I have a friend who is taking part in a fragrance study right now. The study is double blind, and even the consumer testing company administering it doesn't know much about it. But what the study is about isn't all that interesting to my normally prurient friend. What fascinates her most is how the study's participants talk about scent.
In the orientation for the study, the participants had to develop a scent “vocabulary” by smelling six perfumes and then writing down as many descriptors for the scents as they could. My friend, although no perfume expert, probably has more experience smelling perfume than most of the other study participants. (Besides that, although the company conducting the study required each participant to wear perfume at least five times a week and not to smoke, my friend knows for a fact that some of the participants almost never wear perfume, and she has seen a few of them outside of the study's offices sucking down that last cigarette before going in the building.)
After sniffing the perfumes, my friend diligently noted her perfume vocabulary on the worksheet: rose, powder, violet, aldehydes, cucumber, lily of the valley, and other standard notes. As she jotted what she smelled, she overheard some of the other participants talking about their descriptors…
