Yes, you can synthesize a chemical. But no, refining is never perfect. If you get the chemical from a plant, then the impurities will be other stuff from the plant. But if you synthesize it from a chemical factory, the impurities will be other stuff from the factory process, which probably will be not at all the same.
To this day I don't think we are even close. Think about how we still use dogs in highly critical functions like tracking people, detecting drugs or explosives, or even detecting when a diabetic kid has a blood sugar level out of its safe range.
So, I think we are still a very long way from being able to arbitrarily synthesize a scent. I don't think we even fully know how a sense of smell works; it's not just the receptors but also the cognitive processing. As an analogy, look at the complexity required to understand and manage color perception. And physically, the EM spectrum is way less complex than the organic chemistry in scent.
- Synthesizing compounds
- Creating sensors to detect compounds
The goals in one field might be realizable while the goals in the other remain elusive.
The kind of device that would function as a reusable detector for small amounts of the substance floating freely in the air, while useful for measuring air pollution, is rarely used when researching how to synthesize new compounds.
It's 85% myristic acid but I would venture a guess that the other 15% is an assemblage of plant secondary metabolites that are delicate and difficult to get just right synthetically.
I presume though that sythesis just can’t produce the exact compound mixture that nature can and hence the demand for natural ingredients.
Really, people have bent over for natural things, often unnecessarily romaticizing about it in cases where we can produce the exact compound. Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit if nature produced it or some highly intelligent beings reverse engineered it.