GC-MS Fragrance Testing

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:06]Hello and welcome. So far, I use my GCMS for forensic toxicology, environmental testing, drug and food safety, and some organic chemistry process. [music] Another very popular usage for this incredible instrument is the fragrance product development and cosmetic formulation industry.

[00:00:24]I guess I should have thought about this analysis sooner, but I must thank Kim Derrick again for this brilliant suggestion. So here, I will analyze these six popular brand of men cologne and compare this cheaper one with this more expensive luxury liquid. Now, I know nothing of this business and if I had to explain a complex scent, I would really struggle since my exposure to the odor field is limited to everyday smells, lab chemicals, and the occasional prank stuff.

[00:00:55]Smells like crap.

[00:00:56]But first, my GCMS suffered a critical malfunction during an analysis. The signal was slowly disappearing by peaks in sensitivity were completely gone. I first thought the ion volume was getting too dirty, especially after the Quaturn sample from that feel free garbage a few months ago. In retrospect, I wasn't far from the real problem. I cleaned it and restarted, but that didn't help. At this point, increasing the detector voltage was an option, but this decreased my detector's life and finding a replacement detector for this 23-year-old instrument is unusual at best. Also, the work involved in replacing it is not a fun time, but I did. That's why I always keep spare part for everything.

[00:01:38]But still, no signal. So by now, I'm really starting to panic. I spent many hours testing and trimming the column and I eventually replaced it with a new one. I also changed the septum, the liner, the filament, and that's when I found out the heater wasn't working. So I replaced this weird fuse, but still nothing. How about the whole gas handling module? Nope. The injector?

[00:02:00]Still no. So, I then took a closer look at the ion optic and I rebuilt the whole ion source. I think the repeller was just dirty enough to short with lens number three, and once I cleaned it, just in case, I also replaced the vacuum pump oil and the calibration gas module, so I wouldn't have to do it later. This was worth it. The vacuum had improved significantly. The sensitivity is even better than before, and it picks a sharp and baseline is smooth and stable. The GC-MS only needs a few microliters for this analysis, and even that needs to be diluted in methanol before injecting a tiny fraction. [music] So, I was certainly not going to spend thousands of dollars on expensive glass bottles for this video. I only purchased samplers and barely used any of them, so you will only see the cheap one in the fancy rotating display and stock photo for the expensive one. I'm sorry. All right, so let's take a look at the first cologne I analyzed. When I'm forced to be social, I wear this one, and I do like it. It smells great and it's affordable. You'll find it on Amazon at about $135 for 100 ml. Fuck ounces. The main ingredient is 7-octen-2-ol, 2,6-dimethyl, also called dihydromyrcenol. It has a fresh, strong, sweet, lemon-like citrus smells with lavender notes and is often used in soap, fine fragrances, and household cleaning products. to be widely used in perfumery in general, and it will come up often in this video. Next is this 4-tert-butylcyclohexyl acetate, known as Verdenex, another extensively used chemical with a woody, floral, pine, and fruity odor. Now, these two alone make up about 68% of the total mix. To a lesser degree, limonene, pinene, and this 6-4-carene with a distinct pine-like aroma were also present. I uploaded the a analytical report to ChatGPT and ask AI to make sense of all of this stuff. The fragrance is heavily built around classic terpene chemistry, >> [music] >> giving it a fresh, piney, citrus, aromatic, masculine profile. Major terpene compounds include alpha-pinene, limonene, forkarene, linalool, and linalyl acetate.

[00:04:12]Wait, I've been saying limonene wrong this whole time? Yes, this GCMS report for Mont Blanc Legend is actually pretty interesting [music] because it contains a mix of expected fragrance terpenes, fixatives, aroma esters, >> [music] >> and several compounds that are unusual or unexpected in a mainstream cologne analysis. Next, Neptunium analyzed [music] Bleu de Chanel. It's pronounced Bleu de Chanel. You dick. The official website lists this fancy liquid at $1.42 a mil. The dihydromyrcenol is here again at the same retention time with a 78% probability. Also, this makes up about 20% of the fragrance. At 8.7 minutes, we find the next important product, sylvestrene or cycloisolongifolene 1-methyl-5- 1-methylethyl, which does look like limonene. As the name suggests, it is not a citrus fragrance, but has a pine-like smell and is a natural product found in evergreen and coniferous tree.

[00:05:09]There's also some linalyl acetate, which is sweet, fruity, and woody with notes of bergamot, lavender, and pear. But, I'm not an expert, so I think it's beautiful. [music] It's fresh. It's crisp. It's really clean. It's almost that sort of like shower fresh fragrance. There's a grapefruit note in this. There's a lemon. There's a bergamot. There's lavender. Again, those woods with sandalwood, cedar, amber wood, and the tonka bean base, which gives it just a slight sweetness on the skin. Okay, Yves Saint Laurent or YSL for AI is a bit more affordable [music] here. The official site listed at $80 for the same volume as the previous two.

[00:05:45]The same seven octane or dihydro mercenol at 8 minutes is here again. And there's also some ethyl linalool for the fresh laundry hint. And although synthetic, this molecule can be found in lavender and bergamot. The Christian Dior Sauvage is interesting because it has this massive peak at 23 minutes identified as a diacetin or glycerol diacetate. This is a widely used plasticizer and when pure, it's a viscous odorless liquid that does not interfere with the smell. It looks like Christian Dior uses it as a solvent. And surprise, that old seventh octane is here again. And the silver stream pine like with a linalool and a bit of ethyl linalool, too. Aside from the diacetin, these make up roughly 3/4 of the chemical signature of this fragrance. We find our old friend silver stream and dihydro mercenol again at 8.69 and 12.34 minutes in the Louis Vuitton. Now, this one will set you back $13,230 per gallon or $3,500 a liter. There was a non-negligible amount of linalool, too, in this guy. If this doesn't look familiar, it is also known as a meracite and has a strong grapefruit smell.

[00:06:54]Linalool acetate is also here at about 16% of the mix.

[00:06:59]That should get us a fruity but fresh scent with hint of pine. At the start, it is a bit spicy. It's a bit sharp. It also has a bit of fruitiness. It's a mix of grapefruit, which is really pushing that juicy fruitiness. But I especially notice the ginger. I think that's the most prominent note in this fragrance alongside ambroxan in the dry down. But also in the opening is the bergamot.

[00:07:20]Maybe that's giving it a sharper edge.

[00:07:22]It also smells a tad herbal to me and a fresh green spicy. And this is a ginger, grapefruit, and ambroxan fragrance. This next one is the most expensive I tested, but you would not guess that looking at the ion chromatogram indicating a few stuff at high concentration. The first one here is Lilial, a controversial compound banned in the European Union since 2022 for its potentially harmful effect on fertility and reproduction.

[00:07:51]The irony for a product named Vanilla Sex is not lost on anyone. This juice sells for $615.

[00:07:58]Assuming a 0.1 ml per spray, a single squeeze will set you back over 60 cents.

[00:08:04]Beta-Methyl Ion is at 36.77 minutes, just after the large one. This higher peak was misidentified, but it's probably curcuminol, which indicate the use of turmeric-based essential oil.

[00:08:17]More on that later. The consensus on this one is remarkably negative for such a high-end product. The expert did not like it. Uh piss and caca. Finally, I compare two brand with a similar aroma, the infamous Creed Aventus Absolute and the ALT Executive No. 26. They have been found to smell very similar, but one sells for about 10 times the price of the other. So, what is the difference? A side-by-side look at the total ion chromatogram reveal pure product used in one [music] and a mess of crap in the other. At first glance, they don't seem to have much in common, but if you wanted to go for a pine-like flower fresh fragrance with [music] hints of citrus, well, most of the previously explored chemicals would be here. So, naturally, both of them have pinene, three and four caring, and terpinene, linalool, and linalyl acetate, and the all-time classic, the hydromyrcenol. The ALT brand seems to have the highest solvent and glycol concentration to cut cost. On the other hand, the more expensive Creed uses cleaner terpene with fewer synthetic artifact. Now, it is true that the GC-MS is the perfect instrument to recreate the fragrance. Copycats used it extensively for that purpose.

[00:09:33]I am just exploring the science and the chemistry. I am certainly not trying to make enemy in the perfume industry. Some company even [music] offer this service, but at a steep price. I do understand the frustration of someone who spent month or perhaps years perfecting a product wanting to keep their intellectual property from being copied in a few minutes. So, could this instrument be defeated? Yes, it can.

[00:09:57]For example, this is the mass spectrum of P Saline. We know that because we know how it breaks down in the ion source. So, we can predict what P Saline spectrum should look like. That spectrum is already saved in the library, so the software can recall it. It's possible to create a molecule that has never been seen before and does not exist in the library. Reconstructing what it is from its mass spectrum is not impossible, but very difficult, tedious, and time-consuming. To create that never-before-seen [music] molecule takes a team of chemists to come up with a non-toxic, non-smelling, or maybe good-smelling, and a stable molecule.

[00:10:36]Not a trivial weekend project. Another method called Cryptosim consists of overwhelming the GC-MS with hundreds of interference peak from inert molecular fragment. This creates a huge mess of phantom useless peaks and unrelated compound. This forces the counterfeit into a wild goose chase by making the analysis extremely tedious, time-consuming, and even costly. I don't know if it was done before ever, but I thought of another method, but probably too expensive to implement. This is the mass spectrum of acetic acid.

[00:11:10]And this is the one I got from acetic acid D. This is just acetic acid with a deuterium atom and three hydrogen instead [music] of four hydrogen. The difference of a single mass unit shifts the spectrum one EMU higher, which makes the library unable to correctly identify it. So, if this molecule had a different isotope somewhere, it would also confuse the software and leave the chemist struggling to identify the correct chemical.

[00:11:38]I can identify some isotopic ratio discrepancies, but this is not a high resolution mass spectrometer. Such a unit is far more expensive and requires costly software to run. Probably not worth the time. I did look for isotopic imbalance using [music] the NIST library and mass interpreter, but quickly gave up. Now, this all may be very exciting to some viewers, but there is hundreds of thousands, if not millions of colognes and perfumes out there. So, please understand I cannot answer every request for new analysis. I know I butchered a lot of names in this video and I apologize. I had microphone issues.

[00:12:14]>> [music] >> So, this is probably not your first YouTube video and you know what to do.

[00:12:19]Thumbs up if you like it, subscribe if you want, Patreon, bell, share. I hope to see you again on the next one and thank you for watching.

[00:12:28]Damn it.