For 2,500 years, scent makers have been concocting fragrances. Ancient Egyptians used them to anoint the heads of kings. The French gave birth to a perfume industry to mask an early-modern era filled with people who bathed infrequently. The most recent preoccupation of what is now a $3 billion industry: producing a longer-lasting smell.The problem is that bacteria on the skin eventually consume fragrance molecules. These essences and oils, associated more with romance than with science, may have found an answer in biotechnology. Federal regulators will soon award a patent to Spherix Inc., a small technology and biotech firm in Beltsville, Maryland, for a chemical process that the company says can double a fragrance’s lifetime on human skin. With 425 employees, Spherix is a relatively minor player in the growing industrial biotechnology business. Nonetheless, Spherix’s scientific division has commercialized a wastewater treatment system and a process that detects the presence of industrial oil in water. Most recently, it obtained approval for a synthetic sugar called Tagatose.Then the 37-year-old company stumbled into fragrances. Its line of synthetic molecules are designed to rebuff the millions of bacteria that coat human skin and consume fragrance molecules. Replace the vulnerable molecules found in fragrances with stronger versions of those molecules, says Spherix’s chief executive, Gilbert Levin, and even the lightest eau de toilette can stay longer on the skin. The technology could eventually be applied to shaving cream, dishwashing liquid or just about any other commercial substance that smells. For now Spherix is focusing on scent makers. Spherix says it’s discussing the prospect of a license agreement with a handful of fragrance manufacturers, although it wouldn’t name them. The US Patent and Trademark Office has notified the company it will grant the fragrance patent in a few months. ‘‘Here’s an area where they can clearly improve,’’ Levin says, describing his pitch to fragrance companies. ‘‘It’s high-tech perfume.’’ Its biggest selling point, endurance, may appeal to women in the work force with less time and patience for reapplying cosmetics, say those in the beauty industry.Already, extended-wear lipstick has become an industry standard, turning Revlon’s ColourStay and Cover Girl’s Marathon lipstick lines, both introduced in the mid-1990s, into hits, said Allan Mottus, editor of the Informationist, a cosmetics-industry publication. Will it work with fragrance? (LAT-WP)
