I love to smell new things.  I love getting to have new olfactory experiences, and the way perfume can mimic nearly any feeling, mood, or real life scent fascinates me.

Which brings me to just what I’m writing about today, which is a basic guide to perfume appreciation and a glossary of common terms in perfumery.  A lot of people don’t pay a whole lot of attention to their olfactory world, and one of the keys to being able to truly appreciate perfume is to start paying attention to what you smell.  Inhale, think about it, what do you smell?  Here there is the sweet powdery residue of my perfume on the dress I’m wearing, the slight musty scent of the blanket inherited from my grandparent’s house that won’t wash out, the scent of my conditioner, the wool of the living room rug, and the pleasant slightly woody, slightly sweet smell of old house.  If I were in the kitchen there would be lingering toast smell from breakfast, dish soap, bleach, fabric in the background wafting in from my dressing room.

Currently I am wearing Passion by Elizabeth Taylor, it’s a musky sweet animalistic old fashioned kind of brew.  It’s been a few days since I worked on this.  I smell the damp fur of my coat from being out of doors in the rain.  Smell your furniture, smell your pets, smell your friends (with their permission), try to pick out the origins of various scents, pick your general scent impressions apart to their components.  

Now get your favorite perfume, spray some on.  Smell it now?  What notes are you getting?  These will be your top notes, the initial and evanescent scent of a perfume, these are the most volatile parts of the composition and thus the quickest to disappear.  These are often citrus notes (notorious for their poor staying power) or certain florals, wait ten to twenty minutes, sniff again, you’ll notice the perfume smells very different from when it was just applied, here we have the middle notes, heavier more lasting smells with medium longevity these are often things like rose, sandalwood, honey, patchouli and sometimes overlap with the basenotes of a perfume, which are what you’ll smell when the midnotes have vanished, woods, spices, patchouli, musk, tobacco and gourmand notes like vanilla or cocoa tend to make up a perfume’s base, these are the largest, heaviest, slowest to evaporate molecules that ground the fragrance, some being noticeable up to twenty four hours after application.  

Keep sniffing yourself, notice the development of the perfume, perhaps look up the perfume, see how many of the notes you can identify.  This will help you identify common elements between perfumes, which will help you find more perfumes you love (which one could argue is a bad thing… I’ve ended up with over two hundred… and I’m still buying more, god help me)

Go to a department store, test some perfumes (give yourself some time between testing because otherwise your nose will get exhausted and your perception of smells will be off) explore their notes and development.  Right now as I’m writing this I’m wearing Tom Ford’s Velvet Orchid.  It smells sweet, cool and humid with just a subtle note of something sexy and dirty underneath.

Here are some common terms and genres of perfumes:

Gourmand: Uses dessert-y notes like caramel, vanilla, chocolate, and similar.  Pink Sugar by Aquolina, Fantasy by Britney Spears, and Viva La Juicy by Juicy Couturier

Animalistic: Contains real or synthetic animal smells, like musk, civet, leather, etc.  Rhumba by Ted Lapidus

Oriental: IDK spices or something, this term is kind of problematic and as far as I can tell it doesn’t mean anything because it can refer to woody, spicy, amberous, or floral scents and be combine with any number of other genres so it’s kind of to the point where it means nothing, but it’s usually like amber and incense-y and kinda warm but not always.  I wear a lot of perfumes considered to be in this category, but since almost anything can be put in this category, eh whatever.  Shalimar by Guerlain and Narcisse Noir by Caron are classic examples of this.

Green: Pretty self explanatory, smells green, so leafy and usually kind of fresh and possibly earthy. Green Tea by Elizabeth Arden, Chanel no. 19, and Haiku by Avon are green fragrances.

Woody: Similarly self explanatory, smells like various woods, like cedar, sandalwood, mahogany or other woods.  Girl by Pharrell Williams and Mediterranean by Elizabeth Arden (which also has musk and floral notes) are examples of this genre.

Floral: Smells like hedgehogs… wait, no, that’s not right, floral perfumes smells like, give me a second, I’ve got this.. flowers!  That’s right, florals smell like flowers.  What kind of flowers?  ANY KIND OF FLOWERS, even one’s that don’t actually have scents because perfume makers make up scents for them, because perfumer and poet both begin with P so poetic license carries over (also to puppeteers in case you were wondering, seriously, ask the next puppeteer you meet to show you their poet’s license).  Dior Pure Poison, Rare Pearls by Avon, and Very Irresistible by Givenchy are examples of floral perfumes.

Balsamic: Surprisingly balsamic perfumes do not smell like the most delicious of all vinegars, but instead smell like balsams.  “WTF is a balsam?” you ask, a balsam is an aromatic resinous substance usually secreted by a tree, but for the purposes of balsamic fragrances ingredients that smell like they could have been.  Black Orchid by Tom Ford, Casmir by Chopard

Indolic: Smells as if it contain indoles, which are a scented chemical present in white flowers and poop, so… that’s weird.

Jammy: Usually used in reference to roses, jammy usually means a sweet, sticky… jam like rose as opposed to a powdery dried rose smell.

Powdery: With a dry scent, reminiscent of vintage face powder, baby powder, or talc. The opposite of aquatic.  LouLou by Cacharel, Insolence by Guerlain, and G by Galliano are examples powdery fragrances

Aquatic: Wet smelling, with watery, humid notes, these are common in scents intended for summer.  Escape by Calvin Klein and Into The Blue by Escada are examples of aquatic fragrances.

Chypre: Is a family of perfumes named after a perfume produced by Coty in 1917.  Chypre means cyprus in French or something like that, anyway they tend to have citrusy top notes, a resinous or patchouli-y middle and an oakmossy or musky base.  Mitsuko by Guerlain, Paloma Picasso by Paloma Picasso and Coco Mademoiselle by Chanel are chypre fragrances

Musk: An aromatic substance traditionally harvested from a rare type of dear, now made mostly synthetically (much to the relief of the deer)

Fougère: A class of fragrances, the name means “fern like”, they usually contain lavender, oakmoss, and tonka bean (combined with other stuff).  They’re usually marketed to dudes.

Oakmoss: One of the most important ingredients in traditional perfumery, smells dark, possibly a little bitter, and like a wet forest.  Heavily restricted in Europe as some people are allergic to it.

Fruity: Smells like fruit, often combine with other scent genres.  J’adore Dior by Dior, Believe by Britney Spears, Happy by Clinique and Elysium by Clarins

Calone: A watery/melon-y smelling synthetic molecule that was really popular in the 90s.  Present in Davidoff’s Cool Water and L’Eau d’Issey by Issey Miyake  

Civet: Natural civet is secreted from the anal glands of the civet cat, thankfully it’s mostly synthetic nowadays, some people say it smells like poo, other people think it smells sexy. I’ll just leave you to consider the implications of that one.  You can find it in Chanel no 5, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, Shalimar by Guerlain, and Obsession by Calvin Klein

Perfume is sold in varying concentrations (with greater or smaller ratios of fragrant compounds to alcohol or carrier oil) and here are some of the concentrations with vague guidelines as to what percentage of smelly stuff you’re getting:

Parfum extrait: The purest and usually most expensive form of a fragrance, with the least percentage of alcohol.  These are usually 15 to 30 percent scent oils.  Many perfumes don’t even come in extrait because the lack of alcohol limits the ability of the perfume to disperse itself and be smelled, because basically we smell things by inhaling particles of volatile compounds and then our brains process the input somehow (no one is exactly clear on how this works as far as I know) into something we perceive as smell.

Eau de parfum: A perfume containing 8 to 15 percent fragrance chemicals (incidentally all material is chemicals, including natural essential oils, so don’t freak out), one of the most common strengths perfume is sold in.  It will last longer on the skin than products that contain a smaller percentage of fragrance chemicals, and most people consider this to be the best balance between projection (distance from which is can be smelled) and longevity (how long it still smells like the thing)

Eau de toilette: 5 to 8 percent smell usually, but this stuff varies company to company as well, so keep that in mind, it’s just usually around these percentages.  Will not last as long as eau de parfum or parfum extrait, but may project more while it lasts.

Eau de cologne/eau fraiche/body mist: Usually contains 5 percent or less smelly stuff and is usually correspondingly cheap.

There are also scented body lotions, powders, body washes, bath oils and all sorts of other scented products, but those are somewhat secondary.

Learning what you like in a perfume is one of the most enjoyable adventures you can embark upon.