Vanillin - One of my friends

I am a chemist and I regard chemicals as my friends. One of my favourite chemical families are the terpenes. The terpene I want to talk about is vanillin, which as you might guess, was first isolated from vanilla. It has a very distinct sweet odour and is often used on its own as a vanilla flavour. The reason it is on my mind at the moment is that it gives the Waitrose Baby Bottom Butter its distinctive smell, which some people have likened to vanilla ice cream. Well there is a good reason for that. Vanillin is the smell of vanilla ice cream. In fact I think most people think of the smell of vanilla as that of vanillin. When you smell real vanilla, although it does have a rich and interesting smell, it doesn't really smell as vanillary you expect.

Terpenes often surprise you when they turn up where you least expect them. I came across a paper in a pediatric journal where vanillin had been used in a study to see whether familiar odours can calm down babies. In the study they found that babies that were used to the smell of vanillin were calmer than normal when their mothers left them if they were exposed to the smell of vanillin. They found the same effect from the smell of the mothers' breast milk. From the way the study was conducted it wasn't clear if this is a unique property of vanillin or if any distinctive smell would have had the same effect. But for me, it was a familiar feeling of being surprised and delighted by my favourite family of chemicals.

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