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Fragrance Feelings: Fact or Fiction?

The true power of perfume is its emotional impact, making each scent deeply meaningful.

We can design perfumes to make people feel happy, relaxed, romantic, or sexy and use marketing to sell our vision. But how do we know if our fragrances deliver on their promises?

I used to think that understanding people's emotional needs was enough to make fragrances they would love. But intention is not enough. The real secret is testing how our creations make people feel.

Testing and refinement are key for turning our visions into market success. It transforms superficial likes into passionate loves, creating fragrances that truly touch people's hearts.

Inspired by this insight, I decided to explore what the experts have discovered, to answer a question that puzzled me for a long time: is emotional fragrance design fact or fiction?

So, let me share with you some ideas, research, and examples demonstrating how we can understand the emotional impact of our fragrance creations.

The Path to Perfume Perfection

Creating fragrances that connect with people emotionally is a process that requires a deep understanding of both perfumery and human emotions. Here's a quick overview of the key steps I follow in emotional fragrance design:

Understanding the Target Emotion:

• First, decide which specific emotional response you want to evoke in your target customers.
• Ask yourself, "What do people want to feel when they experience my new creation?"

Choosing the Right Scents:

• Use your personal scent reflection library to guide you in selecting fragrance materials, accord ideas, and fragrance structures that you think might evoke the desired target emotion.
• For example, based on your previous experiences, you might choose materials like lavender and vanilla for their calming effects.

Testing and Refining:

• Test your fragrances on target customers and gather feedback on their emotional responses.
• If the desired emotion isn't achieved, adjust the formula accordingly.
• Refine the fragrance until it effectively evokes the intended emotional response.

Remember, emotional fragrance design is more than just creating nice scents, it's about delivering your emotional promises.

The Emotional Scale of Scents:

Several approaches have been developed to measure and test emotional responses to fragrances, including self-report questionnaires, mapping scents based on emotional effects, physiological measurements, and brain imaging techniques. Let's explore some of these approaches.

Mapping Scents and Sensations

In 1951, Paul Jellinek,  an influential perfumer and theorist, developed his groundbreaking Odor Effects Diagram - a tool that changed helped perfumers better understand scents and emotions.

This revolutionary tool organizes a wide range of scents along the descriptive spectrums of Erogenous vs. Anti-erogenous and Narcotic vs. Stimulating to show how various scents might impact emotions.

Jellinek's work remains influential because it provides a structured framework to link fragrance families to potential emotional impacts. 

The above diagram shows one way how other researchers have expanded on Jellinek's work by integrating data from extensive odor databases. 

The Emotional Vocabulary

The measurement and testing of emotional responses to scents often involves the use of questionnaire-based methods. One such method is the Universal Geneva Emotion and Odor Scale (UniGEOS).

The UniGEOS questionnaire uses a vocabulary of 25 emotions organized into nine dimensions evoked by smells. It aims to bridge the gap between the subjective nature of emotional responses to odors across different cultures.

1. Unpleasant Feelings - Disgusted, Irritated, Unpleasantly surprised

2. Happiness/Delight - Happy, Pleasantly surprised, Well-being

3. Sensuality/Desire - Desire, Romantic, Sensual

4. Energy - Refreshed, Energetic, Revitalized

5. Soothing/Peacefulness - Relaxed, Comforted, Soothed

6. Hunger/Thirst - Mouthwatering, Thirsty, Famished

7. Interest - Amusement, Interesting, Impressed

8. Nostalgia - Sad, Melancholic, Nostalgic

9. Spirituality - Spiritual Feeling

The selection and number of dimensions used may vary due to the cultural context of the consumers tested.

The comparison above shows that even if two floral-fruity-green perfumes smell similar, they might make you feel different emotions. One evokes feelings of being clean, energetic, and invigorated, while the other brings about amusement, mouthwatering, and nostalgia due to their unique emotional signatures.

By leveraging tools like the UniGEOS, fragrance designers can gain a deeper understanding of how their creations impact consumers' emotions. This knowledge, combined with the insights gained from scent mapping and other research methods, forms the foundation of successful emotional fragrance design.

Inside Top Industry Methods

While scent mapping and consumer surveys provide valuable insights into fragrances' emotional impact, I believe it is very interesting and important to examine how industry leaders are improving our understanding of this topic.

Mood Mapping

A great example of how the fragrance industry evolved our understanding of fragrance and emotions is International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. (IFF) Mood Mapping system.

Pioneered in the mid-1990s, IFF Mood Mapping starts by asking people how they feel when smelling scents. They pick from moods like happy, relaxed, sensuous, stimulated, irritated, stressed, depressed, and apathetic. But they don't stop there. This subjective emotional feedback is complemented by physiological responses like heart rate, blood pressure, and skin electric activity to see how scents affect us physically and mentally. Using all of this data, Mood Maps are created, plotting the emotional impact of fragrances on a two-dimensional scale from high to low arousal and negative to positive moods. These maps show which scents make us feel a certain way, helping them design perfumes that actually work to change our moods.

Case Study: Clinique's "Happy" by IFF

In 1997, IFF used its Mood Mappy technique to create Clinique's loved classic Happy. It's one of the earliest examples of a scent intentionally designed to evoke a specific emotion—to make the wearer of the perfume feel happy.

• Top: Orange, Mandarin, Grapefruit
• Heart: Lily-of-the-Valley, Morning Orchid, Rose
• Base: Musk, Amber

Using Mood Mapping, citrus notes like clementine were identified to uplift peoples' moods and spirits with good vibes. The vibrant blend of citrus notes creates an initial burst of freshness and happiness. A floral bouquet of lily-of-the-valley, orchid, and rose provides a delicate and uplifting heart. And the warm and comforting base with musk and amber notes adds balanced comfort and peace.

A High-Tech Holistic Approach

The Swiss fragrance house Givaudan is advancing the understanding of emotional responses to scents by integrating novel and high-tech measuring methods.

Evolving traditonal verbal surveys, Givaudan measures peoples' subjective experiences with their Mood Portraits technique. People select from a collection of images to show how fragrances makes them feel. These images depict a range of emotions like happiness and calmness, allowing people to express themselves without using words.

There are several advantages of using imagery instead of words:

• More Accurate: Sometimes it's hard to describe feelings with words. Pictures can help capture emotions more precisely. Afterall a picture is worth a thousand words.
• Quick and Easy:  It's faster for people to choose a picture than to think of the right words to describe their sometimes complex feelings.
• Less Bias: Images reduce the potential bias. People might be influenced by what they think they should feel as suggested by a questionnaire. 

Like IFF, Givaudan measures physiological responses such as heart rate and skin electrical activity to see how the body responds to different scents. Plus they use techniques like EEG (electroencephalography) to monitor brain activity. And advance AI and machine learning to identify patterns used to predict emotional responses to help craft fragrances that connect on both conscious and subconscious levels.

By embracing both the science and the art of perfumery, industry leaders are setting new standards in how emotionally designed fragrances are developed, tested, and understood, proving that the connection between scents and feelings is more than just fiction.

The Challenge

Despite advanced techniques, accurately measuring the emotional impact of fragrances presents unique challenges due to the deeply personal nature of scent perception.

Our individual preferences and emotional associations with scents are shaped by our personal histories. These connections vary from person to person - what brings joy to you may evoke negative memories in me. Context also plays a crucial role, the same fragrance can trigger different emotions depending on the setting and activities,  whether we're relaxing at the beach or working in a busy office. And even the intensity and complexity of a fragrance can change its emotional impact.

In the next edition:

Love is in the air – Are you ready to seduce?

See you again in two weeks!

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