Everything you need to know when shopping for your signature scent.
What Exactly Is a Scent Profile? Here’s How to Choose Your Next Signature Fragrance
Even as our relationships to makeup and hair care have shifted over the past year, fragrance has remained a reliable way to transcend our homes, conjure closeness to faraway relatives, and find elevation in a string of mundane days.
As we emerge into more social situations, finding a signature scent may seem like a relevant search. But how to go about it? Unpacking the notes and recognizing how they work with your unique body chemistry is the first step, and one of the key classifications of a particular perfume is its scent profile. From detailing the layered notes to identifying its scent “family,” the profile is an easy way to understand a fragrance's composition while matching it up against the mood you want to be in when you apply.
Here, we spoke to a set of perfumers and fragrance experts to break down everything you need to know when it comes to deciphering a scent profile.
What is a scent profile?
“In the fragrance world, olfactive families are a way to break down and classify how a perfume smells rather than what it contains,” says Joan Tanis, national training director at Maison Francis Kurkdjian. “Simply put, there are eight olfactive families that are divided into two groups: in the Warm group, there is fougere, oriental, and leather. In the Fresh group, you have citrus, floral, and aromatic. Interestingly, the chypre and woody families are a cross between warm and fresh.”
Tynan Sinks, writer and co-host of the Smell Ya Later podcast, adds that while a profile can serve as the umbrella term for the main notes of a particular fragrance, it can also touch on the layers of a scent, such as the “top, middle, and base notes, or how the fragrance is built.”
Can it change over time?
“The profile itself does not change, as the notes it was created with will always be in the scent, but the way it smells on your skin often does,” says Sinks. “Some fragrances are linear, meaning they smell the same throughout the entirety of the wear. Most fragrances, though, do evolve on your skin over time.”
Beauty journalist and Smell Ya Later co-host Sable Yong explains that staying power is often dependent on the order of a fragrance's layer composition. “The bottom notes are going to stick around the longest on your skin, while the top notes often are the quickest to fade, and the middle notes—sometimes called heart—tend to influence both.” It's important to note that a fragrance will present itself differently over time when applied directly to the skin rather than spritzed onto clothing. You're more likely to experience the “tiered reveal” of a fragrance if you only apply on the edges of your wrist or collarbone, whereas you'll be able to smell the whole composition for longer if it's also added to fabric, Yong says.
What is the most important note: top, middle, or bottom?
“The customer's attention will be driven for sure by the top notes, simply because they are the ones he or she will smell first,” says perfumer Kilian Hennessy. “But the heart and dry down notes are actually more important as they are the true signature of the scent.” The “dry down” refers to the body of the fragrance, the final scent that emerges after the middle note has started to wear off and the bottom note begins to fully emerge.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Michella Oré
