Wearing one of my summer favorites in the heat! Watching the final round of The Masters…doesn’t get much better than this!!

By Daniel Rene and Paris Corner Review to follow…

A lot of the time, no, not the way influencers make it sound on video. I think what happens is a mix of experience, memory, suggestion, and sometimes just knowing the listed notes before they even start talking. Most people are not actually smelling every single note one by one like they are reading ingredients off a label. A lot of the time they are picking up the overall scent profile, recognizing certain familiar qualities, and then translating that into note language. To me, smelling fragrance is usually more about catching the main impressions. You might clearly get something fresh, fruity, woody, musky, floral, spicy, smoky, or creamy, but that does not mean you are truly isolating ten different notes with total accuracy. A lot of perfume is blended in a way where things overlap, so what you are really smelling is the composition as a whole more than each separate piece. I also think once someone reads the note breakdown, it becomes a lot easier for the brain to “find” those notes. So if the brand says fig, incense, suede, or vanilla, people start looking for those exact things. That does not always mean they would have pulled all of that out on their own without seeing the note pyramid first. In my opinion, people with a trained nose can absolutely get better at recognizing certain materials, styles, and accords, but even then, I do not believe most people are naturally smelling every note the way some videos make it seem. Sometimes it is real experience, and sometimes it is just review language. That is why I think it makes more sense to focus on what a fragrance actually smells like to you overall. Is it green, sweet, clean, dark, airy, creamy, smoky, resinous, or fresh? Does it change over time? Does it lean high quality, synthetic, natural, dense, or transparent? That tells me more than somebody listing twelve notes in thirty seconds. So no, I do not think most people can smell all the notes in a perfume the way influencers claim. I think most are picking up the main character of the scent and then filling in the rest with experience, comparison, and sometimes a little bit of performance, because even experienced master perfumers cannot tell all the notes in a fragrance.