on describing smells

I remember a childhood party game where we were blindfolded and told to try to identify a taste. I couldn’t do it—I got spaghetti sauce—even though once named it was obvious. After that I came to the conclusion that I very much need context to identify taste.

I’m the same way with scents.

Twice in the past week I read books that referred to chypre—a family of perfumes characterized by citrus top notes and an oak moss base note (per my Google search). But if you asked me to identify that scent without context, I’d be helpless. I also can’t really call it to mind based on the definition.

My brother just gave me sandalwood incense, but I wouldn’t have known it without the label. I bought solid amber from the internet because I saw it referenced in a book and didn’t know what it smelled like. Even if I tried, I couldn’t describe it to you now other than “amber.”

Knowing this problem, last summer I bought a variety of travel-sized Molton Brown body wash and took notes so I could tell the difference between bergamot and black pepper. Still, even after trying, I can’t do it very well.

On my dresser is a mason jar filled with large pink cabbage roses, heady and perfumed. What do I call the bouquet, other than rose-scented?

I live in the orange groves, which are in blossom right now. The air is thick with this gorgeous, sweet-scented perfume, and I adore it. It feels decadent and beautiful and special and ephemeral. (Now, of course, if you’re allergic, you’d probably want to be getting out of town.) And if you’ve never smelled it, you have no idea what I’m talking about.

And this is the problem of describing scents.

I read a recent New Yorker article that used the word “petrichor,” defining it as “the sublime scent emitted when rain hits rocks or pavement.”

But if I say petrichor in a sentence, I’m not sure very many people would know what I mean. I had to doublecheck it myself to write it down here. If a reader looked it up, they’d find a very poetic Oxford dictionary definition: “a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.”

That to me seems like the definition is better than the word—it calls up more of an evocative mood than the word itself.

So, I’m curious if there’s anyone out there who really experiences scents through the written word. If you’re smelling cabbage roses and orange blossoms and petrichor from the words above, or if you’re like me and have to use that sense to experience them.