What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [6]
With the basic raw materials in mind, a trainee next learns to think like a perfumer. When a professional analyzes a fragrance or creates a new one, he does not think in terms of individual ingredients; he thinks of typical combinations called accords. An accord is a mixture of raw materials (rarely more than fifteen) that go together particularly well. Accords are the building blocks of perfumery. By combining several of them, the perfumer creates an initial sketch of the perfume, sometimes called a skeleton. In a way, creating a perfume is like writing software: a programmer starts with building-block software modules that already contain many lines of code. A computer program is built with many modules, just as a fragrance is assembled from accords. The analogy goes further—software is tested with iterative debugging; perfume is tested with repeated sniffing and tweaking of the formula.
An art form as subjective and personal as perfumery might be expected to resist computerization. In fact, the opposite is true. The practice of perfumery quickly adapted to the digital world in terms of tracking materials and recording formulas. At a more fundamental level, the perfumer and the software programmer share a similar mind-set that involves the logic of subprograms and modules. Some of the memory burden of those thousands of ingredients is relieved by computer technology. Perfumers browse the company’s entire inventory of materials on-screen. They assemble a formula with a series of mouse clicks. They save everything: formulas, failed trials, and favorite accords. Software is an active partner in the creative process. It warns the user when two chemically incompatible materials have been selected, thereby avoiding a formula that discolors when exposed to sunlight. Most important, it continuously tallies the cost of the formula and displays it on-screen as dollars per pound of fragrance oil. No matter how great the creative latitude on a given project, a perfumer always works to a dollar limit.
Once a novice starts to think like a perfumer, he begins to develop a new way of smelling. Individual ingredients recede and whole fragrances emerge: he learns to smell the forest before the trees. Given a new men’s cologne, he quickly recognizes it as, say, a Fougere type. Next he sniffs for the individual notes that define the Fougere pattern: lavender, patchouli, oakmoss, and coumarin. After confirming these, he smells further, looking for a new twist or nuance that sets this formula apart from all the other Fougeres in the world.
Perfumers reduce the complexity of their world to a small, manageable number of fragrance families. They use well-known accords to simplify the process of scent creation. The perfumer’s job is more about pattern recognition than about raw memorization; his mental map is uncluttered by free-floating details. Like most highly creative people, perfumers tend to be a little crazy; but they are not driven crazy from remembering thousands of smells.
The Shopper’s Problem
Hundreds of perfumes are available for sniffing in department stores and boutiques. They range in style from restrained elegance to loud assertion, from distinctive originals to blatant knock-offs. How does one shop for scent amid this sensory overload? Lacking the perfumer’s trained thought processes, the average person is completely at sea.
Fragrance houses—the companies that employ perfumers and create the juice for the Calvin Kleins and Cotys of the world—find it useful to organize perfumes by smell. The Haarmann & Reimer company published a fragrance genealogy that traces every style of perfume from its