Olfaction Training 101
Olfaction training/evaluation is one of the most important aspects of learning to make natural perfumes and natural incense. Without the training, you’re just wasting time and resources when neither of those things are infinite. Some advice that I give is to work with the raw materials daily for at least a year before attempting to ‘put something together’ with them. The temptation to Grenouille the materials is hard to resist, but if you want to do it right, you have to have patience and discipline. Learn to read each individual material like a book. Take copious notes, write poetry and prose for them, create formulations on paper, and once you’re through all the materials you possess, start over again at the beginning, adding in new extractions and materials as you go. And then when you’re done with that year, continue doing it but add in the hands-on work of formulating.
The same techniques used to recover from anosmia are some of the same used in this type of training. There are smelling activities, things you do throughout the day, that are less structured than evaluations that you should implement as well – for example, smelling your hands or your cat’s fur and making a mental note of what you learned; taking a walk through your neighborhood at dinnertime and catching a whiff of your neighbors’ dinners cooking, and trying to figure out what they are. And then there are the exercises in deliberate olfactory excavation – like the top-down, bottom-up work.
Top-down work is easy – it’s when you’re already familiar with what you’re smelling, like black pepper. You have an expectation of what black pepper smells like, so your brain has already kicked in to smell pepper. This type of work draws on associations and lived experiences.
Bottom-up work is not so easy. It draws on materials or scents you have never experienced before; materials that require you to create the language to describe it. This entails direct perception and attention, moment-to-moment work. No preconceptions. It emphasizes awareness and being in the present, a slow unveiling of a scent. This builds a sensitivity by teaching the nose-brain to pay closer attention to subtleties you might otherwise ignore. This work helps when evaluating finished perfume or incense as well.
Together, they offer structure, vocabulary, recognition, confidence, strengthen the pathways that don’t rely on labels, and help us to suss out nuance.