Formulation Process: Highlight: Giuvidan – Celebrity Baby

At Givaudan, we work with several different clients, including fashion brands, celebrities, and haircare brands that want to create a fragrance or fragrance that goes into a shampoo. For example, a celebrity asked for a fragrance that smelled like her baby.
The Brief of a Celebrity Baby
We agreed and set up a brief to understand what her baby smells like. When we asked what her baby smelled like, she replied, “Well, my baby smells like my baby.” The brief is used to obtain the specs for the fragrance.
However, it was tough to obtain the specs because we had no idea what her baby smelled like, nor would we likely meet her baby. We began pulling information from a client that wants a brief that smells like a baby.
How does the celebrity want to use this? Is this fragrance in a bottle? Or a lotion?
The Process of Cruelty-Free Beauty
How our perfumer builds that product will depend if the product is going to be a body lotion, which requires less amount of fragrance that must be mixed differently than a product in a bottle.
Typically, products in a bottle have an alcohol base, which requires a different concentration and different amounts of ingredients. She wanted the fragrance inside of a bottle, but she wants it to be very safe and very soft, stating, “You know, I want it to be cruelty-free.”
We went back and we pow-wowed. We figured what the baby smelled like by the only evidence she provided: it’s how it comes out of the bath. We made sure the norms or regulations went through the regulatory department that tells us what ingredients we can use to make the product cruelty-free.
By the way, all our ingredients are cruelty-free. Just to put that out there.
We considered that she may want it made vegan. Most ingredients in fragrance are vegan, but there are a couple that isn’t because, believe it or not, you can’t use beeswax. Beeswax isn’t vegan, right?
For example, many people say, “I want a honey fragrance, but I want it to be vegan.” To honor their requests—we use our pow-wow. For our celebrity, we found the regulatory pieces we want to hit, the ingredients that smelled like a baby coming out of the bathtub.
We also had to ask ourselves how much did she want to spend? How much fragrance do they want to put into the product and all the other regulator pieces? From there, our evaluator and our perfumer get together and talk about how they are going to build the fragrance. It is usually made through the computer.