Blended Smells and Why Accords Matter
Most things in life don’t smell like a single ingredient.
Bread, for example, develops its warm, toasty, comforting aroma through the Maillard reaction, a process where heat transforms sugars and amino acids into an entirely new set of aromatic molecules. None of those molecules smell like raw dough; together, they smell unmistakably like bread. A rainforest isn’t one note either. It’s water, bark, humidity, soil, green growth, and decay woven together.
The Architecture of an Accord
Perfumers use accords to recreate this kind of complexity. An accord is a blend of several ingredients that, when combined, lose their individual identities to create something entirely new and familiar.
Think of it as the "chords" in music. You might have distinct notes like C, an E, and a G, but when played together, they produce a C Major chord. In perfumery, we blend materials until they collectively sing a single note, like "Leather" or "Amber."
When Nature Won’t Cooperate
We often rely on accords because nature is protective of its secrets. Many scents we love cannot actually be extracted from the source.
Take Fig, for example. You can’t steam-distill a fig and get that juicy, green, milky scent in a bottle. Instead, a perfumer must "rebuild" the fig from scratch. We use green-smelling molecules (like Stemone) to mimic the leaf, coconut-like materials (lactones) to recreate the milky sap, and woody notes for the stem.
The same goes for "silent flowers" like Lily of the Valley or Gardenia, and fruits like Peach or Strawberry. Since these plants don't yield an essential oil, we use chemistry to replicate their molecular signatures.
Accords as a Creative Shortcut
Building accords isn't just about recreating reality; it’s a way to simplify the creative process. If I know I want a specific "Vintage Lipstick" vibe in five different perfumes, I don’t want to weigh out individual doses of rose, violet, and ionones every single time. I build a "Lipstick Accord" once, balance it perfectly, and then use that single blend as a "building block" in future formulas.
It allows you to isolate a specific scent profile and treat it like a single ingredient.
The Science of Association
This is the structure that makes fragrances easier to talk about. For example, aquatic fragrances often rely on Calone, a molecule known for its watery, ozonic, slightly melon-like scent. It isn’t derived from melon; it simply shares similar molecular signature cues, and our brains interpret those cues as something oceanic.
Synthetic molecules often replicate or reference compounds found in nature, like how wine can smell like chocolate because they share certain aroma compounds, not because chocolate was added.
Understanding how these blends work lets you describe scent with a wider vocabulary. It maps something chemically complex onto something emotionally familiar, turning a list of molecules into a story your nose already knows how to read.
