| 英文原文阅读 |
The Perfume Hunters
Sniffing out new smells for use in cosmetics and household products involves blood, sweat and plenty of insect repellent.
Tired, scratched and soaked in sweat, the hunters begin to think of turning back. Time is running out. Dusk is falling and they still haven't caught sight of their quarry. Suddenly they stop. One of the men lifts his head and sniffs. He knows they are close. He scans the undergrowth in the deepening gloom--and suddenly he spots what they have been looking for. There, hidden beneath some leaves at nose height is a tiny spike of flowers, the whole bunch no bigger than a thumbnail. Within minutes, the hunters have set their trap. All they have to do now is wait.
The hard work was worth it. The next morning, there in the trap is a rare catch--a new sort of smell. For the men in the Madagascan forest are perfume hunters. And instead of rifles, they are armed with nothing more sinister than a few glass jars, a couple of pumps and some tubing which they will use to capture new and exciting fragrances to make our lives smell sweeter.
Ever since the unguentari plied their trade in ancient Rome, perfumers have had to keep abreast of changing fashions. These days they have several thousand ingredients to choose from when creating new scents, but there is always a demand for new combinations. The bigger the "palette" of smells, the better the perfumer's chance of creating something new and fashionable. Even with everyday products such as shampoo and soap, consumers are becoming increasingly fussy. Cheap, synthetic smells are out. Fresh, natural smells are in. And many of today's fragrances have to survive tougher treatment than ever before, resisting the destructive power of bleach or a high temperature wash cycle.
Chemists can now create new smells from synthetic molecules, but nature has been in the business far longer. Plants produce countless fragrant chemicals. Many are intended to attract pollinators. Others are produced for quite different purposes. The fragrant resins that ooze from wounds in a tree, for example, defend it against infection.
The island of Madagascar is an evolutionary hot spot; 85% of its plants are unique, making it an ideal source for novel fragrances. So last October an expedition, including Robin Clery, a chemist, and Claude Dir, a perfume company director, explored two contrasting landscapes in northern Madagascar. Their first stop was a remnant of rainforest in the national park of Montaigne d'Ambre. The second was the tiny uninhabited island of Nosy Hara off the northwest coast.
With some simple technology, borrowed from the pollution monitoring industry, and a fair amount of ingenuity, the perfume hunters bagged 20 promising new aromas in the Madagascan rainforest. Each day the team set out from their "hotel"--a wooden hut lit by kerosene lamps, and trailed up and down paths and animal tracks, exploring the thick vegetation up to 10 meters on either side of the trail. Some smells came from obvious places, often big showy flowers within easy reach. Others were harder to pin down. "Often it was the very small flowers that were much more interesting," says Clery.
In fact, some of the most promising fragrances were given off by resins that oozed from the bark of trees. Resins are the source of many traditional perfumes such as frankincense and myrrh. The most exciting resin that the team found came from a Calophyllum tree, a relative of the Asian beauty leaf, which produces a strongly scented medicinal oil. The sap smelt rich and aromatic, but it also smelt of something the fragrance industry has had to learn to live without-castoretum, a substance extracted from the musk glands of beavers and once a key ingredient in many perfumes. "We don't use animal products any longer," says Dir, "so to find a tree with an animal smell is extremely precious."
After the luxuriance of the rainforest, the little-known island of Nosy Hara was a stark, dry place--geologically and biologically very different from the mainland. "Apart from two beaches, the rest of the island is impenetrable, except by hacking through the bush," says Clery. One of the biggest prizes here was a sweet-smelling sap weeping from the gnarled branches of some ancient shrubby trees in the parched interior. So far no one has been able to identify the plant.
The group also set out from the island to capture the smell of coral reefs. Odors that conjure up sunkissed seas are highly sought after by the perfume industry. "From the ocean, the only thing we have is seaweed, and that has a dark and heavy aroma. We hope to find something unique among the corals," says Dir.
The challenge for the hunters was to extract a smell from water rather than air. This was an opportunity to try Clery's new "aquaspace" apparatus--a set of filters that work underwater. On Nosy Hara, jars were fixed over knobs of coral about 2 meters down and water pumped out over the absorbent filters. So what does coral smell like? "It's a bit like lobster and crab," says Clery.
The team's task now is to recreate the best of their captured smells. First they must identify the molecules that make up each fragrance. Some ingredients may be quite common chemicals. But some may be completely novel, or they may be too complex or expensive to make in the lab. The challenge then is to conjure up the fragrances with more readily available materials. "We can avoid the need to import plants from the rainforest by creating the smell with a different set of chemicals from those in the original material," says Clery. "If we get it right, you can sniff the sample and it will transport you straight back to the moment you smelt it in the rainforest."
Summary
The perfume trade has a long history, dating back to (14) _____________. Today, perfumers can choose from a wider range of chemicals, and many of these are synthetic. However, fresh, natural fragrances are more (15) _____________ and perfumers continue to hunt for new smells from nature. Plants are a major source of perfumes, producing smells for many reasons, such as to encourage useful insects and to prevent (16) _________. Last October, perfume hunters traveled to Madagascar, a promising site for new smells because of the (17) _____________ of its trees and flowers. In a rainforest, the group collected an extremely valuable smell which resembled a chemical called castoretum. This new smell was considered very useful because today perfumers have stopped employing (18) _____________. At a small island, the fragrances of (19) _____________ were collected by the same team using equipment that works underwater. On returning to the laboratory, the group will attempt to reproduce the new smells using chemicals that are (20) _____________.
|
