Jaime B's Blog

[The original poster asked whether two perfumes weren't very similar because the two fragrances had a particular dominant note in common. Here's my reply:]

Jubilation XXV certainly is a good quality scent. I wouldn't say that B-Men wasn't, but frankly, when I sniffed it a long time ago, it left me so blasé that I barely recall what it smelled like.

What I would like to suggest for making interesting comparisons is the idea that having notes in common doesn't always make perfumes equivalent. They may seem similar because some note or notes are prominent in both, but the questions of balance, proportion, supporting notes, and combination are more important in comparing two perfumes than their coincidentally having a few notes in common.

You can make a nice perfume with a lot of fairly common notes in it; there are, after all, a limited number of perfume materials out there, and cost and supply considerations reduce that number in practice for most perfumers. Another "nose" can take a number of the same notes; nuance them differently by the choice of different supporting notes; source the same materials from other firms or growers whose products seem to fit in better with the overall composition; be more exacting in finding the proper proportions among the different notes; and finally end up with a masterpiece, even though a bare list of ingredients wouldn't show too much difference between the two.

Really good noses are given more time and are permitted more iterations of slight variations to develop a perfume, until they feel they have it exactly right; that increases its final cost and delays the profits to the firm launching it. Making something decent with a much tighter bottom line means working faster and keeping cost down, and getting it to market quickly enough to satisfy the accountants. You can have some of the same materials in the finished products, but you don't have products of equivalent value or artistic merit.

Training your nose to recognize notes is one thing, and a useful thing, too; but training yourself to recognize different perfume genres and their family resemblances can also be useful, as can studying how different perfumers achieve different overall effects even within the same genre. That can be a useful path to deepening one's appreciation of the subtleties of perfume construction.

Another way to put it is that in comparing two scents that are somehow similar, it is usually more interesting to focus on detectable differences than on similarities.