fragrance

I’d love to say that this article stands alone, but it doesn't. It's builds on "An example of how commercial fragrances are composed,” so if you haven’t read that one yet, you should stop and do so, otherwise a lot of what i’m about to say probably won’t make a whole lot of sense.

I go back and forth on the concept of fragrance notes. They’re so damn useful, but they’re also so damn wrong. Highly misleading at the very least.

Here’s the thing: the average person just seems content to take fragrances as mostly pleasant blobs of smell that are fundamentally alien and not to be truly understood by lay people. When people get past that point and want to dig deeper inte fragrance, inevitably the first thing they come across is the concept of fragrance notes. No longer are fragrances just smell blobs with hints of recognizable things sticking out a bit. Now there are notes! A whole list of things, some of which are unfamiliar and some of which can’t actually be detected by our fictional budding perfumista/perfumaestro. It’s like an ingredients list.

Except it isn’t. That’s the first common misconception around notes. It’s easy to forget sometimes, even for more experienced folks. Sometimes a notes listing will say “jasmine” and there will be actual jasmine absolute in it. Sometimes, it will say “jasmine” and there will be a jasmine specialty base in it, a replacement that isn’t actual jasmine oil but is supposed to smell as close to actual jasmine oil as possible. Sometimes, the perfumer decided to use a substantial amount of a material that isn’t actually jasmine or even at attempt to reproduce a realistic jasmine smell, but it happens to be found in jasmine, so (unsure of how else to describe it) the person writing the notes listing puts it down as “jasmine.” This might happen with benzyl acetate. Sometimes (pretty often actually), the perfumer will decide to make heavy use of a material that doesn’t really smell a whole lot like jasmine, is being used for entirely different reasons than its faint jasmine-like smell, and isn’t even found in natural jasmine...but maybe it happens to be closely related to a single molecule that is in real jasmine, or just kind-of-sort-of smells like jasmine. Guess what? That sometimes gets listed as “jasmine” too. When I wrote the above, I was thinking of a specific material: methyl dihydrojasmonate a.k.a. Hedione.

And sometimes, even though it makes up a large portion of the fragrance formula and contributes heavily to the final fragrance smell, it doesn’t get listed at all. That happens an awful lot.

Whenever someone writes about how fragrances smell, there's a giant elephant in the room that is rarely addressed. You might have noticed it waving its trunk around when you read the article on how fragrances are composed. I’ll spell it out:

Most fragrance consumers have zero familiarity with the the basic building blocks of modern fragrances, and rather than tell people that they need to become familiar with them in order to understand fragrance composition, everyone pretends that they smell close enough to everyday materials that no one needs to do anything special.

This is B.S. You can absolutely enjoy fragrance as a pleasant smell blob without learning a damn thing about it, but you can’t really understand what’s in it and why it smells the way it does without understanding the raw materials used.

As soon as someone tries peeling back the veil and discovers fragrance notes, it empowers them with information. That information just happens to almost always be taken out of context, and when it’s taken out of context, it’s wrong.

That’s not to say that fragrance notes aren’t helpful. I often use them myself and find them very helpful. I have a couple of advantages though:

I realize that notes are not ingredients

I understand enough about how fragrances are composed to be able to read between the lines.

That first point is incredibly important, so i’ll repeat it again:

Notes are not ingredients

A real ingredient might or might not show up in a notes listing. If a note is listed, the fragrance might contain that exact ingredient, or it might not. The only thing that a note tells you is that someone out there decided that a customer might experience something that reminds them of that note. That’s all.

It’s hard to emphasize just how arbitrary notes listings are. The thing that hammered it into my head was having to write them.

Let’s write one together.

Once again, if you didn’t read the article on how fragrances are composed, you should go back and read it now, because we’re going to write a notes listing for the formula I discussed in that article:

• Florhydral - 10

• Exaltolide Total - 10

• Ultrazur - 15

• Peonile - 60

• Petitgrain oil -70

• Ethylene Brassylate - 90

• Aurantiol Pure - 100

• Geranyl Acetate - 120

• Linalyl Acetate - 220

• Dihydro Myrcenol - 305

Total: 1000

Take a read over the above formula, which is reflective of commercial fragrance formulas (though not nearly as complex). That notes listing might not seem quite as easy to write as it did a few minutes ago.

Florhydral is an floral/green smelling aldehyde that isn’t really found in nature.

Exaltolide and ethylene brassylate are white musks. As a side note, most people have no idea how white musks actually smell.

Ultrazur is an marine note that’s often used in laundry applications

Peonile is a volumizer that smells sort of like peony, sort of like geranium...sort of like a bunch of stuff even though it’s not found in nature.

Petitgrain is the only ingredient in the whole fragrance for which the average customer is going to have any frame of reference (citrus tree leaves)

Aurantiol smells sort of like orange blossom and sort of like artificial grape flavor.

Geranyl acetate and linalyl acetate are both found in significant quantities is many dozen plants, from herbs to flowers to spices.

Dihydromyrcenol smells fresh and distinctive and like nothing in nature. If the scent if familiar, it’s likely due to laundry detergent.

So how do you reflect all that in a notes listing?

Three different writers might do it in three different ways. Someone more verbose might try to find something to represent all the materials. They might end up with a notes listing that looks like:

Petitgrain, orange blossom, concord grape, white musk, peony, lavender, geranium, aldehydes, green notes, aquatic notes

Based on the descriptions I gave for the ingredients, you can probably see where all of those notes came from, but if you sniffed this cologne accord and read the notes listing, you would likely be puzzled because most of these listed notes would seem to be entirely missing.

It doesn’t actually smell like peonies, or lavender (from the linalyl acetate) or the ocean, or even like the aldehydes that everyone is familiar with due to Chanel No. 5. The petitgrain is there and the orange blossom/grape MIIIGHT be there if you squint your eyes and tilt your nose just right. Even then though, there are other smells in there that don’t really seem like they could come from those listed notes...but if you’re not familiar with every single one of the notes, you might just assume that these smells came from one of the listed notes that you’re not familiar with.

A second person might eliminate all the hard to describe bits and go with the minimalist:

Petitgrain

I realize that most of you haven’t actually smelled this accord (though you can buy it if you’re interested), but petitgrain is actually the most prominent note. Everything else is there to sort of reinforce it.

Personally, if I was writing it, I would list it as:

Petitgrain, orange blossom

The petitgrain is the most prominent note, but the aurantiol gives enough of an orange blossom impression to garner a mention.

If you accept that notes are just an incomplete list of impressions you might get from the fragrance, this is a perfectly good notes listing.

If you think it’s a reflection of actual ingredients, you’re going to have problems because there is no combination of petitgrain and orange blossom that will actually combine to make this smell...or anything close to it even.

The tough call here is with the dihydromyrcenol. It’s almost ⅓ of the fragrance, it’s a potent material and this accord reeks of it, but you can’t reflect it in the notes listing because the people reading the notes listing have no idea what it is or what it smells like.

It’s like trying to come up with a “notes listing” for a photograph of a modern office, but only being allowed to use words that a 5th century roman would know. “desk, “chair” and “person” are all easy, but how do you explain the computer? Without that shared frame of reference, you either have to resort to poor analogies, oversimplification or straight up omission.

That’s what it’s like to write notes listings. The person writing them waffles back and forth and finally comes up with something that’s good enough, but not really quite right. Notes listings are something you call complete because you’re too frustrated and discouraged to continue, not because you nailed it...or maybe that’s just me.

Then it gets published and this work in progress that the perfumer probably really only thinks does a C-/D+ job of describing the fragrance suddenly becomes gospel. True or not, it’s an important tool that non-perfumers use to understand the fragrance. Well dressed, smiling sales associates read the notes out from glossy pamphlets. People who can’t get anywhere to smell the fragrance make buying decisions based upon it. Other people judge the fragrance by how close the fragrance smells to the raw materials in the notes listing, even though it was never actually meant to smell like those raw materials. People decide on favorite ingredients, sometimes without ever having smelled a fragrance containing that ingredient (cough tonka bean cough).

Notes listings get taken way more literally and way more seriously than they were ever supposed to be taken. Just make sure to take them with a grain of salt.