What does "sportiness" contain? — the word appears zero times across 42,225 materials

Someone posted an idea on r/DIYfragrance:

"I came across something described as close to Terre D'hermes, without the sportyness. I figure I can just add some sportiness myself. Has anyone tried this and found any new learnings?"

The shortest reply asked the sharpest question:

"Adding 'sportiness'? What does 'sportiness' contain?"

That can be checked.

The short version

• Scanning the odour field of all 42,225 materials in the database: sporty appears 0 times. So do sexy, luxurious and confident.
• In the same data, green appears 1,616 times (3.83%), woody 1,469 (3.48%), citrus 546, powdery 307.
• Perfume's marketing vocabulary and a material's descriptor vocabulary are two barely overlapping sets of words.
• masculine appears 0 times in the odour field and 18 in the longer commentary field; elegant is 0 and 33. They exist, inside somebody's remarks, not in a material's definition.
• This matches the field's own research: Zarzo and Stanton analysed 881 perfume materials profiled against 82 descriptors and sorted them into 17 odour classes — all of them smell words.
• But the thread performed the translation itself. Somebody turned "more sporty" into four concrete moves: more bergamot, more lily-of-the-valley materials, slightly less patchouli and less Atlas cedar.
• And the most useful reply in the thread is about method rather than materials: split a portion off before you touch anything.

About 9 minutes.

How often the word appears

The numbers first. String matching across two fields of all 42,225 materials: odor (the odour tags, usually a handful of words) and odor_descriptions (longer commentary carrying sources and reviewers' remarks).

Word	Odour field	Share	Commentary field
green	1,616	3.83%	1,722
woody	1,469	3.48%	1,485
fresh	665	1.57%	1,065
citrus	546	1.29%	672
powdery	307	0.73%	321
metallic	155	0.37%	175
clean	131	0.31%	296
marine	47	0.11%	64
ozone	43	0.10%	53
watery	32	0.08%	52
elegant	0	—	33
masculine	0	—	18
aquatic	0	—	5
feminine	0	—	4
sporty	0	—	0
sexy	0	—	0
luxurious	0	—	0
confident	0	—	0

That table sorts the words into three piles.

First pile: smell words. Green, woody, citrus, powdery, metallic, marine. They appear on hundreds to over a thousand materials, and they are the substance of the odour field.

Second pile: the hinge words. fresh at 665, clean at 131. They are both smell words and marketing words, and the database does use them as descriptors.

Third pile: absent. sporty, sexy, luxurious, confident are zero in both fields. And masculine, feminine, elegant appear only in the longer commentary — which is somebody's remark, not a property of the material.

So that commenter's question has a literal answer: in this database, "sportiness" contains nothing, because no material has ever been described that way.

This is not the database's preference

One might object that this is just one database's habit of wording.

The field's formal research uses the same class of words.

Zarzo and Stanton applied principal component analysis to a semantic odour profile database in Chemical Senses in 2006. That database held 881 perfume materials, each with a profile across 82 odour descriptors.

Two of their conclusions are worth keeping:

Their statistical analysis has revealed that the underlying structure of odor space is high dimensional and not governed by a few primary odors.

And:

The relationships identified between the descriptors are consistent with those reported in similar studies and have allowed their classification into 17 odor classes.

Eighty-two descriptors, seventeen classes, and all of them smell words.

In 2009 the same authors did something whose result is more interesting still.

Writing in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, they ran PCA on two databases: 309 compounds against 30 descriptors, and 119 perfume materials against 66 descriptors.

On the first:

The loading plot corresponding to the relevant components was strikingly similar to the odor effects diagram proposed by P. Jellinek (1951), primarily on the basis of his long experience as a perfumer.

A diagram drawn from experience in 1951 matched a principal component analysis half a century later.

Which says the odour descriptors are not arbitrary: they have structure, and that structure is stable enough that experience alone could find it.

And "sporty" is not in it.

(Their conclusion is careful too: standard sensory maps are possible, they say, "if a consensus is first reached regarding which odorants best represent particular odor qualities". Even the smell words' referents are not yet settled.)

But the thread translated it anyway

This is the turn in the piece, and it is good news.

Somebody posted a GC-MS reconstruction formula of Terre d'Hermès, and another person who had actually made it gave concrete advice:

"I've made this formula. I had to replace about 20 per cent of the ingredients with other things, but the result was quite similar to Terre d'Hermès and nice. I'd say that if you want it to be more sporty, I'd increase the bergamot and perhaps lily of the valley materials and reduce the patchouli and Atlas cedar very slightly."

Four moves:

Direction	Move
Add	bergamot
Add	lily-of-the-valley materials
Remove	patchouli
Remove	Atlas cedar

Note the shape: two additions and two subtractions, adding citrus and white floral, subtracting woody and earthy.

That is not "adding sportiness". It is shifting the centre of mass from woody-earthy toward citrus-floral.

Which is the translation. "Sporty" is not a material class; it is a direction — and a direction can be stated as what to add and what to remove.

We've written about workhorses and genre breadth: patchouli oil spans all fourteen genres in the corpus and so does bergamot. Neither belongs to a genre, so shifting their proportions shifts the whole perfume's centre.

Subtraction is the real problem

And here is a difficulty the original poster had not reckoned with.

Two of those four moves are subtractions. And you cannot subtract anything from a finished bottle of perfume.

Somebody in the thread found a good image for it:

"I'd suggest only trying this with fairly classic colognes. Adding to fuller perfumes is unlikely to work well, like hammering a car to make it more aerodynamic (in theory possible, but highly unlikely)."

That catches the point: you can only add, and most adjustments require removing.

If half of "more sporty" is "less patchouli", the only route is to dilute the whole thing and add the rest back. Which is exactly what the most substantive reply in the thread does.

The method from the person who actually did it

This one deserves recording in full, because it is the thread's only operational account:

"Yeah i tried this with a few fragrances. I had the most success with ingenious ginger, i added some powdery orris (i think mostly orivone) and some other stuff and it actually turned out really nice! I gave some to a friend and she liked it better than the og.

The way i did it was by creating a 'ginger stretch' accord that was my interpretation of the core parts of the og with a few tweaks, but very diluted (probably to around 10% or less oils), then i combined that with the og at about a 1:1 ratio. The idea was to make it less potent so you can apply more sprays without it being overpowering, while adding a slightly different character to it."

This solves the subtraction problem, cleverly.

Taking it apart:

1. He did not add materials to the original. He built a separate accord first.
2. That accord was diluted to 10% or less — so it is at perfume strength rather than material strength, the same order as the finished thing.
3. Combined 1:1. Which halves the original, while putting his own work into the other half.
4. Every material in the original dropped to half its concentration. That is the subtraction.

Achieving relative reduction through overall dilution is the only subtraction available when you cannot take a finished product apart.

The cost is that the whole perfume gets weaker. And he turned that cost into the purpose: "so you can apply more sprays without it being overpowering".

(We worked through dilution arithmetic last round. Note here that after a 1:1 blend the original is at half strength, and his accord contributes half of its own strength — a 10% accord becomes 5% of the mixture.)

The most useful sentence

The thread's shortest and most important advice:

"Just split a portion off and mess around with that, for when you inevitably hate it after your changes."

That is the control-sample piece in another form: keep the original.

With one bottle that you modify directly, you have lost both your control and your way back.

Collecting it up

• "Sporty" appears zero times in the odour field across 42,225 materials. It is not a material property.
• But it can be translated into a direction: add citrus and white floral, remove woody and earthy.
• Translation has to come first, because materials only answer to smell words.
• And execution can only add, so relative subtraction has to come from overall dilution.
• Split a portion off before you start.

The general form: when somebody describes a perfume with a word that describes a person, ask first what smell words that word maps to, and then what materials those smell words map to. Skip the middle step and you will be hunting for materials in a space that has none.

What this doesn't establish

The string matching is crude. I searched substrings, so sport matches things like transport (which is why sport shows 2 hits in the commentary field while sporty shows 0). Conversely I may have missed other spellings or synonyms — if the database uses athletic or energetic, I did not search for them.

"Zero" is this database's zero. Another database or another supplier may well use these words. All I can say is that across these 42,225 records, no material is described that way.

fresh and clean appear on both sides and I placed them in a middle pile. That grouping is my judgement, not the database's classification.

Zarzo's two papers are methodological PCA studies. The second author of the 2006 paper was then at Procter & Gamble, which I state so readers know. Both papers address the statistical structure among descriptors, not whether marketing words mean anything — a question they never ask.

"All 82 descriptors are smell words" is my impression from the abstract. The abstract does not list them, so I could not verify each one.

I have not seen Jellinek's 1951 diagram. I cite Zarzo and Stanton's description of it.

I have not seen the Terre d'Hermès GC-MS reconstruction. Someone posted a PDF; I neither downloaded nor verified it. And the person who "made this formula" says he replaced about 20% of the ingredients, so his result is not that formula either.

"More bergamot and less patchouli makes it sportier" is that commenter's judgement, not something I verified. I cite it to demonstrate the act of translation, not to endorse the formulation advice.

The Ingenious Ginger case is one person's single experience. No control, no blind test, and "she liked it better than the og" is one person's opinion.

References

M. Zarzo, D. T. Stanton, Identification of latent variables in a semantic odor profile database using principal component analysis, Chemical Senses, 31(8), 713-724 (2006). PMID 16855062. doi:10.1093/chemse/bjl013

M. Zarzo, D. T. Stanton, Understanding the underlying dimensions in perfumers' odor perception space as a basis for developing meaningful odor maps, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 71(2), 225-247 (2009). PMID 19304614. doi:10.3758/APP.71.2.225

Related: the fragrance wheel, what makes a workhorse, he asked whether one or two would do, his control test lied to him for a year.