The abandoned chapel of a Cistercian abbey.
Cold stonewalls, covered in Moss.
The scent of waxen wood, of the tabernacle and ornate pews.
The linseed oil of the unfinished painting.
Myrrh and Frankincense still linger in the air,
When a peppery whiff catches you, unawares:
That of white lilies, still fresh and yet so spicy.
The subtle scent of golden pollen mingles with that of solemn green leaves.
A beam of light breaks through the stained glass windows illuminating this olfactory tumult of feelings, shifting from humility to jubilation.
A divine call.
When I visited the site in Paris, which was a lovely experience, we did sample this perfume among others and were quite impressed. Something weird happened in America, maybe the Axe Body Spray takeover, where at least those with a working class upbringing thumbed our noses at such frivolous things but now I have come to appreciate fragrance a bit more.
Funny enough, we actually randomly had dinner with the founder of a perfume shop who was visiting Paris with his wife and it was fascinating to learn a bit about the industry.
Sounds like a product description out of the J. Peterman catalog.
Lorca wrote here, Picasso sketched here, Buñuel and Dali schemed to shock the world here. Even today, you'll still find ideas hanging in the air at Madrid's Cafe Gijon-along with the pungent smoke of Ducados.
Stir sugar into your cortado and watch the room unfold in the nearest mirror. There are so many, reflecting into each other, you can see everything from one spot.
Are those young ladies debating García Márquez? It's perfectly acceptable to stroll over and get involved. All it takes is confidence-and this jacket. Spanish Café Linen Blazer.
Huh. Sounds like a pleasant smell, but not something I'd want as a perfume.
The way I see it, perfumes should replace your scent. They should complement it. They should go together like wine and food.
Axe Body Spray covers your natural scent -- the entire marketing is "You smell bad so you should smell like something else". That's how we've marketed fragrance in the US since forever. Somebody finally figured out that we could sell it to boys as well as to adult women.
Absolutely. What the scent smells like in the bottle, or on a wafting stick, or on the forearm of the sales assistant letting you sniff like you're Clark Griswald does not tell you how it will smell on yourself or the person you are buying it for. I've spent quite a bit of time around "scents", and there have been several that I was unsure about until after trying them on for a bit.
Oh, perfumes are a great hobby. If you're in SF or LA, definitely hit up one of the boutique perfume shops (Scent Bar and Ministry of Scent).
There are also bunch of sellers who package samples (aka "decants" - buy a 100mL, split it into smaller bottles). I found that 1-2mL is plenty to get an idea. I've had great experience with LuckyScent (mentioned in the article), Surrender to Chance, as well as random reddit swaps and highly rated Ebay sellers.
The perfume scene is super wide and diverse, and I found that although there are general trends, it's hard to even know all the popular brands, and everyone's nose is unique. Skip stuff like Aventus and Sauvage and buy some discovery sets (surrender to chance puts together some good ones).
There is definitely a spectrum between "wearable crowd-pleaser" and "avant-garde storytelling" - Afrika-Olifan comes to mind - love it for the creativity and execution, but it would be rude to go outside wearing it. There's also some storytelling - Black March, for example, starts off with grassy fresh earth after a rain, then turns into flowers.
2) I hate perfume. I met an avant garde perfumist called Christopher Brosius (label: "I hate perfume") and waited 20 years to buy his samples. They are AMAZING. So approachable. Everyone who has let me dab with his fragrances has been blown away. "In the library" smells like old books. "Wild hunt" has rotten leaves as an ingredient. "Walking on air" smells like fresh cut grass. I hate perfume but I am obsessed with his smells: https://www.cbihateperfume.com/
My partner complains that the economics of scent mean your signature smell can be deleted on a whim. She fell in love with a very unlikely scent, got 10 years, it's gone. It's actually happened twice to her, and these are not marginal brands either, Cacharel and Beckham, who (probably because they are ruthless with otherwise underperforming product) prune their range.
If the containers were uniform, it could be a robot production line and small runs wouldn't be an issue given the inputs are somewhat universal.
It's paint blending for the nose.
"War paint" (2003) by Liny Woodhead about Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden is a fascinating read. It was a book before a stage production.
@gwern, did you mess up your inflation calculation here?
> I couldn’t get all the ones Nguyen highlighted from LuckyScent and some sampler packs were sold out, but I settled for 39 samples total on 8 February 2021. (Which cost $153 [2021; $190 in 2025], so amortizing to $3.90 [2011; $6.03 in 2025] each.) At that point I felt I had gone a bit overboard, so I didn’t do an additional order from CB I Hate Perfume, which Nguyen praises for doing the most interesting ‘abstract’ perfumes, to pick up ones that LuckyScent didn’t have in stock.
Perfumery is much maligned and misunderstood. It is, ultimately, an art form, a kind of human expression like music or painting, that is rarely appreciated as such. Many would happily see it banned, knowing nothing about it other than that some people wear too much. That'd be like banning music because your neighbor's TV is too loud.
Lucky Scent (mentioned in this article) has a boutique in LA. If you're nearby, you can go in and sample to your heart's content. Perfume boutiques are unfortunately rare but most large cities will have something and they're accessible and inviting in my experience. There really is a _lot_ more out there than what a Sephora or Macy's will ever show you.
Nice article. He correctly notes that vocabulary for describing odors is limited for most so reviews and descriptions trend quite "purple" and abstract. There is a vocabulary, though, but it'd take some time spent with some books and a perfume organ to make progress on that front.
I belong to the ban perfume group. I am allergic to most of them, it feels like someone is hitting me from inside my sinuses. And it is not because someone wears to much or smell to intensely either. Sometimes I barely smell it but it feels equally violently bad.
I wish I knew what is so irritating in so many perfume so I could militate to have that substance banned instead of being in the no perfume militia!
For me at least, most of the other debilitating chemicals appear in predictable and semi-avoidable contexts.
Traffic chemicals appear strongest on busy motorways with stagnant air, where people outside of cars don't spend much time.
Flower chemicals can cause problems but usually dissipate within 10 feet or so.
Fresh rain primarily eliminates free-floating chemical attacks and does not cause one itself.
Cooking is self-regulating because the person actively triggering the chemical emission is exposed much more strongly than people elsewhere even in the same room.
Grass can only be crudely avoided or mitigated during the seasons where it's problematic. (Thank God for COVID bringing awareness that masks make it physically easier to breathe.)
But perfume? You never know when you'll run across a person who chooses to be a targeted, walking violation of the Hague Convention. There's no way to mitigate this other than avoiding people entirely (which some people do choose to do, but which has negative side effects).
That said, in recent years I find the perfume from cleaning supplies or laundry supplies to be more problematic than the perfume from people.
It's never about the smell. There are many unpleasant scents out there that do not count as a chemical attack. And when specific flowers count as a chemical attack, their scent is still pleasant (and proportional).
I'm aware of petrichor existing. I'm not aware of it ever effecting a chemical attack the way perfumes do.
My point is: the chemical-attack portion of perfumes can far exceed the scent component. So even a modest application that most people can't even smell still counts as a targeted assault against some of us.
If I have my inhaler at hand, that feels like pulling knives out of my lungs - better than before, but the wound remains. But we don't expect people to get much work done if they've been stabbed today.
I’ve had allergic reactions to perfume twice in my life, years apart. Both times it became very difficult to breathe, like an asthma attack. Both times it was very clear exactly which person’s perfume was triggering it. Both times it resolved within a few minutes of leaving the room to get some fresh air. The first time I wasn’t completely sure what had happened, so I went back in and experienced the exact same thing twice more before giving up. The second time I was wiser.
It would be extremely annoying if that was a regular occurrence. Luckily I only seem to be sensitive to something rarely used.
"Reverse the problem" is severely overstated. Admittedly it can be useful for people with potentially-fatal allergies, but otherwise it's often the equivalent of building scar tissue.
My wife and at least one of my children are sensitive to perfume. They get headaches, at a minimum.
A bit east of Elkhart Indiana, there's a place that claims to sell "natural perfume". Does anyone who is perfume-sensitive have any experience with that? Is it possible that the chemicals used in "non natural perfume" are at the root of the sensitivity? (I haven't dared to test it on my wife, so I'd be interested in any reports.)
It's unlikely "natural" has anything to do with it. Compounds that occur naturally are often synthesized, but it's the same molecule as found in nature. (example: vanillin) There are some scent molecules that are totally new and not found in nature outside of our production, but "naturally occurring" is a broad category that can include all sort of things individuals are likely to be sensitive to even after removing all the "natural" chemicals that are actual poison.
Plenty of essential oils (what tends to be used in these) are aggressively irritating unless diluted to people without allergies. Even when diluted, I am allergic to some, and my wife is allergic to others, though we get different symptoms than "unnatural" perfumes.
Instead of migraines, it's closer to hay fever type allergies.
Most of them but not all of them. Dove and even Irish spring us ok (not that it smell great) however my wife had to throw away many fancier soaps she received from a cosmetics sampler subscription.
Essential Oils like fir needles, black spruce, orange, rosemary... don't affect me, I even like them (but I find lavender repulsive but it's not hurtful).
And I don't feel like going to an allergy specialist for something as superficial as this is a good use of my time since my coworker, friends and family are not into perfume.
> Many would happily see it banned, knowing nothing about it other than that some people wear too much. That'd be like banning music because your neighbor's TV is too loud.
Eh, we get pretty angry about people going around with music in public spaces (and tend to require licensing for it) and I think we're right to.
While (human) vision is 3 colors, reviews of visual arts obviously can't just describe the colors of the thing. It also has shape, depth, style, etc.
Food reviewers don't note the levels of salt, sour, etc. They describe flavors and textures and parings.
But also, I don't buy that taste is just the composition of 5 components. This sounds like a reference to that diagram of the tongue we've all seen. It's as complex as scent is. There's no way you can define the taste of cinnamon by specifying some sort of 5-tuple.
I believe he is correct. The misunderstanding is from the old chart that showed certain tastes were only detected by certain parts of the tongue.
It’s still true that we can only taste salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. All other flavor complexities come from scent simultaneously giving us information. It’s why everything tastes so boring when you have a head cold.
Think about this, suppose you're on a Zoom call and you want a person on the other side of the call to match a color that you're seeing. You can say "make it more blue", "make it brighter", "shinier", etc.
You can get pretty close to what you're seeing this way.
I spend a lot of time in Seoul and there's an entire street in the Sinsa neighborhood dedicated to perfumes and scents. A lot of experimental work going on, it's kind of fun. Worth a try if you come by.
This is the weirdest thing to see here. However, if you want to fix nose-blindness, just smell into coffee beans. Most perfumeries have a glass of coffee beans.
I used to try and buy a lot of perfumes some years ago. Unfortunately I concluded that it isn't really worth it since beyond some classics (Fahrenheit , terre d Hermes, declaration, narcisso for him, dior home, ysl m7, armani code, zv this is him, ck eternity, chanel egoiste platinum and of course aventus) there aren't many truly unique scents. Most perfumes try to copy another existing, mass appealing one.
Also male perfume nowadays is either too weak or too sweet (or too expensive if you go the niche route). So either I'll wear a perfume that will smell for 30 minutes and nobody will notice or I'll bite the bullet and wear a club perfume that will suffocate people (and not even smell good).
Yeah the sweetness is a real issue but there are a lot of niche fragrances that don't follow these trends. And it's still possible to find powerfull stuff too, doesn't have to be that expensive.
There is lots of interesting brands that don't go for mass appeal, for example Pineward.
The high end ones are purer in ingredients, but the mainstream are just the cheapest combination of chemicals you are putting on your skin/breathing in.
This must have been like 15 years ago, but I vaguely remember someone making a perfume that smelled like the scent you get when you open up the box of a new iPhone or MacBook.
It’s a distinct smell and I’m not really sure if it’s purely from the electronics or if it comes from the papers inside the box too.
For anyone looking to save money, don't get the brand name perfumes.
Instead, get something from a good clone house. They have special equipment to analyse the ingredients of the branded perfumes and end up making exactly the same thing.
Stay away from lower quality copies that aren't made by clone houses (i.e random "inspired by" stuff from Amazon).
Sadly it got too popular and now the ratings and reviews are often brigaded and every one of the list of most popular perfumes is pretty bad. Still useful as a reference, of course, but the ratings must be taken with a spoonful of salt.
I like instances of any fragrance really, as long as it doesn't "project". Basically, if someone comes close they catch it but otherwise it doesn't throw the smell very far. Examples: khus,sandalwood,some lemongrass perfumes, and iris.
The problem with sampling when you're out-and-about is that you get nose-blindness, even if you use the coffee shakers they give you to clear your head.
I don't know if it's still a good route, but I used to be able to buy sacks of random perfume sampler bottles from eBay sellers for peanuts and then I could try a couple every day and note down which ones I liked or not.
I can't stand perfume, it makes my skin crawl. Literally when someone is dowsed in the stuff, you can feel the wave of exploding microparticles in mini chemical reactions as they walk passed you. In my "unpopular opinion" perfumes should be banned.
Scent sensitivity is a real, and ADA protected, disability. Why do I have to have an asthma attack or a migraine because someone has to express themselves through chemical warfare? Perfumes are as bad for people's health as second hand smoke, and one in twenty or so people everywhere feel just like I do.
Here’s the description:
When I visited the site in Paris, which was a lovely experience, we did sample this perfume among others and were quite impressed. Something weird happened in America, maybe the Axe Body Spray takeover, where at least those with a working class upbringing thumbed our noses at such frivolous things but now I have come to appreciate fragrance a bit more.Funny enough, we actually randomly had dinner with the founder of a perfume shop who was visiting Paris with his wife and it was fascinating to learn a bit about the industry.
The way I see it, perfumes should replace your scent. They should complement it. They should go together like wine and food.
Axe Body Spray covers your natural scent -- the entire marketing is "You smell bad so you should smell like something else". That's how we've marketed fragrance in the US since forever. Somebody finally figured out that we could sell it to boys as well as to adult women.
https://www.orizaparfums.com/en/ultimateproduct/170/coffret-...
[1] reasonable within the context of their prices... YMMV.
There are also bunch of sellers who package samples (aka "decants" - buy a 100mL, split it into smaller bottles). I found that 1-2mL is plenty to get an idea. I've had great experience with LuckyScent (mentioned in the article), Surrender to Chance, as well as random reddit swaps and highly rated Ebay sellers.
The perfume scene is super wide and diverse, and I found that although there are general trends, it's hard to even know all the popular brands, and everyone's nose is unique. Skip stuff like Aventus and Sauvage and buy some discovery sets (surrender to chance puts together some good ones).
There is definitely a spectrum between "wearable crowd-pleaser" and "avant-garde storytelling" - Afrika-Olifan comes to mind - love it for the creativity and execution, but it would be rude to go outside wearing it. There's also some storytelling - Black March, for example, starts off with grassy fresh earth after a rain, then turns into flowers.
For those not in America, SF and LA are counties in the united states of america.
every single comment on that website is amazing.
2) I hate perfume. I met an avant garde perfumist called Christopher Brosius (label: "I hate perfume") and waited 20 years to buy his samples. They are AMAZING. So approachable. Everyone who has let me dab with his fragrances has been blown away. "In the library" smells like old books. "Wild hunt" has rotten leaves as an ingredient. "Walking on air" smells like fresh cut grass. I hate perfume but I am obsessed with his smells: https://www.cbihateperfume.com/
If the containers were uniform, it could be a robot production line and small runs wouldn't be an issue given the inputs are somewhat universal.
It's paint blending for the nose.
"War paint" (2003) by Liny Woodhead about Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden is a fascinating read. It was a book before a stage production.
> I couldn’t get all the ones Nguyen highlighted from LuckyScent and some sampler packs were sold out, but I settled for 39 samples total on 8 February 2021. (Which cost $153 [2021; $190 in 2025], so amortizing to $3.90 [2011; $6.03 in 2025] each.) At that point I felt I had gone a bit overboard, so I didn’t do an additional order from CB I Hate Perfume, which Nguyen praises for doing the most interesting ‘abstract’ perfumes, to pick up ones that LuckyScent didn’t have in stock.
Lucky Scent (mentioned in this article) has a boutique in LA. If you're nearby, you can go in and sample to your heart's content. Perfume boutiques are unfortunately rare but most large cities will have something and they're accessible and inviting in my experience. There really is a _lot_ more out there than what a Sephora or Macy's will ever show you.
Nice article. He correctly notes that vocabulary for describing odors is limited for most so reviews and descriptions trend quite "purple" and abstract. There is a vocabulary, though, but it'd take some time spent with some books and a perfume organ to make progress on that front.
I wish I knew what is so irritating in so many perfume so I could militate to have that substance banned instead of being in the no perfume militia!
I don't understand how this is distinguishable from random smells going about life, like traffic, fresh rain, flowers, cooking, grass, etc.
Traffic chemicals appear strongest on busy motorways with stagnant air, where people outside of cars don't spend much time.
Flower chemicals can cause problems but usually dissipate within 10 feet or so.
Fresh rain primarily eliminates free-floating chemical attacks and does not cause one itself.
Cooking is self-regulating because the person actively triggering the chemical emission is exposed much more strongly than people elsewhere even in the same room.
Grass can only be crudely avoided or mitigated during the seasons where it's problematic. (Thank God for COVID bringing awareness that masks make it physically easier to breathe.)
But perfume? You never know when you'll run across a person who chooses to be a targeted, walking violation of the Hague Convention. There's no way to mitigate this other than avoiding people entirely (which some people do choose to do, but which has negative side effects).
That said, in recent years I find the perfume from cleaning supplies or laundry supplies to be more problematic than the perfume from people.
> not because someone wears to much or smell to intensely
a normal perfume/cologne wearer is not going to smell 10 feet away
also
> Fresh rain primarily eliminates free-floating chemical attacks and does not cause one itself.
yes, petrichor
I'm aware of petrichor existing. I'm not aware of it ever effecting a chemical attack the way perfumes do.
again, no one is arguing that people who wear too much perfume are not obnoxious
> a chemical attack
what chemical?
If I have my inhaler at hand, that feels like pulling knives out of my lungs - better than before, but the wound remains. But we don't expect people to get much work done if they've been stabbed today.
It would be extremely annoying if that was a regular occurrence. Luckily I only seem to be sensitive to something rarely used.
A bit east of Elkhart Indiana, there's a place that claims to sell "natural perfume". Does anyone who is perfume-sensitive have any experience with that? Is it possible that the chemicals used in "non natural perfume" are at the root of the sensitivity? (I haven't dared to test it on my wife, so I'd be interested in any reports.)
Instead of migraines, it's closer to hay fever type allergies.
Essential Oils like fir needles, black spruce, orange, rosemary... don't affect me, I even like them (but I find lavender repulsive but it's not hurtful).
And I don't feel like going to an allergy specialist for something as superficial as this is a good use of my time since my coworker, friends and family are not into perfume.
Eh, we get pretty angry about people going around with music in public spaces (and tend to require licensing for it) and I think we're right to.
Taste is just a combination of 5 basic tastes, vision is a combination of 3 primary colors, etc.
Food reviewers don't note the levels of salt, sour, etc. They describe flavors and textures and parings.
But also, I don't buy that taste is just the composition of 5 components. This sounds like a reference to that diagram of the tongue we've all seen. It's as complex as scent is. There's no way you can define the taste of cinnamon by specifying some sort of 5-tuple.
It’s still true that we can only taste salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. All other flavor complexities come from scent simultaneously giving us information. It’s why everything tastes so boring when you have a head cold.
You can get pretty close to what you're seeing this way.
With scent? Not even close.
Food also has a universe of possible consistencies.
Hearing is quite similar in that there are numerous different length hairs in the ear drum that can sense different frequencies of sound.
Sure, this is a finite number, but for practical purposes it's not really decomposable.
https://www.smellstories.be/en/blogs/blog/the-coffee-bean-my...
https://blackphoenixalchemylab.com/
Also male perfume nowadays is either too weak or too sweet (or too expensive if you go the niche route). So either I'll wear a perfume that will smell for 30 minutes and nobody will notice or I'll bite the bullet and wear a club perfume that will suffocate people (and not even smell good).
There is lots of interesting brands that don't go for mass appeal, for example Pineward.
The high end ones are purer in ingredients, but the mainstream are just the cheapest combination of chemicals you are putting on your skin/breathing in.
Perfume gets up my nose.
It’s a distinct smell and I’m not really sure if it’s purely from the electronics or if it comes from the papers inside the box too.
Instead, get something from a good clone house. They have special equipment to analyse the ingredients of the branded perfumes and end up making exactly the same thing.
Stay away from lower quality copies that aren't made by clone houses (i.e random "inspired by" stuff from Amazon).
Costco has some nice deals on high end perfumes, like Roja or Tom Ford.
There are also local perfumeries which can be interesting.
I don't know if it's still a good route, but I used to be able to buy sacks of random perfume sampler bottles from eBay sellers for peanuts and then I could try a couple every day and note down which ones I liked or not.
Plus I’ve found it’s a power move when I smell good in a room of people who have no aura.
Humans are animals/automatons after all, and it’s a neat hack.