Fragrance Terms Explained: From a Ship's Wake to a Goat's Beard

At the stern of a ferry the sea splits into a white furrow of foam that lies on the water long after the boat has pulled ahead. A passenger in a grey wool coat walks the deck into the wind, and for a few seconds after she has passed, the air carries mandarin and a salted leather as cold as the rail.

French has one word for both trails. Sillage is a ship's foaming wake first, from sillon, a furrow, and the scent a perfume leaves behind only after that. Much of perfume's vocabulary was borrowed the same way, and the confusion starts when two of those words get used as one. The perfume in the grey coat is Ganymede by Marc-Antoine Barrois, and it comes back more than once below.

The trail on the deck

What hung in the air behind the grey coat was sillage, the trail a perfume leaves as its wearer moves. Had she stopped at the rail, the scent held in a radius around her would have been projection. How long it stays perceptible on her skin is longevity. A perfume can be generous on one and modest on another, so "strong" on its own says very little.

Each perfume page here rates two of the three: longevity in hour bands, and sillage in a single word, which across the whole shelf is Moderate, Strong or Enormous. There is no separate projection rating. The longevity figure is typical, not promised, and nobody's skin is obliged to agree with it.

Side by side, the ratings pull loud and long apart. Ganymede is rated Enormous in the longest band and turns up among the loudest niche fragrances we carry. Vanille Havane by Les Indémodables shares that band at a Moderate sillage, long and quiet at once, while Pacific Chill, Louis Vuitton's mint-bright cologne, sits at the short end, Moderate in the shortest band.

Skin changes how a perfume leaves it. In a 2018 study that sampled the air just above people's skin after a fragrance went on, the way it diffused differed from one person to the next, and so did the scent each one gave off as time passed.

Marc-Antoine Barrois and the perfumer Quentin Bisch made it as their idea of a divine skin. Mandarin opens it, osmanthus brings an apricot softness and velvety suede, and immortelle, spicy and faintly salted, lays a saffron light over an almost metallic mineral leather.

An island and a goat's beard

Rockroses grow from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, shrubs that carry a sticky brown resin called labdanum. In ancient times labdanum was gathered by combing the beards and thighs of goats and sheep that had grazed the shrubs. Nineteenth-century Cretans gathered it with wooden rakes strung with rows of leather thongs.

That resin is one corner of chypre, French for Cyprus. The family takes its shape from François Coty's Chypre of 1917, the first composition built on an accord of bergamot, labdanum and oakmoss, named for its mostly Mediterranean materials. Oakmoss, the third corner, is a lichen that grows mainly on oak trunks and branches.

Bertrand Duchaufour made it for MDCI in 2012, a green oriental chypre. Cistus, the labdanum shrub, sits at the top beside galbanum, and oakmoss lies at the bottom with castoreum, leathers and styrax, so the resin and the lichen of Coty's accord stand at either end of it. Rose, iris and prune fill the space between, and the whole has the weight of brocade, or of a zibeline fur fit for a Tsar.

The fern that smells of hay

Paul Parquet's 1882 perfume for Houbigant was called Fougère Royale, the royal fern, and the family it began still carries the name. The smell is lavender laid over oakmoss and coumarin, and the fern lives only in the title. Houbigant sells it today, reengineered from the 1882 compound, and its copy paints curled fronds and newly mown hay.

Coumarin is that hay, the sweet smell of the tonka bean, named from coumarou, the French word for tonka. William Henry Perkin first made it in a laboratory in 1868, fourteen years before Parquet laid lavender over it. On our shelf, Lost Tribe's Pan's Labyrinth keeps the old frame of lavender, coumarin and French oakmoss and dusts it with powder.

A melting winter note

Constantin Weriguine called the aldehyde a melting winter note. He had learned perfume under Ernest Beaux, whose Chanel No. 5 of 1921, the fifth of the samples he showed Coco Chanel and the one she chose, made unprecedented use of aldehydes as aroma boosters.

Time in the bottle

Once a perfume is blended, its materials take time to settle into the alcohol. That rest is maceration: three to four weeks is a common minimum, some niche houses wait six months or longer, and Adi Ale Van leaves Decembrie 89 Freedom Elixir to rest for twelve months.

Jimmy Bodin's extrait, at 32 percent, opens on apple, orange and lemon, then sinks through hazelnut into vanilla three times over, as bean, absolute and Madagascar, with rum running underneath.

Sometimes the law changes a perfume already on sale. In 2017 the European Union banned two natural components of oakmoss, the fragrance allergens behind the most cases of contact allergy, and from 23 August 2021 no cosmetic containing them, perfume included, could be sold in the EU. The lichen itself stayed legal, but chypre and fougère both lean on oakmoss, so the rule reached straight into them. The deadline ran longer than usual, because reformulating a fragrance is long and complex work.

Harvests and opened bottles change a perfume too, part of why two decants of the same perfume can smell different. Ganymede's scent has not been reformulated since its launch on 1 April 2019. Only its preservatives and UV filters were taken out, in October 2020, and Marc-Antoine Barrois has promised to announce on its page any reformulation it is ever obliged to undergo.

What jasmine shares with a civet

Indolic and animalic get swapped, and with reason. Indole, found in many perfumes, smells of flowers in the faintest amounts and of faeces when concentrated. Its cousin skatole turns animal at higher doses and reads as civet, yet jasmine and orange blossom hold a little of it, and there it smells floral. Said of a perfume, indolic means a flower carrying a hint of that darker edge.

Scraping the glands of a live animal is the preferred way today to take civet, the secretion of the civet's perineal glands, and in Ethiopia civets are kept in captivity to collect it. Castoreum comes from beavers' castor sacs, dried and generally aged two years or more, and perfumers use it mostly for a leather effect. Both are animalic, the smell of materials that come from animals, and a note list naming either one does not say whether an animal was involved. Adi Ale Van's Afterlife Potion sets the flower and the animal in one bottle, with tuberose and jasmine absolutes at the top and civet and castoreum named in the base.

Ensar Oud names its animal outright. Blue Kalbar is a perfume oil made with genuine civet paste, Mysore sandalwood from 1992 infused with white Jamaican ambergris, and two artisanal ouds. Its heart is the buttery warmth of blue lotus absolute from the Thai countryside.

The smell of a coin

When the trade words run out, five plain questions still describe a perfume. Ask them in order: what colour is it, what would it feel like, is it hot or cold, where does it put you, and who does it make you.

Colour comes first, and the blue of marine perfumes came out of a laboratory. Calone, a sea-breeze material discovered at Pfizer in 1966, became a dominant note in several marine perfumes from the 1990s. The sea itself smells partly of a sulphurous, cabbage-like gas given off by phytoplankton, and Calone keeps only the breeze. Galaxolide, one of the synthetic musks sometimes called white musk, was developed at IFF in the 1960s and is commonly used in laundry detergent to mask the smell of the cleaning chemicals, so the white of a white musk and the smell of a clean shirt can come from the same molecule.

Texture brings in the coin. The metallic smell of coins, keys and iron is a body odour: chemists traced it in 2006 to metal reacting with skin and sweat, so a coin held in a closed hand smells of the hand.

Temperature can be literal. Menthol cools through touch, setting off a cold receptor in the skin, and that receptor was found with menthol itself, in work honoured with the 2021 Nobel Prize. Heat has a receptor too, found with capsaicin from chilli, and it fires at temperatures felt as painful.

Ganymede answers all five, in order: the gold of salted skin; suede over a leather gone almost metallic; skin warmed by leather against a mineral breath; a marble world of the gods and a windswept salt sea; and the Trojan prince captivated by Zeus. On the ferry the grey coat has gone below, and for a few seconds more the air over the deck carries salt and cold leather above the white furrow of the wake.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between sillage, projection and longevity?

Sillage is the trail a perfume leaves in the air as its wearer moves. Projection is the radius of scent around someone standing still, and longevity is how long the perfume stays perceptible on skin. A perfume can be generous on one and modest on another.

What does chypre mean in perfume?

Chypre is French for Cyprus. The family takes its shape from François Coty's Chypre of 1917, the first composition built on an accord of bergamot, labdanum and oakmoss.

What is a fougère fragrance?

Fougère is French for fern. The family began in 1882 with Fougère Royale, composed by Paul Parquet for Houbigant, and its smell is lavender over oakmoss and coumarin, with the fern only in the name.

What is the difference between indolic and animalic?

Indole smells faecal when concentrated and floral in the faintest amounts, so indolic describes a flower carrying a hint of that darker edge. Animalic describes the smell of materials from animals, such as civet, from the civet's perineal glands, and castoreum, from the castor sacs of beavers.