This chapter is a critical overview on the recent strategy to study the composition of the plant volatile fraction. With the introduction of metabolomics, this fraction has strongly regained interest, being an important biosensor diagnostic of plant metabolism and changes. In the first part of this chapter, the concepts and the practical aspects of profiling and fingerprinting are discussed when applied to study the plant volatile fraction. In particular, methods and technologies to obtain a representative volatile profiling are discussed in detail with the aim to define an effective combination of the three main steps of an analytical procedure (i.e., sample preparation, analysis, and data elaboration) to obtain reliable and high throughput results. In particular, essential oils and headspace sampling,
GC
techniques (conventional
GC
, fast
GC
, enantioselective
GC
, heart‐cut
2DGC
, and
GCxGC
) and
MS
detection with different analyzers, and supervised and unsupervised statistical methods are discussed in this respect. The same approach is used to discuss fingerprinting, that is mainly focused on nonseparative methods and in particular on headspace‐mass spectrometry (
HS‐MS
).
The second part deals with the evolution of screening and exhaustive study of the plant volatile fraction in view of the recent scientific and technological achievements: these two approaches and their meaning in the present context are discussed and a general and indicative procedure to apply is given.