A chromatochemometric approach for evaluating and selecting the perfume maceration time

A chemometric treatment of the data obtained by gas chromatography (GC) with flame ionization detector (FID) has been proposed to study the maceration time involved in perfumes manufacture with the final purpose of reducing this time but preserving the organoleptic characteristics of the perfume that is being elaborated. In this sense, GC–FID chromatograms were used as a fingerprint of perfume samples subjected to different maceration times, and data were treated by linear discriminant analysis (LDA), by comparing to a set of samples known to be macerated or not, which were used as calibration objects. The GC–FID methodology combined with the treatment of data by LDA has been applied successfully to seven different perfumes. The constructed LDA models exhibited excellent Wilks’ lambdas (0.013–0.118, depending on the perfume), and up to a reduction of 57% has been achieved with respect to the maceration time initially established.