The perception of fragrance is a very personal thing. Every human is subject to many different kinds and strengths of scent experience throughout their lives, which is why every person can have a vastly different experience with fragrance perception.
Many things can affect your sense of smell. The main areas of review in this article are:
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- Physical aliments โ sinuses
- Overloading your olfactory receptors
- Colour associations
- Memory, Storage and time
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Physical aliments
Perhaps youโre affected by sinus issues or allergies, if so this will always limit your sense of smell. It doesnโt mean you have to have a cold to experience a limiting affect on your senses. You can wake up a little stuffy and this will mean your senses are now compromised for the day.
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Olfactory receptors
Sometimes your first experience of a scent is the strongest and then after that it dissipates. It doesnโt take long for our olfactory receptors to become saturated by a certain odour, and once this happens you then have trouble detecting it later on.
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Have you ever been next to someone who has poured half a bottle of perfume or cologne on? Itโs so strong you can barely breath without coughingโฆand you wonder cant they smell how strong that perfume is? No they cant, because they have become immune to the scent. Their olfactory receptors have been overloaded with a particular
scent and they cannot smell it anymore. This is why a scent can be
very strong to one person, and barely detectable by another.
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Experiencing scent throw in very small confined spaces will also overload your olfactory receptors.
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Memory, Storing & Time
How you store your fragrance can also play a large role in how well it keeps. Fragrances are made up of many different ingredients and some can be affected by light, air oxidization, time and sometimes your own memory.
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ย Perhaps you use your last bit of fragrance and you buy a new bottle after some time. You feel you know the fragrance well, because youโve used it many times, but perhaps the day you open the new bottle you feel the smell is not exactly the same as the old one.
You think the manufacturer changed the formula, but this is very unlikely and very difficult to determine without an expensive gas chromatography and massย pectrometry test. So you must reply on your own scent memory and perception to guide you, and we already know this is not a foolproof method.
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There is no easy way to determine any differences. The only way for you to compare the two scents directly, is to put both fragrances on a blotter and compare side by side under exact conditions. Of course you need to make sure your old sample was kept in pristine conditions and wasnโt compromised by time, oxidization and light. Then you need to have the exact same amount of fragrance on your blotter, because if one blotter has more fragrance than the other, this will compromise the test. You also have to smell with both nostrils, because one might be more congested than the other. And you must do a blind test because our brain can surely have preconceived outcomes, which are very difficult to change.
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How old the scent is plays a large factor. If you are comparing a fragrance sample that is more than 12 months old, itโs likely the fragrance will have subtle differences. You see the number of ingredients in a fragrance can be anywhere between 20 to 100 ingredients and some of these will mature and change over long periods of time and varying conditions, similar to the way red wine changes. For example to get the best tasting mature wine the environment must be temperature controlled.
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Colour Association
Colour association plays a big role in how well we identify scents. I considered myself to have a good sense of smell, whereby I can often name a scent from just smelling a candle. But I soon discovered I had no idea how much I used colour association, until
some kids put me to the test. At the time we were coordinating our candle scents with colour. As a prominent candle making instructor, I conducted a kids class and kids donโt colour coordinate scents. For examples one would choose blueberry fragrance but colour the candle yellow. During this class, once candles were set we had a โguess the scentโ game and I got 2 out of 10 correct. I was shocked at how much colour association had on my sense perception.
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So summing up, we are faced with sense perception challenges every day in many ways. We are constantly evaluating fragrances that are very similar or perhaps the same. Even by asking a question as simple as saying, โDo you think these 2 fragrances smell the same?โ can prejudice the evaluator into either looking for a difference or looking for a similarity, depending on what he or she wishes the outcome to be. Naming the fragrance is also a big influencing factor โ I canโt tell you how many times we have given an evaluator the same fragrance under two different names, and the
evaluator automatically assumed the fragrances are different because the samples were named differently.
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So the next time one of your customers says, โThis candle doesnโt smell as strong as my previous purchaseโ, bear in mind that they might be right โ or they might not! Therefore we encourage you to share this article with them.ย
