Lianna Albrizio, Assistant Editor 09.16.22
The Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM) held its first in-person meeting for the first time in three years on Wednesday, September 14 at the Chart House in Weehawken to celebrate its critical impact on the understanding of the safe use of fragrance ingredients.
According to Dr. Danielle Botelho, RIFM’s safety assessment manger, the organization’s scientists more than doubled the number of peer-reviewed and published fragrance ingredient safety assessments in that time. The more than 1,750 discrete materials for which RIFM has completed safety evaluations represents 80% of the total number in current use. Members anticipate completion in the peer-reviewed literature by 2024.
“RIFM’s critical safety science work—from its cutting-edge animal-alternative methodologies to its leadership in developing the science to understand the impact of Natural Complex Substance materials—relies on collaboration,” said RIFM’s President Dr. James C. Romine. “That is why we designed this year’s gathering to spotlight the collaborative science moving us all forward.”
Award Presentations
During the business portion of the meeting, RIFM members confirmed the 2022 Board of Directors. Dr. Robert Weinstein, CEO of Robertet USA, was welcomed as the institute’s new chair.
Dr. Romine presented two awards highlighting individuals whose commitments to collaboration have significantly moved the science supporting fragrance safety forward. Mary Mircovich, RIFM’s scientific literature coordinator, received the RIFM President’s Award.
Dr. Ben Smith, a past post-doctoral fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, received the RIFM Board of Directors Excellence in Fragrance Safety Science Award. Smith serves as Director for the Singapore Future Ready Food Safety Hub (FRESH) and the A*STAR Innovations in Food & Chemical Safety (IFCS) Programme.
Dr. Robert Bedoukian, president of Bedoukian Research, stepped down from the RIFM board after 33 years of service. Dr. Bedoukian emphasized the growing importance of collaboration and the industry’s $1 billion collective investment in the science supporting risk-based fragrance safety.
Following the meeting, dozens of attendees met with RIFM scientists to discern some of their latest collaborative work in the science poster hall, which spotlighted nine published papers and manuscripts in progress, including work to support the environmental endpoint in safety assessments for Natural Complex Substance materials and a new paper elucidating the lack of known respiratory sensitizers among the ingredients used to fragrance consumer products.
Dr. Pamela Dalton Discusses Loss of Smell from Covid-19 Infection
Dr. Pamela Dalton, principal investigator at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, highlighted her institute’s partnerships, including a collaboration with RIFM’s Nikaeta Sadekar, senior scientist for respiratory toxicology. RIFM and Monell are identifying and compiling odor thresholds, or the lowest concentration level where a person can detect a smell in their immediate environment, for fragrance ingredients currently in use.
Monell is a basic research institute that studies the chemical senses including taste, smell and chemesthesis, or the sensitivity of mucosal surfaces to environmental chemicals.
“RIFM can give us the data on the safety of material, but that doesn’t tell us how people are going to react and that’s where my laboratory can do a lot of good work,” noted Dalton. “We are going to look at highly-used fragrance materials and use state-of-the-art olfactometry and analytical chemistry starting with the high-production volume of fragrance chemicals and look at a higher threshold for chemists. We want to adequately present information to the public about what they’re actually experiencing in their products and what the safety is.”
On the topic of olfaction, Dalton addressed the loss of smell reported by up to 80% of patients who were infected with the covid-19 virus that lingered for days, weeks and longer.
“Smell is health,” said Dalton. “You really have to lose it to appreciate what you’re missing.”
Dalton noted the repercussions of smell loss on physical and mental health. The symptom, she said, plays a role in such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. A study that was conducted in 2014 by the National Health and Nutrition Survey retested participates who suffered losses of taste and smell five years later. Participants whose smell was impaired was a better predictor of mortality than any physical measure taken, she said.
“That doesn’t mean it’s killing you. It means that your ability to smell is a proxy for your underlying health status in ways that we don’t fully understand,” said Dalton.
In another study by Richard Costanzo, Daniel H. Coelho and other researchers published in the American Journal of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Medicine and Surgery showed covid patients’ loss of smell adversely affected their quality of life. Seventy percent of subjects said they missed smelling fragrances while over 80% said they enjoyed life less with more than 40% feeling depressed and more than 50% experiencing reduced appetite. Almost half of people who lost their sense of smell from the virus said their worries stemmed from their inability to detect body odor.
“This is critical,” said Dalton. “This is the sense that if it’s not stimulated, may lead to neurodegeneration because of the way the structures of olfaction are completely intertwined with our limbic system, which regulates our emotions, and so depression may not simply mean not enjoying things, it can actually be an underlying physiological change.”
Dalton expressed how easily people may take their sense of smell for granted, and covid-19’s so-called “silver lining” in helping people who have regained the sense associated with memory appreciate it to the fullest.
“I think our collaborations have highlighted the importance of communicating to the public that fragrance is an important part of our life,” she said. “I don’t want to live in a world without good smells, and not even a world without occasional bad smells, because you have to have everything in order to appreciate the full hedonic range of what you’re smelling.”