance, so then we walked through the garden searching for the source. There were these big bushes with minute flowers with five petals each. I had know idea what this bush was," she explains.
"But the next day we went to the local market ... and I asked a flower vendor. He gave me the Latin name: pittosporum."
And it is indeed the top note signature of Knowing.
"If you think of fragrance as liquid emotion, then you understand why finding that right scent is so important," Matts says
And because of that emotional link, you know immediately when you've got a fragrance that works, he adds.
(It was Matts' idea to put soy milk into Clinique Simply to remind him of his baby son.)
Sure, there are marketing meetings and focus groups but the only reliable way to test a fragrance is to live with it, says Matts, which he'll do for weeks before signing off on a final formula.
The way people sample fragrances has changed over the years, though, and the change has not been for the better, according to Matts.
"We smell things on a blotter or by putting our wrist directly under our nose, not by catching a hint of the scent as you brush your hair or as you get dressed, which is how we're supposed to smell fragrance," he explains.
Matts also says it's been exaggerated how much a scent will change between one person to another. There is some variation, he allows, but the heart of the fragrance should remain the same and at the same intensity if it's a well-made perfume or eau de toilette.
Ingredients matter most
What does matter are the ingredients, and not just whether a fragrance features a rose or an orange blossom -- it matters if the rose was picked as a bud or a full blossom. Even the time of day the flower is picked might affect its scent.
"The minute you cut a rose, the molecular structure changes. Think about the difference between the smell of a fresh rose and a bouquet that you've had for a week," says Lauder.
It's these subtle-yet-important differences that drives the sometimes high prices of fragrances. Some natural flowers are very hard to obtain, and some fragrances, such as Beautiful, use a very high concentration of these ingredients, Khoury says. It can cost thousands of dollars for a single pound of petals, and literally tons of petals might be needed to produce enough fragrance for a product launch.