How to train your nose: a mini perfumery course at home

Your nose can be trained like any other sense: by smelling carefully, every day, and naming what you smell. Just a few minutes a day with kitchen spices, fruit, flowers from the garden, and a few fragrances to compare is enough.

Exercises

1. The kitchen. Smell one spice at a time: cinnamon, cloves, pepper, cardamom. Close your eyes and try to recognize them.
2. Citrus fruits. Lemon, orange, mandarin, grapefruit: they may seem similar, but they are not.
3. Comparison. Two fragrances from the same family, one on each wrist: what makes them different?
4. The diary. Write down what you smell, even in your own words: "it smells like new leather," "it smells like rain."
5. Time. Smell the same fragrance after one minute, one hour, four hours: you will learn the fragrance pyramid.

Tools

A discovery set dedicated to raw materials is perfect for training: the Perris Monte Carlo set contains ten vials, each with a raw material. For vocabulary, there is the little fragrance dictionary; for families, fragrance families.

Moving forward

In the boutique, the olfactory journey with Gabriele is a one-hour session to learn how to recognize fragrance families in real fragrances. It is the next step after practicing at home.

Frequently asked questions

Can you learn to recognize the notes of a fragrance?

Yes, with practice. At first, you recognize the families, then the most prominent notes, and finally the nuances.

How do you become a nose?

Through specific studies and many years of practice. We discuss this in the nose.