How should you describe a perfume if you don't know the notes?

By Arthur Cukier

Short answer: describe what the perfume makes you feel, where you would wear it and how it changes on your skin. Notes matter less than you think. Most people cannot pick them out of a finished perfume anyway.

I learned this from my mentor, Chantal Roos, former President of Yves Saint Laurent Beauté. She taught me to talk about perfume through feelings, not through a list of ingredients. Here is how I do it today, as the founder of Perfume Street and the licensee of Borsalino Fragrances.

Start with the idea, not the ingredients

Every perfume has a DNA. First ask what it is trying to say. Then ask who will wear it, where, and for which moment. A perfume for a summer evening in Milan is not built like a perfume for a winter day at the office in New York.

Read it in three moments

A perfume moves. Take the top, the heart and the base one at a time. What do you feel at the first spray? What stays after an hour? What is left on your skin at the end of the day? Each moment should have its own feeling, and the whole should still tell one story.

Think in accords, not single notes

An accord is a group of materials that together create one idea. There are thousands of ways to build the same accord. So the word "iris" or "amber" on a list tells you very little. What matters is what the accord means to you: softness, warmth, tension, comfort.

Diffusion and longevity are two different things

Diffusion is how far a perfume travels around you. Longevity is how long it stays on your skin. A perfume can be loud for one hour, or quiet for ten. We tune both for the use and for the country. Some markets want a perfume that fills the room. Others want it close to the skin, and lasting all day.

How I describe Black Iris

Black Iris and White Iris were born from cinema, and black-and-white cinema in particular. We thought of Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Humphrey Bogart. We wanted to bring people back to a time when perfumes were not notes lined up one after the other. They were one blend you could not take apart. You could not name what you smelled. You just felt it.

We kept a very Italian soul, with key natural ingredients like orris butter from Tuscany. So I don't describe Black Iris as "iris, cardamom, cedar". I describe it as the moment the lights go down at the cinema.

The trend I would push back on

More than a mistake, it is a trend. Many people now want perfumes that are always stronger and always last longer. I understand why. But it has a cost. Fresh natural materials, like citrus, do not last long on skin. Remove them to gain hours, and you lose some of the beauty.

Only a small number of materials last very long on skin. So perfumes built only to last end up smelling alike. I would rather spray again every two or three hours and keep the feeling I want. To find more diversity and more creativity, look at the whole perfume, top notes included.

Don't buy from a list of notes

I also don't like blind buying from a list of notes. The same notes can feel completely different depending on their dose and how they are blended. Most of us cannot recognise them inside a finished perfume. Choosing by notes keeps you in your comfort zone, and you miss the perfumes that could surprise you. Smell it on your skin, and give it a day.

Five questions to describe any perfume

• Where would you wear it, and when?
• What do you feel at the first spray?
• What stays after one hour?
• Does it stay close to you, or fill the room?
• Which film, song or place does it bring back?

Questions we often hear