The Use of Vibrational Spectroscopic Techniques in Perfume Analysis: An Exploratory Study on the Differentiation of Original Perfume Samples and Their Non-Counterfeit Replicas

The development of more accessible perfumes (non-counterfeit replicas) that offer a similar scent to luxury perfume brands is an emerging trend in the perfume market. In this context, it is important to develop simple, rapid, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly alternative analytical tools capable of differentiating original perfumes from their non-counterfeit replicas. In this work, three vibrational spectroscopic techniques, namely near-infrared (NIR), mid-infrared (MIR), and Raman spectroscopy, were evaluated for the discrimination between original perfume samples and their non-counterfeit replicas. Several original perfume samples and their non-counterfeit replicas were scanned through these vibrational spectroscopic techniques and analyzed with two chemometric tools: principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). Different pre-processing techniques were also tested in PCA and HCA to attest to the robustness of the findings. The results revealed that all vibrational spectroscopic techniques tested demonstrated high efficiency in differentiating original perfumes from their non-counterfeit replicas. NIR spectroscopy revealed the least similarity among the samples across all pre-processing techniques. In this context, these vibrational spectroscopic techniques are a rapid, cost-effective, non-destructive, and interesting alternative for discriminating between original perfume samples and non-counterfeit replicas. Although further studies, including the application of supervised classification methods to a larger sample set, are needed to attest to the robustness of these results, these preliminary results are very interesting and promising. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time that vibrational spectroscopic techniques were applied and compared in the analysis of perfume and non-counterfeit replicas.