Your first ten materials: buy these, not a starter kit

The first question from anyone starting perfumery is "what should I buy". It is worth noticing that the fragrance wheel cannot answer it — the wheel arranges finished perfumes, and none of those are on your shelf. The usual answer is a starter kit — thirty vials, 2ml each, with a little booklet. That answer has a problem.

2ml gets you four or five dilution tests. By the time a material starts to make sense, it's gone. And kits pad the count with things you won't touch for three years.

The better move is the opposite: buy fewer materials, in quantities large enough to make mistakes repeatedly. Ten is a smaller sacrifice than it sounds, too — the working palette is a few thousand materials, not forty-two thousand.

Why ten

The real learning curve is knowing what one material becomes at different concentrations and in different company; the long list of names can wait. That kind of knowledge takes repetition, and repetition takes volume.

Ten materials at 30ml each usually costs about the same as thirty at 2ml (what thirty materials actually buy you, counted across 954 published formulas), but now you can:

• Build a full concentration ladder (1%, 5%, 10%, 30%)
• Pair each one against the other nine, forty-five combinations in all
• Ruin things and start over. My own early dilutions mostly went down the drain, and having spare material is the only reason that felt like practice instead of failure.

The ten

Top: two citrus, one spice

Bergamot. The starting point of nearly every cologne. It carries citrus brightness, floral roundness and a trace of bitterness at once, which makes it the best teacher for how a top note hands over to a heart. If it's going on skin, use the FCF (furocoumarin-free) grade, because the standard oil is phototoxic.

Lemon exists on this list to contrast with bergamot. Smell them side by side and you'll understand for the first time that "citrus" is not one smell. Lemon also flashes off fast, which makes it the shortest route to understanding why top notes don't last.

Pink pepper keeps the opening from being only sweet and sour. It gives dryness, a prickle, a little woodiness. It's the small thorn a lot of modern perfumes put at the start.

Heart: two florals, one green

Rose. Natural rose oil is expensive; start with a synthetic reconstruction (a rose accord). The point is to learn how much lives inside rose: honey, fruit, a metallic edge, a dry paper note.

Jasmin. With rose, one of the two pillars of classical floral work. The indole in jasmin reads as faecal at high concentration and only becomes the sensual part of the flower once diluted. This is the lesson that shocks beginners most: a lot of beautiful things smell terrible neat.

Violet leaf is the reference green. It teaches you what "green" means: the wet, bitter, cold smell of a snapped plant stem, nothing like the coolness of mint.

Base: one wood, one balsam, one musk

Cedarwood. The cheapest and most useful wood. Dry, pencil shavings, a little earth. Use it to practise how a base holds up everything above it.

Benzoin. Sweet, resinous, vanillic. It shows you where "sweet" comes from in perfumery: the warmth of resins and balsams, with no sugar involved.

White musk (Galaxolide or similar). You'll notice you can barely smell it. That's the point. A musk's job is to extend and soften everything else while staying out of the way. Smelling it alone is a waste; make one version of an accord with it and one without, and compare.

And one more: perfumer's alcohol

Not strictly a material, but nothing works without it. Buy undenatured or perfumery-grade ethanol. Don't use rubbing alcohol; the denaturant has a smell of its own.

Before you blend anything

Make a concentration ladder for each of the ten, put them on blotters, and smell them once a day for a week. I write the time on the tail of each strip; without that, the next day's smelling turns into guesswork.

Record three things:

1. What hits you the moment it touches the paper
2. What it turns into ten minutes later
3. Whatever is left the next day

That week will do more for you than ten articles, because the nose only remembers what it keeps meeting.

Why not thirty: identification needs three things

The literature backs this up. In 1979 Cain reviewed the research on odour identification in Science, and the conclusion is compact:

Successful odor identification depends on:

1. commonly encountered substances
2. a long-standing connection between an odor and its name
3. aid in recalling the name

The absence of any one ingredient impairs performance dramatically, but the presence of all three permits ready identification of scores of substances, with performance seemingly limited only by the inherent confusability of the stimuli.

Hold those three conditions against a kit of thirty 2 mL vials:

Cain's condition	What the kit gives you
1. Commonly encountered substances	Half of the thirty you will never buy again
2. A long-standing connection between odour and name	2 mL each — gone after a few sniffs, before any connection forms
3. Aid in recalling the name	The booklet gets shelved; it is not in your hand while you smell

All three fail. Ten materials at 30 mL each satisfies all three: you meet the same ten repeatedly, the quantity supports months of repetition, and you can put the name on the bottle and in your notes where you can see it.

"Buy fewer, buy enough" is not a way to save money. It is a design that matches the conditions for identification.

On regulations

Of the materials above, bergamot (phototoxicity), the indolic side of jasmin, and some musks fall under the IFRA Standards. Smelling on blotters for your own practice isn't restricted. The moment it goes on skin, gets given away, or gets sold, check the current IFRA Standards for the limits.

This isn't meant to alarm you. These limits often shape the structure of a formula, and knowing early is far less work than rebuilding a finished accord.

References

W. S. Cain, To know with the nose: keys to odor identification, Science, 203(4379), 467–470 (1979). PMID 760202