5 Notes Newcomers Commonly Mistake for Each Other

Anyone who has stood at a perfume counter reading a list of notes will know the feeling of nodding along without much idea what half of them smell like. It’s fine. Some of these materials sound close because they come from the same place, and others just happen to share a name, which doesn’t help anybody.

1. Iris and Violet

Most people meeting iris for the first time say it smells of violets, and you can’t really blame them. The iris note isn’t taken from the flower at all. It comes from orris, the root of the plant, which is dug up and then left to dry for years until a powdery smell slowly forms inside it.

Violet’s scent is down to ionones, and aged orris has irones, which are close relatives in chemical terms, so of course they overlap. Spend a bit of time with both and violet starts to come across as sweeter. Orris is colder. There’s often a funny earthy smell under it, a bit like raw carrot, which makes sense once you remember it was a root.

2. Neroli and Orange Blossom

Same flower, which surprises a lot of people. Both come from the blossom of the bitter orange tree, and the split happens in the workshop.

Neroli is made by steam distilling the petals. Heat takes out some of the heavier material, so you’re left with something light and fresh that has a slightly bitter, green bite to it. Orange blossom absolute is pulled out with solvents instead of steam, and more of the thick, sweet side of the flower survives the process. It’s heavier and lasts much longer on skin. When you see one of these names on French Avenue perfumes, it gives you a fair idea of whether the scent will open clean or go full-on floral.

3. Amber and Ambergris

The names are nearly identical, and the two have almost nothing to do with each other. Ambergris comes out of sperm whales. It floats around the ocean for years. It hardens, and sometimes turns up on a beach where somebody gets very lucky. Old pieces smell salty and a bit animal, close to warm skin. It’s so rare and pricey that perfume houses mostly use a lab-made version these days.

Amber is a made-up smell, in a sense. There’s no amber plant to distil. Perfumers mix it, usually from labdanum resin with some vanilla, and you end up with something sweet and golden that feels cosy on a cold evening. The amber stone used in necklaces doesn’t come into it at all.

4. Vetiver and Patchouli

People muddle these because they both smell earthy and both hang about in the base of a perfume for ages. Vetiver is a grass, and the oil comes from its roots. It’s dry, a little smoky, and the stuff from Haiti often has a sharp lift that reminds some people of grapefruit peel. Java vetiver is darker and smokier still. Patchouli is a different thing entirely, a leafy plant in the mint family, and its oil is damp and dense, like a pile of wet leaves in a wood. Good aged patchouli can even smell faintly of cocoa.

If you can’t tell which is in a blend, spray some on a card and leave it for an hour. Vetiver mostly stays thin and dry. Patchouli gets rounder and sweeter as it sits. It’s a handy trick for the woody scents in French Avenue perfumes, though it works with anything really.

5. Tonka Bean and Vanilla

Sweet scent fans confuse tonka and vanilla constantly. Perfumers make it harder by putting them in the same bottle so often.

Vanilla is the cured pod of an orchid that climbs up trees. Its main smell is vanillin, the creamy warm note you’d know from custard. Tonka is a wrinkly black seed from a tree in South America, and the key molecule in it is coumarin, which smells of hay with a bit of almond in the background. Next to vanilla, it’s drier and has a slight bitterness, and plenty of people notice a pipe tobacco feel in it too.

Gourmand scents from French Avenue perfumes lean on both at once. It can be tricky to pick them apart in the drydown. Smell each on its own paper strip a few times, and the hay in tonka gets very easy to spot.