FragDNA / The Language of Scent / Wearing It
Finding the Words
Wearing It · 6 min
Smell is the hardest sense to talk about. English has almost no dedicated olfactory vocabulary — we borrow from taste (sweet, bitter, sour), from touch (sharp, soft, dry, warm), from other objects (leathery, smoky, powdery). This is not a failure of your descriptive ability. It is a structural feature of the language, and it is why perfume writing so often collapses into either lists of notes or pure romance.
A better method uses four axes, in this order.
First, structure over ingredients. Instead of guessing materials, describe shape: dense or transparent, warm or cool, sweet or dry, smooth or rough, bright or dark, close or expansive. "Cool, dry, transparent and slightly bitter" communicates far more than a list of botanicals, and it is likely to be accurate rather than a guess.
Second, time. Note when things happen. "Sharp and green for the first ten minutes, then it softens and turns powdery, and after three hours it is only warm wood." This is the single most informative thing you can record, and it is what you will want when you read your own notes later.
Third, comparison. Anchor to something you have already smelled. Comparison is how olfactory expertise is actually built — not by memorising a lexicon but by constructing a network of relations. "Like a drier, less sweet version of X" is genuinely useful to another person; it is also how you build your own internal map.
Fourth, only then, association. Places, memories, textures, images. This is the part people reach for first and it should come last, because it communicates nothing until the structural work is done. "It smells like a cathedral" is evocative but unfalsifiable. "Cool, dry, resinous and smoky, like a cathedral" is both.
Two habits accelerate everything. Keep notes — a line per fragrance, written while wearing it rather than afterwards, because olfactory memory reconstructs rather than replays. And smell single materials wherever you can: a bag of tonka beans, a vetiver oil, a piece of sandalwood, a rose otto sample. Everything in this course becomes real the moment you can identify the material rather than read about it.
The destination is not fluent perfume prose. It is the ability to smell something and know roughly what it is doing and why — and, having got there, to have opinions that are actually yours.
Key terms
- Olfactory vocabulary
- The borrowed set of taste, touch and object words English uses for smell, having no dedicated terms of its own.
- Facet
- One identifiable aspect of a complex material or accord, such as the green facet of jasmine or the leathery facet of vetiver.
- Reference material
- A single raw material smelled in isolation to build an accurate internal benchmark.
Smell this
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