PERFUMES AND FLAVOURS

A. PERFUMES :

it is any substance which is made from natural or synthetic materials, or a combination of both, employed for creating a pleasant odor. Such type of materials are combined by a perfumer for producing the pleasing fragrance. The use of perfumes goes back into the history when people used to burn fragrant resins, woods and gums as incenses. The term perfume has been derived from Latin words per, meaning through, and fumes meaning smoke. Perfume making was one of the important arts in old days.

Perfumes are used in a number of preparations and in many ways to create a pleasant odour. They are used in lipsticks, toilet preparations, face and body lotions, powders and other cosmetics. Even, they are also added as industrial odorants. The true perfumes, also called as extracts, or essences consist of a high amount of perfume oils, about 10 20 °/a. The type of perfume varies along with type of product, like industrial odorants contain low-cost fragrances, while those used in cosmetics or body perfumes contain rare flower oils from many parts of the world.

The perfumes derived from plants are the volatile oils, also called as essential oils. They are collected from various parts of the plants, but especially flowers. They are extracted by applying the techniques like steam distillation, solvent extraction. Perfumes are also obtained from certain animals.

 B. FLAVORING AGENTS:

The flavoring agents used in medicines have no therapeutic advantage but, they certainly have a psychological importance. The careful selection of flavoring agent in a formulation may be considered as an art. The flavoring agents have a major role to play in development of a formulation for internal consumption. in modern days, the attempts are done to mask unacceptable odor or taste by means of formulation techniques like ion-exchange, encapsulation, adsorption etc. This is followed by addition of recipients and finally the flavoring agents. Now-a-days, the selection of flavors for the proposed formulation is done by flavor chemist. During the selection of flavor, various factors like characters of the drug, therapeutic category, adjuvents to be added and category of patient are considered.

During'selection of flavors, the taste of the drug is considered and accordingly, flavors may be proposed. For acid taste, orange, liquorice, raspberry flavors may be used. For bitter testing drugs, peppermint, fennel, cherry flavors may be incorporated. For salty drugs, raspberry or citrus flavors are examples. The flavors like lemon and grape are proposed for drugs with metallic tastes.

A large number of flavors are used from natural sources, like lemon, mint, orange, clove, lavender, rose etc. The choice of flavor also depends upon internal or external use of drug.