What Is ScentTrek? How Perfumers Capture a Living Plant's Scent

ScentTrek is Givaudan’s method for recording the scent of a living plant where it grows, without picking it. Perfumers then rebuild that scent in the lab. When you see “ScentTrek” on a note list, as in Tom Ford’s Electric Cherry or Ombré Leather Reserve, it means the note is a reconstruction based on that research, not an oil extracted from the plant.

How Does ScentTrek Work?

It’s a form of headspace sampling. The headspace is the air immediately around a flower, fruit or branch, full of the molecules it’s giving off. A glass vessel is placed around the living plant and that scented air is drawn off and trapped for analysis. Givaudan’s 2000 annual report shows the idea with an orchid: the flower stays on the plant, and only its scent leaves.

Back in the lab, chemists identify what’s in the sample, and a perfumer uses that as a blueprint to rebuild the smell with synthetic and natural materials. Givaudan’s account of Roman Kaiser’s research describes exactly that: analysis first, then a reconstruction from individual scent materials.

Why Not Just Extract the Oil?

Because many plants either won’t give one or give the wrong one. Some flowers, like lilac and lily of the valley, yield no usable oil at all. Others change when you heat or dissolve them: a distilled flower can smell cooked, flat or completely different from the living bloom. And some plants are too rare, too remote or too fragile to harvest. Headspace records what the living plant smells like, and leaves it growing.

That makes ScentTrek different from extraction methods with similar-sounding brand names. MANE’s Jungle Essence, for example, is supercritical CO₂ extraction, a way of getting material out of a plant, not a way of recording its air.

Where Can You Smell ScentTrek?

Tom Ford uses it most visibly:

• Ombré Leather Reserve lists silver juniper and pinyon wood ScentTrek, from research in the Chisos Mountains of Texas. Our Reserve article covers the full composition.
• Electric Cherry lists a morello cherry ScentTrek, which is why its cherry is tarter and juicier than the liqueur cherries in Lost Cherry. More in our cherry perfume list.
• The original Black Orchid (2006) used ScentTrek reconstructions, according to Givaudan’s 2006 annual report, which describes the ScentTrek expeditions behind them.

Does ScentTrek Make a Perfume Better?

It makes a note more faithful to a living plant, which is the point. It doesn’t make the perfume smell good on its own: the perfumer still decides what to do with that juniper or cherry. Read it as a clue to the direction of the note, then judge the finished scent. A ScentTrek juniper tells you to expect something fresh, resinous and outdoorsy; whether you like it is the usual question.

The ScentTrek glossary entry has the short version, and aromachemical explains the synthetic materials perfumers rebuild these scents with.