Counterfeiting and quantification using an electronic nose in the perfumed cleaner industry

The improvement of analytical techniques to analyse perfume products is becoming more and more important for industries working in this field. Traditional analysis tests rely on sensory panel evaluation of formulations and, increasingly, gas chromatography is being used to analyse the chemical composition of perfumes. For the development of more routine control tests, techniques that are simpler and faster become of interest. The use of an electronic nose system for consistent qualitative and quantitative analysis of perfumed cleaner products is reported here. The instrument is first used to identify, out of 3 test perfumes, the best counterfeit product for a reference ROSE sample. The results obtained showed to be consistent with sensory evaluation. A quantitative application for the determination of the level of perfume added onto one product is also investigated. After building a calibration model, the system can be used to accurately predict the level of perfume introduced into solutions. The use of multivariate statistics techniques to process the data generated for these tests is shown to be straightforward to get to the expected results.