Nose Job

Deep in a jungle crawling with foot-long insects, vengeful monkeys and leathery alligators, a man with flowing hair and whiskers pops open a strange metal suitcase.

Inside is a computerized device that looks like a bomb. He wires it to a nearby flower, flips a switch and then departs, snaking past sulfuric volcanoes and bubbling mud. When he returns the next day, he hopes to have captured the previously unwhiffed ingredients for a future perfume or cologne.

Other professional sniffers are hunting for exotic scents in the Himalayas, in Japanese Buddhist temples, at beaches and baseball dugouts--and in the unlikely fragrance capital of the world, Teaneck, N.J.

Their discoveries include ants that smell like mint, lilies that reek of ginger ale and laboratory concoctions that evoke such abstractions as “inner peace” or “caring.”

In Costa Rica, hired noses stumbled upon a plant that might be the fragrance equivalent of a mood ring.

“We were walking through this field toward a volcano” when something extraordinary happened, says Lori Smith of Givaudan-Roure Corp., which designs scents for the likes of Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent and brand-name shampoos, detergents and carpet cleaners.

“One of us smelled peach, another got basil and one [detected] mint,” she says. “It’s pretty unusual for each of us to smell something different because we’re all trained.”

The confusion came from an herb called barbanacea, which gives off three to four odors at once, Smith says: “It’s kind of like a fragrance with special effects . . . like a spinning light.”

And, for future holiday shoppers, it could become the next big thing in perfumes.

“People want a fragrance that changes, that reacts on them personally,” she says.

Other possible scents on the horizon include the smell of a freshly opened Sega video game, Eau de Starbucks and--pray for divine intervention--Beavis and Butt-head in a bottle.

Not long ago, fragrance makers relied heavily on crushed flowers (10,000 petals for a single gram of oil) and dead whales and beavers for cologne ingredients. Today’s juice--as insiders call perfume--is basically a laboratory affair.

By fitting a special glass globe over a plant--or any other object--chemists can vacuum up its aroma molecules, then reproduce them in a lab.

Michael Jordan’s new cologne, for example, contains whiffs of a baseball mitt (to represent his stint in that sport) and the grass at Pebble Beach (where he likes to golf).

For designer Bob Mackie, also a Givaudan-Roure client, perfumer Carlos Vinals used the glass-dome method on some Dom Perignon, hoping to clone its “effervescent, sparkling freshness.”

Unhappy with the results, he tried a mimosa instead.

“It was a bit wacky at first,” says Vinals, whose desk at Givaudan-Roure’s Teaneck research center is overrun by tiny bottles of “pepper tonic,” “crushed wine leaves,” “sensual dry” and other liquid scents. “But I fine-tuned it . . . [and mixed it into] Mackie perfume.”

Such fine-tuning can be painstaking. Cologne formulas typically require up to 400 ingredients and two years of tinkering before hitting the market.

At Givaudan-Roure, which is one of the world’s oldest and largest fragrance designers, the work is done in a sleek brick building filled with mechanical noses, an aroma “library” and odors that only visitors seem to notice.

“What smell?” employees invariably ask when quizzed about the bouquets wafting through hallways and offices. Even when the fumes are so overpowering it seems there must have been a spill, staffers shrug in bewilderment.

Creating successful scents is an inexact art--part science, part voodoo. Everything from food to religion to monkeys with full bladders can enter into it.

Perfume gurus also pore over reports from something called the Olfactory Research Fund, which sponsors psychological studies on how aromas influence mood and perceptions.

“Fragrances are the hidden communicators in many products,” says Tom McGee, vice president of innovation at Givaudan-Roure. “You can test a laundry detergent with three different fragrances and get totally different reactions from consumers. People will think [one version] is cleaner because of the smell.”

Odors also trigger mental images of colors and sounds. “You can ‘hear’ certain smells,” he says. “We’ve had amateurs come in and match [noises] to specific aromas.”

But reactions aren’t always predictable.

“We once put scent strips in National Geographic [as part of a marketing survey],” McGee recalls. “One of the strips was a sulfur smell, like the kind used in natural gas. When we asked, ‘Would you wear this scent as a perfume?’ in Thailand, 17% said yes.”

Apparently, it resembled the aroma of a Thai fruit. And because there’s a strong link between smell and the sense of taste, cuisine habits affect perfume preferences, McGee says.

In the West in recent years, vanilla, fruit and other “comfort” food scents have become popular fragrance components.

As diets change, perfumes will shift too, McGee says: “The trend toward more exotic and spicy foods will trickle through . . . and influence what people want to wear.”

Religion might be another factor. Smith predicts future colognes will incorporate notes of burning incense and other aromas associated with “ancient wisdom and spirituality.”

“Ten years ago, fragrance was predominantly used as [a romantic] attractant, something that said, ‘Notice me.’ Now, we’re looking for scents that help bring [people] to some kind of inner peace and balance, something they can meditate with,” she says. “It’s an evolution of the word ‘relax.’ ”

To locate such aromas, Givaudan-Roure recently began organizing scent safaris.

The destinations are usually exotic, but the expeditions do have some less-than-glamorous aspects, such as sniffing bugs, dodging snakes and occasionally becoming a human outhouse to angry primates.

Fragrance scientist Ken Purzycki learned the hard way that if howler monkeys find someone invading their turf, they retaliate by urinating. “I thought it was raining,” he says.

But there have been payoffs.

In the rain forests of Costa Rica, scent sleuths found a blossom called lueha candida, which Purzycki describes as having “a rose character with a little bit of creaminess to it.” Givaudan-Roure hopes to have it on the market within a year.

Collecting fragrance samples in the wild could revolutionize perfuming, McGee says.

“If you grow things in a greenhouse, you get . . . [the smell of] a flower in a greenhouse,” he explains. “It’s like wine. Where you grow the grapes . . . changes the flavor of the wine.”

And a flower’s redolence also alters according to climate, soil and interaction with its surroundings.

But capturing that natural scent is tricky.

The machines that analyze the chemical makeup of fragrance molecules are so hypersensitive that they detect “what soap the [field researchers] were washing their hands with,” Purzycki says. “We’ve picked up traces of car exhaust . . . [and] mothball molecules from the collection lab.”

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Not all fragrance research is plants and chemistry. Back in Teaneck, Smith hunts scents from a more esoteric angle. As Givaudan-Roure’s resident crystal ball-gazer, she forecasts trends in sports, art, music and dining, then analyzes their possible effect on cologne and perfume tastes.

Calling herself a “cultural anthropologist of the future,” she hangs out in nightclubs, exchanges e-mail with shamans and sometimes spends weekends on icy mountain slopes.

On the mountain treks, she interviews teen snowboarders. Givaudan-Roure is feverishly looking for a way to bottle the “essence” of snowboarding, she says: “Something that provides a little rush . . . probably with some natural-smelling element, but it could also be a high-tech scent.”

Noting that riders often spend more money on board wax than on personal care, Smith envisions a product that could somehow be used “for boards and bodies both,” sort of like the old “Saturday Night Live” ad parody, “It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.”

Her slogan: “For you and all your stuff.”

She also foresees fragrances based on the trendy coffeehouse scene. Java bean scents have already found their way into bath products and candles, she notes. And perfume could be next, perhaps brewed with such related aromas as cinnamon and nutmeg. “Those smells are associated now with dating,” Smith says. “Coffeehouses are where people socialize.”

A more ominous possibility, perhaps, is Beavis and Butt-head cologne. “The kids have told me they’d buy it,” she says.

Finding fragrances to appeal to future generations is another of Smith’s projects. What will be the “comfort scents” for today’s toddlers when they reach adulthood? she wonders. “Maybe the smell of a computer or technology,” she theorizes. “Maybe [the aroma from] opening a new Sega game. Sega might be their vanilla.”

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Not all the emphasis is on youth culture, however.

Baby boomers still drive a huge portion of the $5-billion-a-year fragrance market, McGee says. And there’s a problem ahead.

Researchers have discovered that the sense of smell fades after age 60 in much the same way that taste buds lose potency with age.

“In other words, when you smell a fragrance at 65, it doesn’t smell the same as it did when you were 40,” McGee says. “So we have to figure out which parts of the sense of smell are dropping off faster so we can boost some things [in perfumes] and not others.”

That’s not the only fragrance-industry nightmare, however.

Although many consumers don’t realize it, most colognes aren’t created or manufactured by the company on the label, but by Givaudan-Roure, International Flavors & Fragrances or another perfume house.

“Some of the world’s finest French perfumes are made in Totowa, N.J.,” quips one G-R executive.

In recent years, though, competition in the industry has turned fierce.

“You’re required to do a lot more than just make pretty smells these days,” McGee says. “Now, three to four fragrance houses compete for the same client.”

The result: lots of losing formulas--and costly marketing tests--sitting on company shelves. It’s all or nothing.

“Our victories are short-lived, and our defeats haunt us forever,” says perfumer Steven DeMercado. “We live on an emotional roller coaster.”

Finally, there’s the, uh, dark side of fragrance-making.

To help finance the perfume part of the business, Givaudan-Roure devotes a lot of work to scents for toilet bowl cleaners, antiperspirants and soaps.

“That means if you’re making products designed to cover up bad odors, you’ve got to reproduce the actual malodors to see if your product works,” says McGee, whose office is cluttered with spray bottles labeled “garbage,” “mildew” and “fecal.”

Sometimes, that means pumping the artificial stench--and its alleged antidote--through a contraption called the vapor phase synthesizer, then inhaling the results through a nose-sized ventilator.

He concludes: “It’s not always the happiest of jobs.”

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Why No One Asks Reporters to Blend Perfumes

In perfume industry lingo, a scent is never just a scent. It’s a symphony, a fine French wine or--in the case of Hugo Boss’ designer fragrance--”a fresh, northeasterly ozonic smell, with a hint of pine forest behind it.”

Uh, right.

Which got us to thinking about some perfumes we’d like to see:

Eau de Clinton: Changes its aroma to match whoever’s wearing it, thanks to a centrist bouquet of shredded FBI files with an undertone of waffle--all deep-fried.

Gas Station Men’s Room: A porcelain claustrophobic base, with a urinal-cake-top note and a breezy wisp of Chevron Supreme.

cK high: The warm sensuousness of fresh mimeograph paper mixed with essence of cafeteria sloppy joe, a hint of dissected-frog formaldehyde and a chalky detention hall ambience. Topped by a whiff of gym.

Dennis Rodman: Why should Michael Jordan be the only basketball player with a cologne? Rodman takes the unisex fragrance phenomenon one step further with a scent that can be worn by men, women or men dressed as women.

Ovitz for Men: $90 million an ounce.