White biotechnology has emerged in biochemical manufacturing processes to deliver perfumery ingredients satisfying novel interests of the society for natural, eco-responsible and sustainable materials. As a result, an intense R&D activity has taken place on these subjects, resulting in both scientific publications and patent applications reporting combinations of state-of-the-art approaches in biocatalysis, metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, biosynthesis elucidation, gene edition and cloning, and analytical chemistry. In this minireview, we present a smelly selection of novel biotechnological processes and ingredients from a scientific articles and patents survey covering the last 6 years and analysed in terms of chemistry, sustainability and naturality. Classification has been made between metabolic engineering on one side, allowing either biotechnological synthesis of essential oil surrogates or single molecule ingredients, and on another side the optimisation of properties of natural complex substances by specific and selective enzymatic modifications of their chemical composition.