By Anton Constantinou
Notes in a fragrance can be misleading. Many don’t smell as you expect them to smell and obsessing over notes can leave you chasing the wrong fragrances or avoiding certain scents altogther.
As fragrance wearers and enthusiasts, we’ve a habit of treating notes like ingredients and expecting fragrances to smell exactly as their notes suggest. This oversimplification is understandable: contextualising fragrances is hard and notes help us feel around in the dark. Problem is, in helping us make sense of scents, notes also discourage us from smelling scents objectively. In following our nose and our nose only.
Here are six reasons why you should stop obsessing over notes and instead just follow your nose.
Notes aren’t ingredients
News flash - those pretty little icons you see on Fragrantica aren’t perfume ingredients. They’re merely descriptors of scents. The real ingredients are the aroma chemicals. Things like coumarin, linanool and citronellol. You know, the stuff on the box.
Notes are PR-speak
That’s right - most notes you read about in perfume are either dreamed up by PR teams or dressed up to sell scents. That tutti-fruity-coca-cola-sweet-cherry-pie note you lust after is really just aroma chemicals mashed together in a lab.
Notes don’t always smell as expected
So, you’re a pineapple lover. Just because you love the smell of pineapple, doesn’t mean you’ll love every scent with a pineapple note. A single note can smell lots of ways depending on how it’s used and in what quantity.
Notes smell differently on different people
Notes on paper is one thing - what you sniff is often what you get. But notes on skin can go in all sorts of directions depending on whose skin they’re on. Just because you like the smell of iris on paper, doesn’t mean you’ll like it on skin.
Notes fall in and out of fashion
Building block notes aside like lavender, bergamot, amber and tonka bean, many notes in perfume go in and out of fashion with popular taste. Fiends for slightly more unusual notes may, therefore, find themselves chasing unicorn notes - and who wants to do that.
Accords are more important
Single notes aren’t anywhere near as important as the profiles they form when fused together. These fusions are what we call accords and they’re usually what you smell when you experience a fragrance from top to bottom. Example accords include fougere, chypre and oriental.
However which way you look at it, fragrance notes are by no means a perfect indicator of how a scent will smell. Sure, some come pretty close in smelling as you expect them to smell, but many don’t.
What’s more important is following your own nose and olfactory system. Trying stuff and smelling it up close. Spraying scents time and time again and getting to know them.
As Kurt Stragier observes in The (un)importance of notes. A story about music and perfume:
‘You have to smell a perfume and experience it (preferably on skin, where your own body scent is added to the entire composition), just as music comes to life when performed.’
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