$10 per wheel. This perfume wheel is meant to provide a visual way to understand scents and their relationship to one another. It’s also a guide to ways of describing scents. The terms included on the wheel aren’t the only ones that can be used to describe each essence, but they represent those you will encounter most often. Novice perfumers often complain that they cannot think of how to describe what they are smelling. It’s easiest to train our noses and our brains to link a set vocabulary of words to odors, and then to expand from there into more personal and original descriptions. The wheel groups essences together according to their common odor trait, allowing you to explore their subtle (and not so subtle) differences. Classifying essences helps organize your thinking about blending with them. Keep in mind that olfactory response is highly subjective, however, and that it draws on both your prior aromatic life experience and your unique way of using language. The inner tier of the wheel delineates the most general groupings of fragrance into families such as “spicy” and “herbal.” The middle tier describes subsets within the families, such as “heavy” or “sweet.” The outer tier places individual essences within these categories. By comparing the nuances of these essences, within and between groups, the natural perfumer learns the specific qualities of each essence and begins to explore, in a sense, beyond the wheel. Besides arranging odors into families with words, the wheel associates them by color, linking, for example, spicy odors with shades of red. The association between color and smell is an aspect of synesthesia: the evocation of one kind of sensory impression when another sense is stimulated. This pairing of scent and color is another channel for thinking about creating natural perfumes. This is one of the best tools you will ever encounter for natural perfumery.
$10 per wheel. This perfume wheel is meant to provide a visual way to understand scents and their relationship to one another. It’s also a guide to ways of describing scents. The terms included on the wheel aren’t the only ones that can be used to describe each essence, but they represent those you will encounter most often. Novice perfumers often complain that they cannot think of how to describe what they are smelling. It’s easiest to train our noses and our brains to link a set vocabulary of words to odors, and then to expand from there into more personal and original descriptions. The wheel groups essences together according to their common odor trait, allowing you to explore their subtle (and not so subtle) differences. Classifying essences helps organize your thinking about blending with them. Keep in mind that olfactory response is highly subjective, however, and that it draws on both your prior aromatic life experience and your unique way of using language. The inner tier of the wheel delineates the most general groupings of fragrance into families such as “spicy” and “herbal.” The middle tier describes subsets within the families, such as “heavy” or “sweet.” The outer tier places individual essences within these categories. By comparing the nuances of these essences, within and between groups, the natural perfumer learns the specific qualities of each essence and begins to explore, in a sense, beyond the wheel. Besides arranging odors into families with words, the wheel associates them by color, linking, for example, spicy odors with shades of red. The association between color and smell is an aspect of synesthesia: the evocation of one kind of sensory impression when another sense is stimulated. This pairing of scent and color is another channel for thinking about creating natural perfumes. This is one of the best tools you will ever encounter for natural perfumery.
