Monday 28 January 2013

How good is your nose?

Like many perfume lovers, I have a lot of samples, not very well organised. Inevitably, one or two of these samples have lost their labels. The other day I picked out one of these label-less samples and on a whim decided to wear it.

I don't hold myself out to have a brilliant nose, but generally speaking I do think I have a decent sense of smell and over the years have managed to build up a library of olfactory associations with most of the major notes. Or at least I thought I had. Wearing this perfume, I realised that I had absolutely no idea what I was wearing. When I first sniffed it, it smelled quite dry and leathery, and for an instant I thought I was wearing Knize Ten. Then the perfume sweetened a little, started to smell a bit more 'perfumey', with perhaps a touch of aldehydes. At that stage I realised I was probably wearing a feminine perfume, but one that a man could pull off. 

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I eventually worked out after a few minutes as the oriental nature of the perfume revealed itself that I was wearing Jean Desprez Bal a Versailles. 

This got me thinking about how our minds are influenced by the labels of perfumes we wear, and whether most of us really do have as good a sense of smell as we think we do. I read somewhere that most, or a lot, of people actually would struggle to identify the smell of roses if they did not see the flower they were smelling. I can't remember where I read this and I haven't tried this experiment in real life, so I don't know if it is indeed true.

What do you think about your sense of smell? To what extent do you think a label influences how easily and quickly you smell notes? On my side, I am tempted to decant a few perfumes into blank vials and see how good I really am at identifying which perfumes they are!

12 comments:

  1. I think my nose sucks. I have never had a very sensitive sense of smell to begin with and I have only been interested in perfume for a short while so my nose is still inexperienced... There are certain notes that I can easily pick up in a perfume, mostly notes that I love, hate or that are simply very distinct. Aside from these notes I am completely lost... I am probably very influenced by what I expect from a perfume as I´m always trying to figure out what various notes mell like by sniffing perfumes that have these notes listed. Maybe I should close my eyes and do some blind sniffing in my sample collection, that would probably be educational!

    Btw, LOVE Bal a Versailles!

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    1. Nadja, I agree that certain notes are very distinctive and therefore quite easy to identify. Patchouli is one that comes to mind for me. Thanks for commenting.

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  2. I throw out every un-labeled sample - I would drive myself crazy plus I know my nose stinks! So cool that you were able to discern what the perfume was. I gave a good sized decant of BaV (which I also love) to a male friend last summer - he rocks it!

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    1. Carol, keep those samples - crazy is good where perfume is concerned!

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  3. My nose is probably about average--nothing special. My husband has a great nose but unfortunately, when it comes to perfume, he has it tuned to the "what is that smell--did you put something on? It's choking me" channel. :-( I can identify a few of the classic stalwarts: Bal a Versailles is easy because my best friend in college always wore it. Then there is Jolie Madame, Chanel No. 5, a few others. Shalimar and Emeraude--yes, I can tell them apart. My nose is curious about everything but probably not as sensitive as my husband's. He is really good at choosing wines.

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    1. Queen Cupcake, my wife sounds like your husband. She usually has something to say about my perfumes, and it also tends to be comments like 'you smell like you're wearing flea powder'. That usually applies to Patchouli for her...

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  4. OMG, if you're going to test your nose with unlabeled decants, please keep them in a set order and keep a schematic close at hand! I prefer to spritz rather than dab so I often pour my samples into a small spray bottle, thinking I'm 'for sure' going to be able to tell what's what and then I can't! So far, the only bottles I can can remember identifying, after-the-fact, are Illuminated Perfume Page 47, Nina Ricci l'Air du Temps and Diptyque Tam Dao :( I totally suck! Like Carol, I've ended up tossing quite a few. That is so cool that you figured out your bottle of Bal a V.! And you know what? I've never smelled B a V. Really, that needs to be remedied.

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    1. Cym its a good perfume and very wearable by a guy, I think. There is nothing systematic about me, I'm afraid. Its chaos and disorganisation (is that a word?) as far as I'm concerned!

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  5. I know everything about my nose! :)

    In many (most?) cases I can't identify notes even when I know the perfume and which notes are supposed to be there ;) But I'm good at recognizing complete perfumes that I know and finding smell-alikes.

    I'm not sure if you saw any of my posts in Deja vu category but other bloggers who were helping me on those projects doing blind testing/comparison of the unlabeled vials of perfumes that I sent them were just amazing in identifying notes.

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    1. Undina, I sometimes think that the more we get exposed to fragrances, the less easy it is to identify notes. I could be wrong, but we get exposed to so many different stimulations.

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  6. It is not as much the label that traps our perception of the perfume as it is the first impression. After a couple of wearings our mind is pretty made made up: like it or not, smells like this or that, makes me feel this way. In reality most of the times we apply a perfume our mind recreates this impression instead of discovering new things or doing deeper. The best way to get to know a perfume better is to spread the love and allow other people to wear my perfumes. This way I smell the actual perfume without knowing what it is.

    Like Undina's nose, my nose is really bad at dissecting notes but very quick to make associations so the danger of smelling the platonic idea of what a perfume smells like rather than the perfume itself is always present.

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  7. Memoryofscent, you have a point, certainly. First impressions can be lasting ones. I have some very bad associations of certain perfumes, for example if I've been ill when wearing one, or perhaps in a stressful situation; then those stick in my mind vividly.

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