Scents And Sensibilities

As the languid chill of winter recedes and the first blossoms of amaltas and bougainvillea gild the Indian horizon, one must meditate yet again on the elusive question of a language's ability to ever truly capture the mysterious world of scent? Perhaps, for a connoisseur the taxonomy may come almost naturally, but for those men fragrances that limit their compliments to tidy classifications of light and strong, day and night, a simple question like, "What fragrance are you wearing" can make one feel dumbfounded.

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Since, perfumes act like invisible things that make one look and feel confident in a room full of people, talking about scent can feel a little like talking about dreams—often tedious, rarely satisfying. The olfactory world is more private than we care to admit. Even when we occupy the same space—a crowded metro carriage or a sun-drenched café—each nose interprets differently.

Far more complex than sampling a tasting menu, fragrance resists consensus. It is at once intimate and atmospheric, personal yet public—a paradox that makes the pursuit of the perfect fragrances almost as complicated as bottling sunlight. Most of the times, we are all ears and eyes. We feel the blues on Mondays, love the golden hours, but the whiff of dirty socks, the odours of the oceans and the what everyone undeniably loves- petrichor- pull us into a full sensory experiences. Yet you walk into any perfume store and you'll overhear someone say , "Oh! It's too strong for me", "I don't like woody perfumes", "this one's too sweet for my taste". Ironically, we all know that perfumes are a mix of complementary notes at play together. It isn't one concentration. Yet when it comes to describing scents, our words fail us.

What, then, distinguishes a pleasant perfume from a truly exceptional one? To be honest, chemists can turn your egg on toast into a fragrance, too.

“When creating a smell, I go for subtle, clean, crisp, light fresh alluring fragrances that must evoke timeless elegance and a quiet sophistication,” writes author of Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent, Jean-Claude Ellena. The French perfumer and writer explores the nature’s most captivating scents, focusing on the botanical elements that shape the world of perfumery. He writes that learning to recognise the architecture of a perfume, requires him to "work as far away as possible from the test lab...using my olfactive memory I select, write down, juxtapose, and dose dozens of aromatic compounds. Whether odors are good or bad doesn't matter; these materials are like words, I use them to tell a story."

Similarly, French sociologist Bruno Latour, in his 2004 essay “How to Talk About the Body,” reflected on how perfumers in training gradually learn to discern ever more subtle and elusive essences: “It is not by accident that the person is called a ‘nose,’ as if, through practice, she had acquired an organ that defined her ability to detect chemical and other differences.” In other words, a nose is not innate; it is meticulously cultivated.

Most of us, however, describe scents comparatively rather than precisely. A trained perfumer can detect whether jasmine is indolic, green, or solar because he has smelled dozens of jasmines. The average wearer, encountering only a handful, cannot triangulate the difference. Perception sharpens with repetition; the nose is trained, not born. Ultimately, to wear a fragrance is not merely to scent the air. It is to inhabit it. Perfume is a dialogue between skin, memory, and environment. A spritz of neroli on a humid April morning in Mumbai, for instance, can smell bright and citrusy on one person.

So, language may falter, and words may fail, but the body remembers. The exceptional perfume is not the one most talked about, nor the one that overwhelms the senses, but the one that feels like an extension of the self: intimate, elegant, and unforgettable.