SEPAWA® CONGRESS 2022 

Speaker: Ing. Rita Ribau-Domingues

Company: Olfasense GmbH

Title: Optimization of Personal & Home Care Products Through Body Odour Testing: Sniffing, GC-IMS and GC-MS-Sniffing

Abstract: Analysing body odour, can be of interest for various objectives in the development and improvement of several personal and home care products (like, deodorants, incontinence and female care, detergents). Sensory as well as chemical analyses methods are available. Selecting the right tool is essential to generate the results needed. If the objective is to determine body odour or its reduction, studies using selected and trained sniffers to evaluate the odour as perceived by a sensory panel is the means of choice up to today. There is no machine that can substitute the human nose in regards to human odour perception yet.   The GC-IMS (Ion Mobility Spectrometry Coupled with Gas Chromatography) can be used to generate a quick molecular fingerprint of body odour. This can be helpful if clusters should be generated determine which body odour compositions are similar/different. Additionally, the device can be trained to detect and measure molecules. The big advantage here is that the analysis takes only a couple of minutes in comparison to other more advanced systems like the GC-MS.   In general, chemical information is often useful for odour assessment, but it has its limitations. GC-MS-Sniffing combines the chemical information typically gained from gas chromatography and mass spectrometry with the sensory information (odour characteristics of each compound individually) provided by the human sensory system. To determine key odorant molecules associated with body odour, this technique is the most adequate. Usually, the responsible compounds are perceived in very low concentrations or are complex molecular structures. The human nose is able to detect them and due to describing the smell at the appearing retention time can support the identification of those key compounds. The present communication provides an overview on the available various methods to analyse body odour with an application to the Personal and Home care markets.