How to Describe Perfume: A Perfumer's Glossary of Scent Words
By Mollie Carberry
A handful of perfumers' words, from accord and drydown to sillage, make every one of those steps easier, and you will find them all in the A to Z glossary below.
Ever tried to describe a fragrance and only got as far as 'sweet', 'musky' or 'floral'? You are not alone. Fragrance vocabulary simply isn't taught the way colour or flavour is. Most of us grow up learning that a wine can be tannic or a dish rich in umami, but nobody gives us the same breadth of words for scent.
At EPC, teaching this language is one of our favourite parts of the job. It may seem intimidating, but the words themselves aren't complicated, and once you have them, a hidden dimension of fragrance opens up. You start noticing what you were smelling all along, without any way to describe it. So here is our working glossary: the terms our Blending Masters use every day in our Luxe Blending Experience, so you can impress your friends (or your dates) with your perfumery expertise.
In this article
The words perfumers use for scent.
01
How do you describe a perfume? 4 steps
Perfumers work through a fragrance in roughly the same order every time. Follow these four steps and you will have a description anyone can picture.
01
Name the family.
Is it floral, woody, amber, fresh, gourmand, chypre or fougère? Start broad: the fragrance family tells your listener most of what they need to know.
02
Pick out the notes.
Which materials can you recognise: bergamot, rose, sandalwood, vanilla? Say where they sit among the top, middle and base notes, even if you can only name one or two.
03
Describe the texture and feel.
Is it powdery, creamy, green, soapy, resinous or smoky? Warm or cool, light or dense, close to the skin or loud?
04
Follow how it evolves on skin.
Smell it at first spray, after an hour and at the drydown, and notice its sillage and longevity. A fragrance can change completely between the three.
Put together, it might sound like this: 'a woody amber with sandalwood and vanilla, creamy and a little powdery, that settles into a soft skin scent'. That is a description a perfumer would recognise straight away.
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02
Words for the architecture of a perfume
Every fragrance has a shape in time, and perfumers have a specific vocabulary for describing it.
A top note is the very first thing you smell, built from smaller molecules that evaporate quickly. Citrus oils, aldehydes and light green notes are classic top notes, which is why so many fragrances feel bright and sharp in the first few minutes before they mellow.
You then arrive at the heart notes, or middle notes: florals, spices and fruits that feel rounder and stay longer. Underneath sits the base, the heaviest and longest-lingering part of a composition. These are your woods, resins, musks and ambers, and they are often still on your skin or clothes hours after the top and heart have evaporated.
Once the top and heart have faded, perfumers call the final stage the drydown. It is what is left when the opening phases have burned away: just the fragrance and your own skin.
Accord
When several materials blend so closely that they stop reading as separate ingredients and feel like one impression, that is an accord. A 'leather accord', for example, rarely contains anything derived from leather. It is an illusion built from smoky, tarry materials such as birch tar and animalic facets, and your brain fills in the rest.
From top notes to the drydown.
03
Words to describe the character of a perfume
As perfumers, we need a rich vocabulary for what a fragrance actually smells like. We talk and think about scent all day, so we have to be granular and specific.
When we call a note green, we mean the bitterness of a crushed stem or a snapped leaf (galbanum or violet leaf), which is quite different from a note that is simply fresh. Animalic describes the warmth of skin, fur or musk, historically drawn from materials like civet and castoreum and today recreated with synthetics. A closely related term, indolic, refers to a faintly 'dirty' quality found in concentrated white florals like jasmine and orange blossom. That doesn't sound very enticing, but it is what makes these flowers so addictive.
Aldehydic describes a sparkling, soapy-metallic brightness, most famously in Chanel No. 5, where aldehydes act like an amplifier for everything around them. Balsamic notes are warm, resinous and faintly sweet, found in materials like benzoin and myrrh. Camphoraceous is a cooling, medicinal sharpness, like eucalyptus or a tin of Vicks. And ozonic captures the airy, mineral freshness that comes just after it has rained.
Texture words matter just as much. Powdery is the soft, dry, cosmetic feel of iris and violet. Lactonic is the creamy, milky smoothness of peach, apricot or coconut. Soapy is the clean freshness of a bar of soap or washed linen, resinous the warm, sticky depth of frankincense or labdanum, and woody covers everything from dry cedar to creamy sandalwood. Any of these words can describe a whole perfume or a single facet of it, one aspect of its smell.
Then there's gourmand, a better-known term. This family is built around comforting, edible, dessert-like notes such as vanilla, caramel or nuts, and we have watched it grow enormously in recent years as food and fragrance culture have drawn closer together. Two older family names are worth knowing too: a chypre sets bright bergamot against a mossy base of oakmoss, labdanum and patchouli, and a fougère, French for fern, is an imagined accord of lavender, oakmoss and coumarin.
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04
Words for how a perfume behaves on skin
Some of the most useful perfumery terms describe how a fragrance behaves: how it moves through a room and changes through the day.
Sillage, borrowed from the French word for a boat's wake, describes the trail a fragrance leaves behind as someone walks past. It is a different quality entirely from longevity, which is how long a fragrance remains detectable on skin. A fragrance can have enormous sillage but modest longevity, filling a room for twenty minutes and then disappearing. Or the reverse: never making a huge impression, yet lingering on clothing for hours (or days). Understanding this distinction can change how you shop for fragrance, because most of us have been taught to conflate the two.
Projection
A fragrance with strong projection, often described as diffusive, radiates generously into the air around the wearer, while one that stays close to you is called a skin scent. Usually built on soft musks, skin scents have become fashionable in their own right, loved for their restraint.
Bloom is the moment a fragrance seems to open up and intensify, often triggered by warmth: body heat, sunlight, or even a hot cup of tea held close to your wrist.
A fragrance that stays largely consistent from application through to drydown, without much evolution along the way, is described as linear. This isn't automatically a flaw; some of the most beloved simple fragrances are deliberately built for clarity rather than complexity. And one word you will hear in any perfume lab: maceration, the resting time after a perfume is blended with alcohol, when it rounds out before bottling.
Sillage, projection and longevity.
05
A confession about the word 'nose'
We'll leave you with one final term, a personal favourite. In the industry, a professional perfumer is often called a nose, or le nez in French, the way a musician is praised for having a good ear. We love that it treats the sense itself as the instrument, trained and refined over years.
That is ultimately what all this olfactory vocabulary is for: to lift the curtain on the parts of fragrance that feel too technical or exclusive, and help you understand what you are experiencing. Once you can put a name to the aldehydic sparkle in a fragrance you love, or recognise the animalic warmth in a musk you have worn for years, you start experiencing scent the way we do as perfumers. And when you start to blend your own fragrance, these words become your working language.
So next time you find a new fragrance and want a better word for it than 'nice', you'll have somewhere to start.
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From accord to woody: the glossary below.
06
A to Z glossary of perfume terms
Our working glossary of the words perfumers use most, from accord to woody.
Term
What it means
Accord
Two or more materials blended so closely that they read as one new impression, such as a leather or amber accord.
Aldehydic
A sparkling, soapy, slightly metallic brightness from aldehydes, which lifts and amplifies the materials around it.
Animalic
A warm, skin-like, musky or leathery character, once drawn from materials such as civet and castoreum and now recreated with synthetics.
Balsamic
Warm, soft, resinous and faintly sweet, typical of benzoin, myrrh and Peru balsam.
Base notes
The slowest-evaporating materials, such as woods, resins, musks and ambers. They last longest and form the drydown.
Bloom
The moment a fragrance opens up or seems to intensify, often as warmth from the skin, sun or heat reaches it.
Camphoraceous
A cool, medicinal sharpness, familiar from camphor and eucalyptus.
Chypre
A family built on contrast: bright bergamot over a mossy, bittersweet base of oakmoss, labdanum and patchouli.
Diffusive
Describes a fragrance that radiates generously into the air around the wearer, whatever its longevity.
Drydown
The final phase of a fragrance, once the top and heart notes have faded and the base settles on the skin.
Facet
One aspect of a material's or a fragrance's smell, such as the apricot facet of osmanthus or the smoky facet of vetiver.
Fougère
French for fern. An imagined accord of lavender, oakmoss and coumarin, the classic aromatic structure.
Gourmand
A family built around edible, dessert-like notes such as vanilla, caramel, praline, honey, coffee or cocoa.
Green
The bitter, sappy freshness of a crushed stem or snapped leaf, as in galbanum or violet leaf.
Heart notes
The middle stage of a fragrance, often floral, spiced or fruity, where its character emerges and stays for several hours.
Indolic
A faintly animalic, 'dirty' warmth found in concentrated white flowers such as jasmine and orange blossom.
Lactonic
A creamy, milky smoothness from lactones, the molecules behind the scent of peach, apricot and coconut.
Linear
Describes a fragrance that smells largely the same from first spray to drydown.
Longevity
How long a fragrance remains detectable on the skin.
Maceration
The resting time after a perfume is blended with alcohol, when it rounds out before bottling.
Nose (le nez)
The industry term for a professional perfumer.
Ozonic
An airy, watery freshness that evokes the air after rain, built from synthetic molecules.
Powdery
A soft, dry, cosmetic feel, like face powder, typical of iris, violet and heliotrope.
Projection
How far a fragrance radiates from the skin, strongest in the first hours after spraying.
Resinous
The warm, sticky, sometimes smoky depth of tree resins such as frankincense, labdanum and benzoin.
Sillage
From the French for a boat's wake: the trail of scent left behind as someone moves through a space.
Skin scent
A fragrance that sits close to the wearer and smells like a warmer, softer version of their own skin, often built on musks.
Soapy
The clean freshness of a bar of soap or washed linen, often from aldehydes and white musks.
Top notes
The opening of a fragrance, built from light, fast-evaporating materials such as citrus oils and aldehydes.
Woody
The smell of wood in all its forms, from dry cedar and smoky vetiver to creamy sandalwood.
From the perfumer's lab
Perfumers learn this vocabulary the only way it sticks: by smelling materials side by side, one rose against another, one musk against the next, and putting words to the difference. I still work that way in the lab, and I always follow a material on skin over several hours, not only on a blotter, because a word that fits the first minute can be wrong by the drydown. A shared vocabulary is simply what lets a team smell the same thing and mean the same thing.
Smell, then name it
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Questions
Frequently asked questions about describing perfume
How do you describe a perfume?
Work in four steps: name its family (floral, woody, amber, fresh), pick out the notes you recognise, describe its texture (powdery, creamy, green, smoky), then say how it changes on your skin from first spray to drydown.
What words can I use to describe a perfume?
Start with fresh, green, floral, powdery, creamy, woody, resinous, soapy and gourmand for the character, then sillage, projection and longevity for how it behaves. Our A to Z glossary above explains each one.
What is the difference between sillage, projection and longevity?
Projection is how far a fragrance radiates from your skin, sillage is the trail it leaves behind you, and longevity is how long it lasts. A perfume can be strong on one and modest on another.
What does drydown mean in perfume?
The drydown is the final stage of a fragrance, once the top and heart notes have faded and the base notes, such as woods, musks and resins, settle on your skin.
What is a skin scent?
A fragrance that stays close to the body and smells like a warmer, softer version of your own skin. Skin scents are usually built on musks and are worn for their quiet intimacy rather than their trail.
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Learn to smell, describe and memorise a material in our free perfumery class, build your vocabulary with real perfumers' materials in an Ingredient Box Set, or go deeper with our semi-professional Foundation online course.
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