Why Perfume Notes Are Hard to Use When Choosing a Fragrance

Perfume notes are names for the smells a fragrance is meant to suggest. They are hard to use when choosing one, because recognising and naming individual smells is surprisingly difficult. In one study, experts and novices alike named everyday smells correctly about half the time, and their descriptions barely matched each other's. Research also suggests another way to describe scent: through the feelings it evokes, which can be measured and studied. This piece covers what the research shows, who notes do work for, and where the evidence runs out.

What a note list does at the counter

You pick up a tester. The card says bergamot, pink pepper, iris, cedar. You spray it and smell the strip. Something bright comes first, which might be the bergamot. The iris you take on trust.

Then the real questions arrive, and the list has nothing to say about them. Will you still like it at four in the afternoon? Does it feel like you, or like someone you're borrowing? Notes describe parts of the scent in familiar language. Your decision is about the whole experience.

There is a second gap too. A note is often an impression, and it need not be a literal ingredient. "Leather", "amber" or "sea air" usually describes an effect built from several materials. So the list is already an abstraction of the perfume, and you then have to interpret it with your nose. The research on that second step is unusually clear.

How well do people name smells?

Odour naming is surprisingly difficult for many speakers of Western languages. Ilja Croijmans and Asifa Majid asked 63 Dutch speakers to describe ten everyday smells. Some were wine experts, some coffee experts, some had no training. Every group got roughly five or six out of ten right. The experts did no better than the novices on these everyday smells.

Accuracy was only part of the problem. Descriptions of the same smell varied a lot from one person to the next, in every group. So even when two people both smell something correctly, they may not use the same word for it.

People do try to name sources. Among the untrained group, 72% of the words they used named a thing the smell came from, like lemon or soap. They reach for the names of things instinctively. They are just often wrong, and inconsistent when they are right.

A larger study by Andreas Keller and Leslie Vosshall had 55 people rate 480 different molecules. The words people chose for the same molecule varied enormously from person to person.

This is partly about language. Speakers of Jahai, a language of the Malay Peninsula, have a set of abstract smell words and name odours about as easily as English speakers name colours. English has very few such words. We describe smells by pointing at objects, and the pointing is unreliable.

Even famous perfumes are hard to recognise

A 2018 study by Tiffany Baer and colleagues tested this with finished perfumes. Nineteen women were included in the analysis. They smelled nine well-known luxury fragrances without labels. On average they recognised just over one of the nine.

The same study then showed the brand names. Labels nudged how pleasant and familiar the perfumes seemed, though only modestly. How the perfumes made people feel did not change, and neither did their bodily responses.

So a famous name can shift your opinion a little. It does not seem to change how the scent itself lands.

Who notes do work for

Notes are a trained vocabulary. Caroline Sezille and colleagues compared four groups: untrained people, trainee cooks, flavourists and perfumers. The professionals used more chemical and quality terms to describe what they smelled. Liking did not differ between the groups. Training changed how people talked about a smell. It did not change how much they enjoyed it.

The wine and coffee study points the same way. Experts used more source words, but only within their own field. Outside it, they were back with everyone else.

For a trained perfumer, the language of notes sits alongside detailed knowledge of materials and how they behave together. For most shoppers, it offers clues without that deeper context.

What feelings about a scent look like

Feelings about scent are structured. When researchers ask people how a smell makes them feel, the answers fall into a small number of recurring groups. Christelle Chrea and colleagues found dimensions such as well-being, social connection, energy or calm, and memory.

Camille Ferdenzi and colleagues then tested feeling words across seven regions of the world. Four groups of feelings appeared everywhere: disgust or irritation, happiness and well-being, sensuality and desire, and energy. Others were specific to a culture.

The most useful result for anyone choosing a perfume comes from Christelle Porcherot and colleagues. They built a short scale for the feelings a scent evokes and tested it on fine fragrances. It was highly reliable. And perfumes that people liked equally still differed in how they made people feel.

That last point matters in practice. "I like it" hides a lot. Two perfumes can score the same on liking while one feels calming and the other feels like a night out. If you only track liking, you lose the part that tells them apart.

Preference is also more personal than people tend to assume. Artin Arshamian and colleagues asked 225 people in nine non-Western communities, plus a New York sample, to rank the pleasantness of ten smells. Culture explained only about 6% of the differences in ranking. The smell itself explained about 41%. The remaining 54% sat with the individual, a figure that also includes ordinary inconsistency in how people rate things. In that task, which used single molecules and no finished perfumes, culture explained surprisingly little and individual differences explained far more. Culture may still shape perfume taste. The result is a useful warning against assuming that someone's background tells you what they will enjoy.

Where the evidence stops

This is where the honest version of the argument has to slow down.

We did not find a study that directly tests whether choosing by feeling leads to better purchases than choosing by notes. The research shows that note names are unreliable for most people and that feelings are consistent and measurable. It does not show that a feeling-led recommendation leaves you happier six months later. Anyone who claims otherwise is ahead of the evidence, and that includes us.

Most of these studies also used single molecules or everyday smells. A finished perfume is a mixture that changes over hours on skin. Porcherot's and Baer's work used real fragrances, which is why they carry weight here, but the field is thin on this.

People are also poor at predicting how their liking will change with use. In a small study by Paul Rozin and a colleague, people predicted badly how much they would like body products after a week of daily use, and decades of experience did not help. A fragrance you love on a strip can tire on you, and one you were unsure of can grow. Any first match, from a quiz or a sales assistant, is a starting point. Wearing it is the test.

How to use this when you shop

Read the note list as a map of impressions. It tells you which smells the fragrance is built around, and it can flag one you already know to approach with care. It cannot tell you exactly what is in the formula, how prominent a listed note will be, or whether you will enjoy the finished scent.

Notice how the scent makes you feel, in your own words. Warm or cool. Sheer or dense. You do not need to identify a single note to notice those differences.

Wear it before you decide. A strip shows you the opening. Your skin shows you the afternoon. Our guide to choosing fragrance samples covers how to test a few at once without blurring them together.

Watch your own patterns. If you keep buying scents that feel alike, the pattern is information. Why you keep buying similar fragrances looks at what that repetition usually means.

How Zenyra uses this

Zenyra's quiz asks how you want a fragrance to feel. It does not ask you to name notes. Your answers become a Taste Map across five axes:

• Warmth: how close the scent sits to body heat, from cool and open-air to warm and resinous.

• Projection: how far it radiates from you, from skin-close to room-filling.

• Risk: how far it sits from mainstream expectation, from crowd-pleasing to polarising.

• Texture: how much body the scent has, from sheer to dense and saturated. More on this in our guide to Texture.

• Sweetness: how sugared it reads, from dry and austere to fully gourmand.

The research above informed one part of that design. Zenyra does not need you to identify notes before it can model your taste. The five axes themselves are Zenyra's own framework for describing how a fragrance is experienced. These studies do not validate that framework, and they do not show that it produces better recommendations. That is something we have to test ourselves.

Curious what your own fragrance preferences look like? Explore your Taste Map through Zenyra's 10-question structured reflection.

Sources

• Arshamian A et al. (2022). The perception of odor pleasantness is shared across cultures. Current Biology 32: 2061–2066. Link

• Baer T et al. (2018). "Dior, J'adore": the role of contextual information of luxury on emotional responses to perfumes. Food Quality and Preference 69: 36–43. Link

• Chrea C et al. (2009). Mapping the semantic space for the subjective experience of emotional responses to odors. Chemical Senses 34(1): 49–62. Link

• Croijmans I, Majid A (2016). Not all flavor expertise is equal: the language of wine and coffee experts. PLoS ONE. Link

• Croijmans I, Majid A (2015). Odor naming is difficult, even for wine and coffee experts. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society. Link

• Ferdenzi C et al. (2013). Affective semantic space of scents. Food Quality and Preference 30: 128–138. Link

• Keller A, Vosshall LB (2016). Olfactory perception of chemically diverse molecules. BMC Neuroscience 17: 55. Link

• Majid A, Burenhult N (2014). Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language. Cognition 130(2): 266–270. Link

• Porcherot C et al. (2010). How do you feel when you smell this? Food Quality and Preference 21(8): 938–947. Link

• Rozin P, Hanko K (2006). Self-prediction of hedonic trajectories for repeated use of body products and foods. Appetite 46(3): 297–303. Link

• Sezille C et al. (2014). Hedonic appreciation and verbal description of pleasant and unpleasant odors in untrained, trainee cooks, flavorists and perfumers. Frontiers in Psychology 5. Link