Here are some terms you will encounter frequently when reading about perfume. They include perfume ingredients, descriptors (i.e., “herbaceous,” “indolic,” etc.), perfume categories, and methods of extracting scents from plants. This list doesn’t purport to be comprehensive, and the definitions are cursory, but they should help you get through the average blog post on perfume, and they will help to clarify descriptions in this book. Hopefully, the ingredients will sound evocative enough that you’ll want to smell them.
Absolute: The residue left over from solvent extraction of scents using materials like hexane and methyl alcohol from fragrant materials. They’re more concentrated than essential oils, and because the temperature used to process them is lower than the steam distillation used to process essential oils, absolutes have a scent closer to the original.
Accord: The scent that results when a perfumer combines three or more notes together to create a scent distinct from the individual notes. Accords can be abstract scents, and they can be specific scents. Gardenia, for example, is often a constructed accord in perfume because the yield is too low and expensive for extraction from the gardenia itself.
Aldehydes: Aromatic chemicals isolated for the first time in the nineteenth century, but that also occur naturally. Certain aldehydes provide an increased diffusiveness, sparkle, and lift to perfumes, most famously in Chanel No. 5. Aldehydes C-12 and lower add sparkle to fragrances, and aldehydes C-14 and higher add fruit notes (for example, the peachiness of Mitsouko’s C-14 aldehyde).
Amber: An accord in perfumery that is supposed to recall the qualities of ambergris. Amber is often constructed with labdanum, Tolu balsam, or Peru balsam. It’s often an accord in Oriental perfumes.
Ambergris: A highly prized perfume ingredient consisting of the oxidized excretion from a sperm whale. It is rarely used in its natural form in perfumery because of its rarity, exorbitant cost, and concerns about sourcing ambergris from live whales rather than from shore-found ambergris. It’s said to have an earthy, sweet, tobacco, and pleasantly animalic scent. It primarily works to bring out other notes in perfumery rather than to impart a particular scent on its own. Aged ambergris and ambrox, a synthetic substitute, according to Bo Jensen, have the following facets: “1) wet mossy forest soil, 2) strong tobacco, 3) balsamic sandalwood, 4) warm animal musk, 5) seaweed/ocean, and 6) fecal.”
Ambrein: The primary scented molecule in ambergris, isolated and used in perfumery. It’s warm, sweet, vanillic, and ambery, with facets of spice and tobacco.
Animalic: A term used to describe fragrances with animal ingredients in natural or synthetic form, including civet, castoreum, musk, or ambergris. The voluptuous, erotic, and sometimes disturbing quality of animalic perfumes can register in an olfactory way, as something “dirty” or animal-smelling, or as a feeling, a mood, or a quality. Sometimes, it can be both.
Animalis: A base created by Synarome with civet, castoreum, musk, and other animalic notes with a fatty, almost intoxicatingly voluptuous quality. It’s in vintage Baghari and Visa, both by Robert Piguet. To smell a perfume with Animalis in its base is to truly understand what an old-school animalic perfume is.
Artemisia: Artemisia oil, or Armoise in French, comes from steam-distilling white wormwood, a shrub that grows wild in North Africa and the Middle East. The best known form of Artemisia is Artemisia absinthium, (aka “grand wormwood” or “absinthe wormwood”), which was in the alcoholic drink Absinthe made notorious in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by writers and artists. In perfume, Artemisia herba/alba imparts a green, cool, slightly camphoraceous scent and is a note in many grand chypres, including Jolie Madame, Bandit, Azurée, Sikkim, and Aramis.
Balsam, balsamic: The resin from the bark of trees and shrubs (Peru, Tolu, styrax) that have a rich vanilla scent. Balsamic is a term used to describe perfumes with the soft, ambery aspects these resins impart.
Base note: The most molecularly heavy ingredient in a perfume formula, and the longest lasting. Base notes can exalt other perfume notes, fix them (make them longer-lasting), and impart their own particular scent. In the perfume pyramids that sketch out a perfume’s ingredients, base notes are featured in the bottom row.
Benzoin: A sweet, balsamic resin used in incense and as a base note in perfume for its vanillic scent and fixative properties. Also known as styrax because it comes from the bark of the styrax tree.
Bergamot: The essential oil from the peel of the nonedible Citrus aurantium fruit that looks like a small orange. Its sweetish, mellow lemony scent is a crucial top note in perfumery.
Birch tar: Dry-distilled from birch bark, birch tar was used in leather fragrances to impart an earthy, smoky, savory note, as in vintage Rive Gauche, Shalimar, and Annick Goutal’s Eau du Fier. It’s been all but banned for use in perfumery by the IFRA. Birch absolute smells like campfire smoke: warm, savory, and hickorylike.
Calone: A synthetic “marine” note that is supposed to evoke the freshness of the ocean. There is a slight watermelon facet to calone. This was a ubiquitous note in the 1990s, in fragrances such as Cool Water and L’Eau d’Issey.
Cardamom: An intensely aromatic, sweet spice from the ginger family, in the form of a pod filled with seeds.
Carnation: A smoky, sweet, and clove-like scent, the latter facet due to Eugenol, the primary component of clove.
Cassis/black currant bud: A sharp, fruity, almost cat-urine-like scented perfume note. In Magie Noire.
Castoreum: An oily secretion from the abdominal sacs of beavers. Its warm, musky scent with facets of fruit and tobacco is often used to make leather fragrances. Both the vintage castoreum and synthetic-blend castoreum I’ve smelled had a dark, almost soy sauce–like savoriness. German chemist Henri J. Hoffmann described castoreum as being “sharp and burning with a creosote or tar-like note, reminiscent of the ‘glowing’ odour emanating from birch tar or Russian leather.” Paloma Picasso’s Mon Parfum was overdosed with castoreum.
Chypre: A perfume category named after the Greek island of Cyprus. It characteristically has citrus top notes such as bergamot, contrasted with a mossy base of oakmoss and patchouli. In 1917, François Coty’s Chypre launched the category, which waned in popularity in the 1990s. IFRA restrictions on the amount of oakmoss and treemoss in perfumes (except in synthetic form) that went into effect in 2010 means that no true chypres will ever be made again.
Cistus (Labdanum): A resin from the rockrose bush, traditionally gathered from goats’ beards as they fed on the plant. Labdanum is said to be the note closest to the scent of ambergris. Creamy, soft, vanillic.
Civet: In classical perfumery, the cream harvested from the anal gland of the mongoose-like civet animal, often described as cat-like. Fecal-smelling when undiluted, civet “rounds” out other notes when used judiciously. Famous as an overdosed note in Guerlain’s Jicky (1889), it is considered one of the first abstract modern scents. Civet is primarily in synthetic form now. I’m coming around to the belief that civet is added to perfume not just for a little stink, but for a host of psychological effects that can best be described as subliminal tension. It was even used in classic clean scents such as Estée Lauder’s White Linen.
Clove: An aromatic spice similar to cinnamon, but less sweet. Its primary component is Eugenol. Caron’s Poivre and Bellodgia have prominent clovey aspects due to carnation, which also has Eugenol.
Coniferous: A term used to describe scents with notes such as pine, spruce, and juniper. Shiseido’s Inoui (for women) made gorgeous use of notes conventionally used in masculine fragrances.
Costus: An African ginger root whose oil smells like human warmth: sebum from hair and skin; some say dust. A human “animalic.” In Lanvin’s Rumeur, Nina Ricci’s Fille d’Eve, and Scherrer 1.
Coumarin: With a sweet scent described as smelling like new-mown hay, coumarin was used in perfumery for the first time in Fougère Royale (1882), and has come to be a primary ingredient in the fougère catgory of perfumes. It’s found in many natural substances, but in particularly high concentrations in the tonka bean.
Cuir: The French word for leather.
Cumin: An aromatic spice used often in Indian cuisine that smells similar to underarm/body odor. It’s used in perfume to impart an erotic body-odor note. In Shiseido’s Féminité du Bois and reformulations of Rochas’s Femme.
Drydown: This term refers to the scent that remains when your perfume “dries down” on your skin, that is, after the top notes and middle notes have begun to evaporate and the heavier base notes become more prominent.
Essential oil: The oils obtained from a variety of plants via steam distillation or expression (from a citrus fruit rind).
Facet: A term borrowed from gemology to describe the many scent dimensions one perfume note, molecule, or ingredient may have. For example, geranium is often described as having a lemon facet, as well as a rosy one. Labdanum has vanilla and cinnamon facets.
Floral: A perfume category whose predominant scent comes from floral notes. Florals can be described as fresh, green, or fruity, etc., depending on the other notes in the composition.
Fougère: The French word for “fern,” this fragrance category was introduced with Houbigant’s nineteenth-century fragrance Fougère Royale (1882), which was a fantasy fern fragrance, given that ferns don’t have a recognizable smell. It includes notes of bergamot, oakmoss, lavender, and coumarin.
Frankincense: A gum resin from a small shrub that since ancient times has been used for incense. Sweet, spicy, smoky, sharp, and even slightly lemony, it is often used, along with other resins like labdanum and myrrh, in Oriental fragrances. Also called olibanum (Boswellia carteri).
Galbanum: A gum resin from the giant fennel Ferula gummosa, steam-distilled for its essential oil. Bitter, herbaceous, and almost chalky, this is the note that is often present in perfume formulas described as “green.” Germaine Cellier used an overdose of galbanum in Pierre Balmain’s Vent Vert, and it greened up Silences by Jacomo and Lancetti by Lancetti.
Gardenia: A creamy, white floral whose extraction yields too little to be worth the cost for commercial perfumery; gardenia accords are constructed instead.
Geranium: A flower with a lemony-rosy scent.
Gourmand: A modern scent category with notes that smell like food, often confectionary; for example, chocolate, vanilla, and cotton candy.
Green: A term used to describe scents that recall the fresh, aromatic scents of herbs, leaves, and grasses. Galbanum is the ur-green note.
Guaiac wood: The steam-distilled essential oil from tree bark. An intensely smoky scent, used to great effect in Theorema and Le Feu d’Issey.
Habanolide: One of many synthetic musks, with a warm, sweetish, powdery quality.
Headspace technology: A form of olfactory photography, headspace is a method of capturing the scent molecules from scented things, whether organic (a flower whose scent can’t be extracted traditionally) or inorganic (dirt). Basically, a bell-jar-like apparatus is placed over the scented object and the molecules are extracted and saved. After the molecules are painstakingly analyzed and noted, a synthetic version can be re-created by perfumers.
Heart note/middle note: In the perfume pyramid, heart notes are often floral notes and have duration/volatility/weight somewhere between top notes and base notes.
Hedione: A synthetic perfume note (methyl dihydrojasmonate) that smells of radiant jasmine. Used in both Eau Sauvage and Diorella to create a transparent jasmine.
Heliotrope: A purple flower originally from Peru with vanilla, caramel, and almond-cherry facets. Its scent cannot be extracted from the flowers, so synthetic heliotropin substitutes for it.
Herbaceous: A term describing the scent of aromatic herbs such as lavender, sage, basil, and bay leaf.
Hesperidic: Describes citrus notes in perfume.
IFRA: The International Fragrance Association is the perfume industry’s global regulatory body whose purpose is to test fragrance materials for safety and possible allergenic concerns. Much controversy has stemmed from its decision to mandate limited use of classical fragrance ingredients such as oakmoss and jasmine absolute, which perfumers say has created limited perfume palettes and wiped out whole categories of perfume (chypre), threatening the continued creation of classic fragrances with those ingredients.
Immortelle (or everasting flower, Helichrysum): A floral note that smells savory sweet. Immortelle is often described as smelling like a combination between ham and maple syrup.
Indole, indolic: A molecule found in decomposing organic matter and feces, in lower concentrations, indole has a floral aspect. Many white flowers, including jasmine and orange blossom are described as indolic because of the disquieting, ripe, animalic, and almost excremental facet of their scents.
Ionones: Violet is an expensive perfume to extract, so ionones, discovered in 1893, step in to provide the powdery-sweet aspect of the flower.
Isobutyl quinoline: A synthetic perfume note used in chypre, leather, and woody perfumes. It provides dry, green, wood, leather, and tobacco aspects. Overdosed in Germaine Cellier’s Robert Piguet fragrance, Bandit.
Labdanum (Cistus): The resin from the rockrose bush. Said to be the plant ingredient whose scent closest resembles ambergris.
Leather: A perfume accord and category of perfume constructed from various notes, including birch tar, styrax, castoreum, and a variety of synthetic notes.
Limbic system: A component of an ancient part of the brain that processes emotions, memories, and instinctual responses related to fear and sex, and contains the olfactory cortex, which receives and processes information from the olfactory bulb. When deployed to talk about perfume, it’s often used less in a scientific manner (although certainly scent, emotion, and memory are connected in the brain) than to discuss perfume’s power to effect deep, visceral, often memory-tinged, near-automatic responses in people.
Magnolia oil: Extracted from the magnolia flower, its scent has a fresh, lemony, diluted rose scent with subtle fruit notes’ warmth in the drydown.
Maté absolute: On its own, this green tea absolute has green, earthy, complex, smoky, tobacco qualities. In Bulgari’s Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée.
Methyl ionone: Discovered in 1893, methyl ionone is a synthetic note that recalls the woody and orris aspects of the violet flower. Used in L’Origan and L’Heure Bleue.
Mimosa, cassie (Acacia farnesiana): The flowers of A. farnesiana, or cassie, yield an absolute that, according to Steffen Arctander, author of Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin, is a warm, powdery-spicy, herbaceous, and floral odor with a balsamic and cinnamon undertone. Amarige highlighted the sweet aspects of mimosa; in Caron’s Farnesiana, the more herbaceous, balsamic aspects.
Muguet: French word for lily of the valley.
Musk: Musk is produced by the musk deer and excreted by the male during mating season. Musk deer were killed almost to extinction for their valuable musk glands, which were dried, and whose musk “seeds” were removed and steeped in alcohol to create tinctures for perfume. The scent of real musk is warm, with depth and a dark animalic aroma. Many synthetics now can mimic musk scent, but one of the most superior musk synthetics, nitro-musks, which were in Chanel No. 5 and countless other vintages, has been banned due to toxicity concerns. Musk can also be substituted with plant ingredients including ambrette seed and angelica.
Myrrh: A dried gum-resin from a number of closely related, small, thorny trees (genus Commiphora). Woody and sweet, myrrh oil, made from steam-distilling the gum resin, is used in many Oriental perfume bases. See Opopanax, or sweet myrrh.
Narcissus: An intoxicating green floral note.
Neroli: The essential oil from steam-distilling the orange flowers from the inedible bitter orange tree, also known as the Seville orange, Citrus aurantium. Orange blossom comes from the same flowers, but its method of production, solvent extraction, creates a slightly different fragrance. Other fragrance materials can be obtained from this tree: petit grain (from the twigs and leaves) and bergamot from the rind/peel.
Note: A term in perfumery borrowed from the world of music. A perfume note is essentially a musical metaphor for an ingredient (e.g., rose or civet). Three notes can form a unique scent impression that exceeds each individual note’s scent, resulting in an accord.
Oakmoss (Evernia prunastri): A type of lichen growing on oak trees that is a crucial perfume note for chypre perfumes. In chypres, a mossy base contrasts with the sparkling, citrusy, bergamot top note. Earthy, phenolic, woodsy, and, of course mossy, oakmoss has been severely regulated by the IFRA to the point that some perfumers and perfume experts believe that no true chypres can any longer be made.
Opopanax: Also known as sweet myrrh, opopanax is an herb that grows up to three feet, with yellow flowers. A balsamic note, that is warm, sweet, and creamy, it also has bitter and smoky facets. Also spelled opoponax.
Oriental: The Oriental category of perfume is distinguished by the use of balsamic resins, woody notes, and rich, sometimes sweet notes like amber, vanilla, and tonka. The Haarmann & Reimer guide divides Oriental into two types: fragrances that are structured around amber, and fragrances whose predominant notes are spicy.
Orris: Usually when “iris” is mentioned in perfume notes, what’s actually being referred to is orris, the dried roots of the iris flower which are turned to “orris butter,” a prized (and expensive) ingredient in perfumery that creates a rich, woody, powdery effect that has worked wonders in fragrances like Jacques Fath’s Iris Gris (Grey Iris) and Chanel No. 19. The process of extracting orris is complicated, painstaking, and yields very little orris; hence, its high cost.
Osmanthus: This sweet, apricot-faceted flower, also called “sweet olive” or “tea olive,” is used in perfumery and in some Chinese teas.
Oud/Agarwood: Made from the resin of the aquilaria tree, which exudes the resins when it’s attacked by pathogens, this perfume note has a haunting, earthy, woody scent that has been the breakout perfume note in niche and mainstream scents alike for several years.
Ozonic: A perfume accord that attempts to create the smell of fresh air after a thunderstorm. Big in the 1990s, and often paired with the Calone-produced oceanic accord (for example, in Cool Water).
Peau d’Espagne (Spanish leather): A style of perfume popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that based its scent on the cured Spanish leather saddles that were once perfumed with spices and perfume oils. Psychologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) claimed in Studies on the Psychology of Sex that Peau d’Espagne perfumes were “often the favorite of sensuous persons,” and more mysteriously, that “Peau d’Espagne is of all perfumes that which most nearly approaches the odor of a woman’s skin.”
Perfume pyramid: Unlike recipes in cookbooks, perfume pyramids are often a truncated, shorthand list of a perfume’s prominent notes and accords. (A complete perfume formula can have upwards of 100 ingredients, whereas a perfume pyramid’s list of top, heart, and base notes tends to only list around 15 to 20.)
Petit grain: The essential oil from the leaves and twigs of the Citrus aurantium bitter orange tree. It provides a bracing, herbaceous, green effect to fragrances.
Pimento: Pimento essential oil is obtained by distillation from the dried, full-grown, unripe fruit of the Pimenta officinalis plant. Its scent is warm, with a touch of subdued spice, sweetness, and clove. Found in Poison and Opium.
Resins: The term for the exudation from the bark of bushes and trees such as Tolu balsam, Peru balsam, and labdanum. Sometimes called “tears.”
Russian leather: A leather accord in perfumes such as Cuir de Russie by L.T. Piver, Chanel, and others that re-creates the scent of animalic, leather hides tanned with birch tar, with the addition of soft balsamic and floral notes.
Sandalwood: An oil extracted from the sandalwood tree once abundant in India and now more likely to be sourced from Australia, or synthesized. With a rich, buttery, warm and woody scent prized in perfumery. Found in Guerlain’s Samsara.
Sillage: The French word for “trail” or “wake,” as in the mark a ship makes on the water that trails behind it. In perfume language, this describes how far a perfume travels after it’s put on the skin, and if it has minimal sillage, it can be described as a “skin scent.”
Skank: Perfume slang for any scent that has an animalic or “dirty” aspect evoking unwashed bodies. The perfume world is indebted to “Miss March” (real name March Moore), perfume writer for PerfumePosse.com, for adding this most important—and humorous—perfume term to the lexicon in 2006. Jacques Guerlain once said that perfume “Should smell like the underside of my mistress,” and many twentieth-century perfumes complied, wrapping their pretty, more socially acceptable notes over ingredients with baser instincts—substances from an animals’ nether regions, spices redolent of human sweat, and flowers with excremental facets. Whether skank refers to “sex, and only sex” as Miss March argues, or also, as Perfume Posse’s Patty White adds philosophically, our relation to decay and a reminder that we’re going to die, perfume has had a cyclical relationship to skank. Perfumers in the 1950s embraced animal notes and “skank” perfumes, for example, while the clean scents of the 1990s repudiated it.
Soliflore: A single-note-themed perfume that may include multiple notes, but whose predominant scent is structured around one floral note, such as lilac, rose, or lily of the valley. Used in contrast to bouquet florals and more-abstract compositions.
Styrax: Styrax is an interesting note often used to create leather scents. A gum resin from the bark of a styrax tree, it imparts a leathery, smoky, balsamic (powdery-ambery) effect that perfumer Olivier Polge has said can give a chypre-like quality to perfumes.
Tiaré flower (Gardenia tahitensis): Tahiti’s national symbol, Tiaré is in the gardenia family, and is also known as Tahitian gardenia. Monoi perfume oil is made by soaking Tiaré petals in coconut oil.
Tolu balsam: A balsamic resin from a South American tree. It has a creamy, vanillic, and cinnamon scent.
Tonka: Tonka beans are from the seeds of the Dipteryx odorata, a legume tree. They have a powerful confectionary vanilla scent with hints of almond and cinnamon. Tonka beans contain a large amount of coumarin, the ingredient crucial to fougères, and they were once considered safe to use in the United States to flavor food and desserts.
Top note: The lightest, most volatile molecules in a perfume composition, which is why they’re placed at the top of perfume pyramids. They include citrus, fruit, and aromatic notes.
Tuberose: Buttery, tropical, with an almost rubbery facet with bubblegum sweetness, this white flower is a troublemaker in the world of perfumes. Although it can be dressed in the finest clothes and seem elegant (Frédéric Malle’s Carnal Flower is one of my favorite modern florals, with this “carnal” but supremely chic flower at its heart), its tawdry sexiness is also used to spectacular effect in Poison and Fracas. It is proof that perfumers can “push” certain aspects of the flower, whether syrupy sweetness (Fracas and Poison) or freshness (Carnal Flower). Something in tuberose’s DNA, however, keeps it from ever being an “innocent” flower.
Vetiver: Steam-distilled from the roots of the tall grass native to Haiti. Woody, peppery, earthy, dusty, sometimes lemony, vetiver is an earthy, comforting scent. In the nineteenth century, no fashionable Creole lady would have been without dried vetiver roots or vetiver sachets in her drawers.
Violet leaf: In contrast to the violet flower, which is sweet, violet leaf offers a green aspect to fragrances. Violet leaf absolute smells round, fresh, pulpy, wet, and slightly fruity-floral.