How to Describe Scent to Make A Perfume
We use words like rounded, bright, soft, or sunny when we talk about perfume, but what do those words actually mean? They aren’t exact scientific terms, yet they appear everywhere. Perfumers use their own versions too: diffusive, airy, lifted. This kind of vocabulary appears because scent eventually moves past literal ingredients and into memory, mood, and association. When language runs out, we reach for whatever gets us closest.
Understanding how we get from lemon to “sunny” helps the whole process make sense.
Starting with the literal
Begin with what your nose can name.
Lemon smells like lemon. Rose smells like rose. Vanilla smells like vanilla. If you can point to one clear thing you recognize, that’s enough. Literal notes anchor your experience.
Even literal notes have shape. Something can feel sharp, soft, rounded, bright. These are sensory impressions, not rules, but they help you understand how the scent behaves.
Naming Families
Once you identify a literal note, step outward. Which family is it part of?
Citrus
Floral
Woody
Aromatic
Gourmand
Musky
Aquatic
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.
Families help you organize your perceptions even if you don’t know the chemistry behind them.
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.
Perfumers use accords to recreate this kind of complexity. Several ingredients are blended until they collectively smell like something familiar. A strawberry accord may not contain strawberry. A leather note may come from smoky, woody, or balsamic materials. 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 blends lets you describe scent with wider vocabulary.
Context changes everything
Citrus behaves differently depending on where it appears.
Paired with sweetness and warmth, it resembles key lime pie.
Paired with herbs and woods, it resembles lemonade.
Paired with aldehydes, it resembles a bright cleaning spray.
Your brain uses context to guess meaning, which is why the same ingredient can feel completely different depending on what surrounds it.
Memory and metaphor
This is where abstract language starts to make sense.
Someone calls a perfume “sunny.” One person imagines citrus and warm skin. Another imagines sunscreen. Another imagines fresh-cut grass. All are correct. Scent and memory share a pathway in the brain, so personal associations become part of the vocabulary.
If a scent reminds someone of their grandfather’s leather chair, you don’t need the exact technical description to understand the emotional tone. When someone describes winter cocoa by a fire, you probably smelled something in your mind instantly.
This is where scent becomes storytelling.
A simple structure for describing a scent
Try moving through these steps:
Identify one literal note.
Place it in a family.
Pay attention to context.
Build a small scene that fits the smell.
Notice any memories it stirs.
Move into abstract adjectives like warm, bright, rounded, dark, airy.
People describe wine the same way. You taste blackberry, leather, vanilla, smoke—not because any of those are added, but because they share the same aroma compounds or reference points. The vocabulary helps map something complex onto something familiar.
Perfume works the same way.
Reverse engineering a scent sketch
When you create a fragrance concept, you move through the same steps in reverse.
Start with a mood.
Calm. Bright. Playful. Seductive. Grounded.
Imagine a moment that matches it.
If the moment is a yacht on open water, think about the sensory elements: salt, metal, sun-warmed skin, driftwood, clean air, a slight herbal breeze.
From the moment, pull the sensory clues.
From the sensory clues, choose materials that echo them.
From materials, build notes that interact in a way that expresses the mood.
This is how a sketch becomes a scent. A fragrance doesn’t have to recreate reality. It only needs to recreate the feeling.
A final note
Perfumery has technique, shared vocabulary, and structure, but the creative process is still creative. Each nose organizes scent differently. Some think in color. Others in texture. Others in memory first. What matters is finding the method that helps you understand what you’re smelling and gives you enough language to describe it. Everything else develops over time.
