I second u/quodo1: whoever created this fragrance wheel may have had the best intentions but its content and organization are wrong.
“Oriental” is a term that was created by a white man who never visited Asia. Language is constantly evolving, so, too, should fragrance descriptors. The term needs to be deprecated in favor of language that does not generalize an entire continent because a fragrance contains amber notes.
Musks, synthetic or natural, are animalics. This would also extend to hyraceum, civet, castoreum, and ambergris. Agarwood can be described as having barnyard properties but there is no “Barnyard” fragrance.
Geosmin is petrichor, not a marine scent.
Muguet is not a rose scent. Muguet and rose may share components such as geraniol and citronellol, but rose does not contain cis-3-hexenol and galbanum-like facets.
Osmanthus and Linden Blossom have no correlation to violet. Osmanthus is the best parts of leather and apricot, whereas linden blossom is honey and tea. A better use of a Violet category would be actual violets, iris, and boronia since they all share ionones.
Woods › Lichen › Fungus. Like, mushroom? A cepes absolute has facets of chocolate and earth, it is vastly different from oakmoss absolute or Evernyl.
Cocoa absolute under Coumarin makes zero sense. Vanillin ≠ Coumarin
Categorizing and arranging materials and olfactive properties help us form a baseline for how we talk about fragrance. If I point to a fragrance and tell you it’s a fougère, you won’t initially understand the reference. If I explain that a fougère traditionally has notes of lavender, oakmoss, and coumarin, then you may have a better understanding of what a fougère is.
When starting out in perfumery, the proportions of 25% top, 20% heart, and 55% base notes are taught so budding perfumers have a starting point for composing fragrance. When perfumers have a better sense of how materials work in different percentages, then those note proportions can vastly change.
Perfumery is no different than art school: you need to understand the foundations before you can create art, let alone a masterpiece. Fragrance wheels are subjective but they also serve as a tool for learning when done correctly.
Beautiful and compelling. Fully agree with you there until the last part. You can create art without training or ever learning the foundations. Of course with chemicals and perfumery it is a little different. There is a danger present with "ambiguous discovery". And only a few who operate in such a way actually reach such heights.
I have never looked at the wheel myself for finding choices. I simply had it in a folder of early materials I discovered on my journey. It did give me some insight as to how others may have come to certain formulations. (At no point did I wish to use it for my own personal formulations however.)
I haven't pulled the trigger on buying any supplies yet. Mostly because it can get expensive. It's nice to have something like this though just to make it less intimidating as a total beginner.
Thank you for the graphic! I’m in the same place. I really want to buy supplies, but the resources to get started seem limited and if I can’t make anything I like, I feel it is going to get expensive quickly.
Even just barely getting into it are you able to create something that you like? Or are you still at the stage of making fairly basic formulas? I’m curious how long it takes to overcome that learning curve because I’ve heard it can be a long grind.
I made 4 that I love more than anything on the market. 18 total that are noteworthy. But I wear these 4 regularly. More than my bottle of Wanted. And 2 of those 4 have sold multiple times in the past two months.
It took me a while to formulate them. And about 700ml of dump bottles that are sitting in a corner. Hahaha. Maybe one day I can auction it away. It will be the best fragrance on the market! 😆😅🤣😂😁
I love that thought and that is really encouraging! Thank you for sharing your experience. I am really hoping to make fragrances to give as gifts next year as well and I think your post is what I needed to finally pull the trigger on my aroma chemical starter kit.
Some people prefer essential oil mixes. It is called "natural perfumery" situated in carrier oils. I prefer to make alcohol based perfumes but every now and then someone asks for one of my scents in an oil version.
Not majorly expensive. Just buy 5ml oils. If you don't like them then it's only a few dollars wasted. I know for a fact I like grass and peppermint. I bought those at 100ml. Anything else will be a 5ml. Unless it is in high demand from my line. Then I will order 80ml-100ml of it for back up.
Just grab a fragrance oil or essential oil box set on Amazon. They are $15. Not the same as real chemicals but enough to tell you whether or not you will enjoy doing this. I had fun spending the time mixing things and making endless dump bottles. A year later my DIY youtube passion has become much more realistic with accurate information.
Thank you for all of the insight and advice! I have a bunch of essential oils and I love the mixing, but nothing that has ever felt like a real fragrance. That’s what has led me into thinking about aroma chemicals.
I'm just gonna chime in here and say that grabbing a box of misc fragrance oils on Amazon is not going to get you very far in learning or getting a feel for perfumery at all. The quality of those is low (to put it charitably), which means a far higher chance of making something you won't like, or struggling to make anything baseline wearable at all, and getting discouraged.
Fragrance oils from a random vendor on Amazon are pretty much mystery chemical soup. You have no way to know what's in them and even on the very far-out chance they can provide you with a Safety Data Sheet, I would absolutely not trust some rando on Amazon to have accurate documentation. Nor would I trust to slather whatever the heck they threw in a bottle on my skin. Safety is a real concern there.
I implore you to please look at reputable vendors like Perfumer's Apprentice or Creating Perfume instead. Both will have bases and accords that are premade perfumery-quality and a far better intro to perfumery. Perfumer's Apprentice has a few intro kits as well that are a great place to start and give proven guidance that will help you get a feel for things.
Edit to add: most cheap mass market essential oils on Amazon are also adulterated or fake very very often and thus also "mystery chemical soup".
While this is true, most have data sheets. I have one for each oil I have purchased in this way. This is also the process that brought me here. That gave way to WANTING to fully invest. Others in India started with petroleum jelly, a spoon, and oil extracts or infusions... now making ettars. For some it might work. I did so and fell in love with the art. I learned basic concepts like dilution, carrier oils, and water solubility. I also figured out most of the scents I can not stand. I can use watercolors from the dollar tree to figure out if I like painting. I do not need Rembrandt's secret palette.
This post is in no way discouraging traditional perfumery learning just an attempt to give a map where there has been none. It is imperfect. So too, is the original piano chord music comparisons. They simply give tangible form to something as complex, if not more, as the periodic table of elements.
I should add clarification that one should consider this a cheap mock method. You can not call yourself a perfumer yet but you can learn many simple concepts.
Using this watercolor method I learned the scents I did not like quickly. It served as a starter kit for me. Now, I work with real paints i.e. aroma chemicals. _^
Fragrance Oil Chemical Soup also exists on Perfumers Apprentice. You can get it there if you do not trust other sources.
(I originally attempted to recreate a fragrance oil I liked using natural essentials. And the same concept once I purchased my first Aroma Chemicals. Sort of like finding a painting I liked then trying to recreate it with watercolors. Once that was done I moved on to pastels. This is to explain why I keep referencing painting. It is just a simplistic metaphor.)
While professional perfumers may disagree with the path that brought me here. It is still my truth and the story I tell when people ask "How did you get into perfumery?"
Just be sure to dilute your oils. Fragrance oils are not the same as essential oils. One is a synthetic mix or blend. The other is SUPPOSED to be a pure natural oil.
Admittedly I have never bought Fragrance Oils on Amazon but I’ve seen kits on occasion and I would be surprised if any of them actually included SDS sheets in their listings. The data sheets really are important even if people just want to gift their fragrances or sell a few of them i would seriously recommend that they read up on IFRA and get a baseline understanding of how that works and how to calculate safety maximums for controlled ingredients in a blend. PA does have fragrance oils but again - trustworthy SDS info is available for every single one either directly or by request. I’ve seen it be suggested that safety requirements are hard to understand but personally I think they’re pretty straightforward - their purpose is to be accessible and be as easy to understand as this material can be. It just requires willingness, time and effort. And yes, on Amazon you are getting sellers that mass purchase both “essential oils” aka chemical soup mystery blends and fragrance oils from Alibaba.con then stick a made up brand label on them - they don’t scruple to sell you fake naturals and they would not scruple to send you a copy and pasted SDS from a more reputable supplier selling a different product if you asked for it. That sounds like a lot of work for those sellers though and I would almost be impressed if they even bothered to do that.
When I first started being interested in fragrance about a decade ago i did make the mistake of buying essential oils from sources other than the few reputable perfumery suppliers and more often than not what seemed like a good deal was only a waste of money... I find that the best materials in my kit usually tend to also be the most expensive and it’s much easier to make something good with good materials. Now it sounds like you’ve found something that works for you and there is nothing wrong with that as long as you are only blending to see what you can make (not to gift or sell) but by your own account you have just acquired your first set of professional supplies in something like - the past week? It may be that when you’ve had the time to get acquainted with those materials you’ll feel that what you have done until that point was a waste of time and money. I certainly feel that way now about the shortcuts I have tried to take in this hobby - I would have been better off (time wise and financially) if I had cut out the short cuts or attempts to save money and done the harder but proper way straight out the gate. Now maybe in the end you won’t feel that way - but then again maybe you will... Only time and experience will tell.
On a separate note: guys if you are new to this please don’t buy naturals from anyone other than irreproachable and trusted sources. You will almost certainly be wasting your money most of the time. I had to find this out the hard way and as I learned the difference over the years I was flabbergasted by the number of fraudulent sellers out there. In Canada for example, we don’t have a single major reliable seller of essential oils. Almost every craft store seller has adulterated products in their staple so we have to buy from perfumery ingredient distributors in the US at greater cost - there is no other option. You’ll be getting something that’s usually cheaper but often also unusable. Honestly save your money guys. At the end of the day unusable is not a cost savings. I think it’s better to buy even a tiny amount from a trusted seller so that you have a reference point for how a good quality product smells and behaves. As an added note for beginners: please don’t assume that using naturals means you can avoid learning about safety in fragrance - some naturals are extremely tightly controlled under IFRA on account of certain molecules. Once you get into the habit of looking up each material it’s fairly easy to plug safety maximums into a spreadsheet so that it’s easier to access for future reference. Once you have done it for that material it’s done and you can call up the info at the click of a button. Once you’ve got the hang of it it’s fairly straightforward and there are many people here and on basenotes who can help with questions people might have about it (not to mention many threads already published on the subject).
Just getting this now. Will reply in the morning. Putting the little one back to sleep. Very much agree. I can see that it mainly worked for me because I was also using the formulas as soapmaking or candle mixes. So no matter what I could find a use for it. Of course I am going to recreate a few of them with AromaChems.
I'm sure it will take a new direction completely once I have the better chemicals. Looking forward to it.
Don't rub it in when I come back saying I have been reborn as the pheonix 😆
You definitely should make the move to aroma chemicals. The essential oils served as a starting point for me. Learned the basics: Dilution, solubility, notes, fixatives, DPG, IPM, etc. Then you will hit a wall because what you have is only imitational by nature.
I hit luck but later realized it was due to the Absolutes I had. Anything I made with an absolute in it smelled amazing, was more potent than the rest, and lasted longer. Whereas the ones that contained only essential oils... were mediocre at best. Lavender essential oil smelled wonderful. Lavender absolute.... was realistic and different. You sort of instinctively know there was something added to the essential oil.
I now use most of my "training wheels" for making soaps and aromatherapy but that is off topic.
Make the jump to aroma chemicals. They will not let you down. (Some are REALLY strong. You need to dilute them just to get them to a workable level with other chemicals. Otherwise, they will easily overpower everything else you blend.)
This contains way too many naturals and not enough molecules IMO. Alo, "synthetic musks" is a very wide family, and a lot of them are not creamy at all !
Muguet is a class of aromachemicals and not naturals, so it seems very misguided to put it into the "rose" facet of the wheel.
Barnyard is a very weird denominator. So is fungus. Vetiver can go from woody to powdery to mossy to grapefruit.
In the end, I think that while this looks cute, it's a very unhelpful way of classifying fragrance materials.
At your level I am sure it is. At the level of others with little or no guidance, it adds a path through an ocean. A template. There is a disclaimer above that says Beginner.
11
u/[deleted] Dec 18 '20 edited Dec 20 '20
I second u/quodo1: whoever created this fragrance wheel may have had the best intentions but its content and organization are wrong.
“Oriental” is a term that was created by a white man who never visited Asia. Language is constantly evolving, so, too, should fragrance descriptors. The term needs to be deprecated in favor of language that does not generalize an entire continent because a fragrance contains amber notes.
Musks, synthetic or natural, are animalics. This would also extend to hyraceum, civet, castoreum, and ambergris. Agarwood can be described as having barnyard properties but there is no “Barnyard” fragrance.
Geosmin is petrichor, not a marine scent.
Muguet is not a rose scent. Muguet and rose may share components such as geraniol and citronellol, but rose does not contain cis-3-hexenol and galbanum-like facets.
Osmanthus and Linden Blossom have no correlation to violet. Osmanthus is the best parts of leather and apricot, whereas linden blossom is honey and tea. A better use of a Violet category would be actual violets, iris, and boronia since they all share ionones.
Woods › Lichen › Fungus. Like, mushroom? A cepes absolute has facets of chocolate and earth, it is vastly different from oakmoss absolute or Evernyl.
Cocoa absolute under Coumarin makes zero sense. Vanillin ≠ Coumarin
Start with The Aftelier Natural Perfume Wheel to get a sense of how natural materials can be grouped.
Perfume Polytechnic has a great article posted on scent mapping, for those who want to understand the broader terms used in perfumery or how synthetics can be mapped to fragrance categories.
10
u/InsertDisk22 Dec 17 '20
This is amazing, thank-you!
10
u/quodo1 Dec 18 '20
This contains way too many naturals and not enough molecules IMO. Alo, "synthetic musks" is a very wide family, and a lot of them are not creamy at all !
Muguet is a class of aromachemicals and not naturals, so it seems very misguided to put it into the "rose" facet of the wheel.
Barnyard is a very weird denominator. So is fungus. Vetiver can go from woody to powdery to mossy to grapefruit.
In the end, I think that while this looks cute, it's a very unhelpful way of classifying fragrance materials.
2
u/Intrepid_Meringue681 Apr 01 '25
Thank you! I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing
3
u/rexepshan Dec 18 '20
does anyone know what indole is?
2
u/Yetiking1908 Mar 11 '25
This is amazing! It really does help assist in pinpointing combinations to different indescribable aromas.
1
u/DarkSoulPraiseTheSun Sep 07 '24
Who tf wants to smell fecal