They do, though, get very close. It’s thanks to Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCMS), an unsexily named method also used for food and drugs to identify the different molecules in a chemical sample. “They work by obtaining some of the liquid you are trying to replicate, even tiny amounts are sufficient,” explains David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi, perfumer and founder of cult fragrance brand Toskovat. “It’s then analysed in a lab via a GCMS machine. This doesn’t give you the full ‘picture’ necessarily, but it gives you sufficient information that if you know how to interpret the results you can make something very, very, very similar,” he says.
— Read more in Inside the sudden rise of perfume dupe labs at DazedDigital.
