Abstract

The classical technique of sensory profiling requires a panel of subjects to score the perceived intensities of a number of sensory attributes retrospectively after having tasted the product. Therefore, it does not take into account the sequence according to which the sensory attributes are perceived in a given product and which is likely to impact consumer liking for this product. Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) asks the panelists to pick repeatedly the attribute which dominates over the others along the tasting of the product. TDS has recently become widely recognized in sensory analysis of food and beverages, we believe it surely deserves applications in cosmetics where stimuli are highly temporal. However, TDS still requires some panelist training to insure a sufficient understanding of the attributes. Moreover, it has been often argued that scoring intensities is more difficult than comparing two products on a similarity scale. Thus the technique of Polarized Sensory Positioning (PSP) proposes to scale the similarity between each product of the study and each of a small number (generally 3) of prototypic products, the so-called “poles”. The set of poles is chosen in order to sample the important areas of the sensory space; in a way, poles can be seen as "meta-attributes". We developed PSP for describing the taste of waters and it has recently been applied for the first time in cosmetics. We believe PSP to be perfectly suited to the cosmetics area where product comparison is a common practice and in which markets are often structured by a few leader products (potential poles) which formulations are not supposed to be modified over time, as perfumes for instance.