Hey all! For this Mannscents post, I decided to cover some info about vanillin. If you're interested in its chemistry, how it's made, whether it's safe, and why it turns soap brown, check out the full article on Mannscents!

Vanillin is found in TONS of foods, essential oils, synthetic fragrances, and sometimes even medications. It’s a colorless, crystalline powder that smells very strongly of vanilla (with a touch of cotton candy). Unadulterated vanillin is not the rich, dark vanilla scent of vanilla absolute, but instead the sweet, airy vanilla of carnival candy during the summer time.

HOW IS IT MADE?

Chemical companies refine vanillin from a molecule called lignin, which they produce from the waste left over from the cellulose (paper) industry. Tasty, right?

Manufacturing teams treat the concentrated waste material, called “mother liquor,” with various alkaline substances (usually lye), and heat it under pressure. The teams then separate out the vanillin through various extraction and distillation processes. Especially cool, the technical methods for manufacturing vanillin have become so precise over the course of the last century that it is nearly impossible, through lab analysis or otherwise, to determine whether the source is natural or synthetic. It’s really that pure.

IS IT THE SAME AS VANILLA ABSOLUTE/ESSENTIAL OIL?

Not even close. Commercial vanillin, as discussed above, is made in a laboratory, but otherwise nature-identical. In contrast, low-boiling solvents like hexylene are used to make vanilla absolute, vanillin’s inedible-and-prohibitively-expensive natural cousin. Distillers soak vanilla beans in hexylene, which they later boil off, leaving behind "concrete" (CON-kreht). They then wash the concrete with alcohol and centrifuge it to separate out the resins and other solids. Those solids are what makes natural vanilla smell dark and rich and wonderful. Thankfully, there's no hexylene left over at the end, though.