How to learn individual notes?

One of my best places to learn notes is in the kitchen. If you have a well-stocked spice rack, start there. I already liked to cook when I started here, so I was golden. As for other notes, just take opportunities as they come. When I'm in home depot, i'll sometimes discreetly smell the cedar racks...etc.

Also, there are many "one note" fragrances that are designed to display only a certain note. Usually if you type in the name of the note in the title of the fragrance prompt in the directory seach engine, you'll get a list of niche frags that revolve around that note. You'll figure out which are the most accurate representations by reading the reviews. Try Tam Dao by Diptyque for a sandalwood demonstration (it wouldn't come up in a "sandalwood" title search, so i'll tell you here). Or search the name of the note in the community search. There are threads devoted to most of the "main" notes that will have many reccommendations. Then order samples!!

Good luck!

go to a whole foods/natural foods type store. there are usually essential oils for sale and you can smell the testers. you'll be able to tick off many notes there.

One way to learn would be to memorize the scent pyramid for what you wear and wear it exclusively till you can identify each note.

Perfumers are called "noses" when they can identify the components in a specified amount of time. The number one nose is expected to rattle them off blindfolded either he or the bottle is not identified before the droplets hit the floor. I can do it with citrus so far if it's orange.

Buy a nice ceder chest. No moths or other bugs like it and there are thousands of hungry woodworkers out there.

Surely nobody here did. But when I started about one and a half year ago I had the same impression. In the meantime I make it to recognize most of the main notes (lavender, patchouli, sandalwood, etc.) pretty well but to be honest a lot of the creations I have tested got the notes perfectly blended in a way that makes it definitely very complex to pick out the single notes. Even worse if e.g. aldehydes come into play.

Unfortunately I am more of an excursive person and so I didnt make it yet to consecrate myself to systematic lessons in testing essential oils but if I read the notes pyramid of a fougere I know its a fougere and I have an idea of it and what to approximately expect. Some people here on the board have doubtlessly this great ability but surely not everyone talking about "the sublime use of note X in a frag Y" knows really what he is talking about. Reading the reviews confirm that suspicion. Nevermind, after a certain time you will find out which member "speaks your language".....

In the end its absolutely helpfull to know the notes to be able to describe fragrances but I know a couple of reviewers here on the board which have the talent to describe frags in a more impessionistic (but sometimes very "precise") way without refering to the notes. Thats great too and I love it....

Nice wardrobe btw!

Christian

I've visited the places that have the essential oils.....You can learn different notes this way.......Gary

I decided to reamp this Thread, as I need some insight as well

Notes have come to me a little at a time, and that was something I enjoyed. I didn't try to "force it." I do think that smelling herbs and spices that you have at home is a good idea. How about a trip to the local botanical garden, florist, or nursery? I bought a bunch of different kinds of "cheapo" frags at first, to help me out, comparing what I was smelling to the note pyramids. That won't cost too much and you can wear the frag too !

I had a big head start in the fact that I was interested in resins, essential oils, absolutes, and floral waters long before I got into fragrance. I'd be willing to say that 90% of the "listed" notes in fragrances list these or are loosely based on these materials, even though many fragrances are largely synthetic. I was familiar with a lot of basic materials that I could recognize or at least compare to in fragrances.

Some others I've had to intuit by a quality shared in a number of fragrances ( namely, aldehydes ), and others I've yet to decipher ( I do not know what hedione smells like, yet I've seen a number of references to it in fragrances ). Intuiting from shared descriptions can be risky, though - castoreum smelled NOTHING like I thought it would when I first tried some genuine tincture.

I guess you could say I came to the table a little more "fully formed" than most, but its the kind of knowledge that can be easily acquired at a store that sells essential oils and related products.

My belief as to what certain notes were didn't match up with the reality of the notes, once I started playing with essential oils and DIY perfumery. It's worth picking up the most commonly-seen notes, along with any you might be curious about. If it weren't for this I would've had no idea that I absolutely love styrax, because I'd have had no clue what it was without trying the oil. Nanda Oils offers small 5mL bottles of many common EOs, and The Perfumer's Apprentice can fill the gaps.

Another thing I tried to do very early on in my exploration of scent was to record the notes for each fragrance in my wardrobe into a spreadsheet, and then see where there was any overlap. I uploaded an early version of this spreadsheet here.

Fredericktoo has a very good point about relying on pyramids to hit the high points of a scent. Reliable pyramids are very good as a guide for what to sniff for. Some pyramids read like fantasies, though, with very vague, general, or poetic-sounding descriptors. Those have to be taken with a grain of salt. The best pyramids to use for this are those that name botanicals.

Definitely sniff herbs and spices, as LiveJazz suggests. Another place to hang out in search of note knowledge is florist shops and botanical gardens. Even though many floral notes in perfume are imitated and supplemented by synthetics and bits and pieces of other things, you can get a good idea of what carnations or hyacinths are supposed to smell like from a good florist shop.

Some notes are indeed very subtle, and it takes long practice, for example, to identify things like orris and violet, which are kind of similar in some ways, and different in others. Comparing scents that are orris-heavy and those that are violet-heavy is a good practice. Some scents approach the level of being soliflores, that is, they are so dominated by a single note that people associate them with that note alone, even though no perfume in commercial production is truly only one note. One such is Chanel No. 18 as an iris soliflore.

About your experiment with mixing: There is a rule of thumb about proportions: 30% top notes, 30% heart notes, 40% base notes (including good fixatives and dispersers), by percent of odorant materials. Skimping on the base notes will result in the kind of thing you describe in your experiment, where drydowns never seem to materialize.

The best way is to buy small sample bottles from sites such as White Lotus or Eden Botanicals. Not all EO's are expensive, and they have an excellent catalogue.
When I get around to sorting them, I will soon be selling my vials of 100+ natural perfumers oils diluted to 10% in perfumers alcohol, which I have found an excellent reference point to identifying individual fragrance notes in perfume. I bought these as part of a natural botanical perfumers palette, but can't easily take them with me back to Australia. Watch my sales listing in the BN marketplace soon.