I love smells! Especially nice ones. Whether in a wine or in food, on a person or in a home, nothing beats that olfactory moment of sheer delight – a feeling so good that you almost want to take a snapshot of it like you can with a camera, so that you can recall and maybe recreate how you felt and the surroundings where you first encountered that smell.
Except you can’t. Or perhaps, you don’t yet know how to describe smells and reproduce them. Because scent, unlike sight, is difficult to express without a common language or points of reference. We seem to find it easier to describe precisely what we like about a photograph or a painting in terms of light, colour, intensity and composition, so we should be able to do the same for smells. Right?
Seeing Aromas
Fortunately, in 1983, Michael Edwards addressed the lack of a reference model for aromas by introducing the Fragrance Wheel to the world. This new scheme was created in order to simplify fragrance classification and naming, as well as to show the relationships between each of the 5 fragrance families of Floral, Oriental, Woody, Fresh and Fougère. Each of the families are further divided into 14 sub-families, so for example, the scent of 'bergamot' belongs to the Citrus family, which in turn belongs to the Fresh family.
What this means is that we are now armed with a visual model of what aromas or combinations of individual scents look like! By using the classification of component scents found in the perfumes on sale today, we can see how our favourite perfumes, even from different manufacturers, have a similar shape when plotted using the Fragrance Wheel. So using this model, we can easily and effectively classify the smells we like or do not like and start the creative process of blending fragrances to suit our preferences or moods.
A Virtual Fragrance Lab
For me, the Eureka moment came as I starred at the eye-watering price tag of a room diffuser in a boutique in the UK, wondering … what if I can put together a complete package of service and products to help fragrance enthusiasts learn how to identify, classify and create their favourite smells using a virtual tool or lab, and then to supply high quality raw materials (essential oils) so that the resulting virtual aroma blends can be realised in the making of cheaper homemade equivalents of room diffusers, candles and sprays?
Digging deep into my technical competence (I did bungle a Computer Science degree from a London university many years ago!), I discovered that I still remembered the basics of coding, enough to bring the aroma model to life in full technicolour ... and thus, aromLAB was born.
