How to Say What You're Smelling

7 min read
5 sections
August 10, 2026
Updated August 17, 2026

When "it smells nice" runs out, five axes take over: colour, texture, temperature, space and identity. A framework for describing a fragrance precisely, built from research and our own catalogue copy.

You spray something spectacular, someone asks how it is, and you say "it smells nice."

Every perfume lover knows that failure. The smell is right there, specific as a face. The words are not.

Here is the fix we use. Five questions, asked in order. By the fifth you will have a sentence that actually says something.

A row of identical glasses on a long dim tasting table, each holding liquid of a different colour

Rain on dark glass with violet and magenta neon dissolved into abstraction

1. What colour is it?

Fastest question first. Gold, green, black, blue. Kanchaveli Yellow is named yellow and smells of leather cut with citrus, and noticing that gap already tells you more than a note list. Purple Rain ends the argument by physically staining your skin blue.

2. What would it feel like?

Satin, powder, fur, wet stone. Oud Satin Mood answers in its own name: nobody thinks satin is a smell, and everybody understands it in a second. L'Air du Désert Marocain feels like warm stone dust.

And a strange one: metallic is not metal. Metal is essentially odourless at room temperature. The smell of iron, blood and coins on skin comes from sweat corroding it, and what you smell is your own skin. Which makes Inexcusable Evil more accurate than it knows.

Falling snow and rising embers occupying the same column of smoke-lit air above a frozen field

Another covers petrol, smoke, bat caves and wild ginger root.

A hand-cast concrete cylinder split open with molten amber light pouring from the fissure, warmth inside a cold form

A small child at a kitchen table dissolving into overexposed light, involuntary memory as it fades

3. Is it hot or cold?

Pacific Chill is mint-cold, an actual shiver. Interlude 53 is embers fading on leather. The strange ones read hot and cold at the same time, and those are usually worth a decant.

4. Where does it put you?

The best fragrances are places. Tyrannosaurus Rex is a cold forest floor on the day the dinosaurs died. Domus Numeni is candle wax and incense in a stone room. Megamare is a cold wave about to land on you.

A cracked ice plain under a banded gas giant filling half the sky

A woman draped in a crimson satin robe standing motionless before a foxed mirror in candlelight, the sensual nocturnal luxury

5. Who does it make you?

Finish this sentence: "this makes me someone who..." Green Irish Tweed makes you someone every room approves of. Black Afgano makes you someone who refuses, more a substance than a perfume. Nobody wears it to be pleasant.

Put the five answers together and you get, for Ganymede: gold going grey, suede over wet stone, cold, an airless place, someone who has decided not to explain themselves.

No app writes that sentence for you. It only happens on skin, over a full day, which is exactly what a decant is for. Wear one tomorrow, ask the five questions, see what comes out.