There were times I received raw materials I simply couldn’t connect with. Even with detailed descriptions from the supplier, my nose couldn’t find much in them. Some smelled buttery or oily, but felt absent. I set them aside, unsure what to do. Certain natural isolates fall into this invisible category. One example was linden blossom. A bit pricey, and I had high hopes. But when I opened the bottle, it felt like clear water. Later, I learned some people are anosmic to certain scents. They simply can’t smell them, while others can. And sometimes, the material belongs to its own category: neutral or silent notes.
When smelling a fragrance, we instinctively seek the bold, bright, most evocative notes, even when we didn't create the blend ourselves. Our minds want to build structures and dig into memory to find something familiar, something we can grasp. This is our nature. We do it visually (seeing faces in nature), and likely with other senses too (like hearing our name even when voices are hard to distinguish). In perfume, the centerpiece, the key notes, are always the heroes: the most important, the most precious, sometimes even rare. Often, they’re the ones other scent enthusiasts talk about most.
But once you delve into the real process of perfume-making, especially with natural aromatics, which are far more complex and multidimensional, you’ll begin to see there’s a blank space to be built within each formula. And it must be done using already complex essential oils or absolutes. A perfume within a perfume, as I often tell myself. That negative space is just as important as the leading notes. It extends, stretches, deepens, supports, and does so much more than you might imagine.
This post may be valuable to both natural perfumers and aromatherapists, as building aesthetically pleasing formulas with therapeutic qualities is an art in itself.