De-Classifying Fragrance Ingredients | Part One

Doug Smelling Lilacs in BBG | De-Classifing Fragrance Ingredients

As someone who creates fragrances, I love my ingredients. I love talking about them, testing them, tracking them down… I am enamored by each individual smell and backstory. To me, ingredients are the heart and sole of olfactory art. I could easily spend hours going on and on about any one of them (and probably have). I never try to hide my appreciation for their existence. I’m not sure I could if I tried. Ingredients were the hooks that first landed me in this crazy world of perfumery. I confess. I was completely seduced by raw materials.

Nature’s Hidden Beauty

Whether squeezed from a plant. or bled from a tree, so many perfumery materials start out as living things. Something we used to touch, something we use to see, is transformed… concentrated… liquified.

In the wild, fragrance is often described as the hidden beauty of nature. Fragrance materials fuel our instinctual drive for discovery. As a result, they add emotional dimensional to the world we live in. Perfumery then involves repurposing these invisible designs of nature to better suit our own distinct human desires. Of all of Mother Nature’s creatures, we alone bend olfaction. We queer the soup.

Slicing and dicing perfume by ingredient can be quite useful in studying olfaction, but this is far from the whole picture of what goes into any bottle. If nothing else, honing in on a particular olfactive focal point can help teach variation in the use of these materials. Consequently, it exposes the importance of provenance and quality. As we smell 15 different fragrances with 15 different spins on patchouli, we begin to understand the diverse beauty any particular strain of patchouli can impart. We begin to unravel the material’s structural flexibility. Therefore, we also quickly become aware that not all patchouli is created equal.

If we then trace any material’s ritualistic usage through time, we are essentially granted a peephole into our cultural olfactive past: a portal born of smell. That being said, experiencing any aroma is still necessary to fully understand and appreciate its purpose in the overall formulation. Think of ingredients like the cast members of our perfumed stories. Each has its own specific part to play. They serve as stitches in the olfactive fabric of perfume.

Casting Ingredients for an Olfactive Narrative

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Again, in formulation, ingredients are important, but not everything. Like any staged performance, direction also matters. Sticking with performance metaphors, if fragrance families are like settings, then ingredients are the cast tasked with bringing these olfactive landscapes to life. Communication and connection are conjured in a perfume through the concerted olfactive efforts of its materials. Some might shine brighter than others, but in concert together, they relay the complete tale. The role of the perfumer is to pen their story.

Some olfactive stories are solo pieces. Imagine a lone actor on a black box stage. Notice the similarities to a soliflore fragrance. In both instances, all attention is focused on highlighting a single voice… an isolated point of view funneled through a central focal point. Hence, it alone guides you through the story. Direction and staging dictate how. Over time, the soloist’s emotional beauty is exposed.

Then there are the more standard productions. These arrangements usually consist of a chorus of extras supporting the actions of a few principal stars. This too is a common setup for perfume formulation. Think about it like this: the average fine fragrance contains hundreds of line items (individual ingredients added to the mixture), but not all are immediately noticeable to your nose. Those underlying components are the extras of our stories. The fragrance notes that are more noticeable, are made so intentionally by the perfumer, turning certain materials into main attractions. In essence, formulation is tailored to draw attention to the interactions of those few star materials. Their story is deemed central to the action by the perfumer. Ensemble pieces, nonlinear narratives, improvisation… all have similar structural foils in fragrance creation, and each variation can best be understood by examining each ingredient’s role in the story.

The Art of the Path

Individual ingredients help set tone in formulation, but they most certainly do not guarantee it. Every material used is being tasked with a role to play by the perfumer, who casts and then directs their performance (which is projected by/on your skin). Materials each have a particular part to play in the olfactive narrative, helping the story unfold as intended by its author. They lend their emotional texture to the perfumer’s unique creation. In that formulation, some materials are stars, some are not, but together they work in concert to create emotional effect. But at the end of the day, your experience of that creation, your response to the performance, determines any fragrance’s ultimate success or failure.

Perfumery is the art of the path, and ingredients are the characters we run into along our olfactive journeys of discovery.

[In part two, the discussion shifts to some of the known limitations associated with classifying fragrances by ingredient, and the issue of sustainable fragrance production as it relates to natural and synthetic materials.]