Language After Smell: The Ethics of Scent and the Poverty of Notes

Abstract

Modern perfumery relies on the olfactory pyramid and note lists to translate scent into language. But these models are not neutral. They reshape scent into something object-like: divisible, ownable, and controllable. This essay argues that olfaction exposes a deeper limitation in modern language itself, because scent has no shared object to point to. If we want truer description, we need a new discipline: a barrier before words, and a relational system of expression.

A quiet provocation

Perfumery has inherited a language that feels almost inevitable.

We speak of top notes, heart notes, and base notes. We describe perfumes as though they unfold in orderly tiers. We list ingredients and accords as if a perfume were a transparent object whose identity could be revealed by naming its components.

This language is not malicious. It is not even necessarily wrong. It is simply inherited. It has become the infrastructure through which perfume is socially understood.

And yet there is something strange about it.

We do not smell in layers. We do not encounter scent as a stack of objects. We encounter it as presence, an atmosphere, a field that changes while remaining itself.

If scent is as fundamental as we know it to be, then it is worth asking why our language for it is so poor. It is worth asking what our inherited models are doing, and what they prevent us from seeing.

Why the pyramid endures

The scent pyramid endures because it is useful.

At a basic level, it corresponds to a real feature of perfumery: different molecules evaporate at different rates. A perfume on skin changes over time, and perfumers compose deliberately—shaping openings, transitions, and dry-downs.

The pyramid is also a pedagogical tool. It gives beginners structure. It gives evaluators shorthand. It gives customers a handle. It allows perfumes to be compared quickly.

In a world of overwhelming choice, the pyramid offers orientation.

So the pyramid endures not because it is fully true, but because it performs several social functions at once:

It coordinates communication
It stabilises expectations
It reduces uncertainty
It creates a shared language
It supports commerce

This is why awareness does not remove it. Many people know its limits, but continue to use it because it solves a social problem.

Humans must communicate. Humans must share experience. Humans must translate internal life into external language.

But scent resists sharing, so we build models.

The poverty of notes

The pyramid is not merely a description of time. It implies an ontology.

It assumes that a perfume is best understood as a stack of parts, arranged in temporal tiers. It assumes that each part has an intrinsic identity that can be isolated, named, and assigned. It assumes that the experience of a perfume is the experience of those parts appearing in sequence.

This assumption is rarely examined. It is embedded in the language itself and it is deeply misleading.

Olfaction does not appear to us as a list of objects. It appears as atmosphere. It appears as presence. A perfume is not experienced as “bergamot, then rose, then sandalwood.” It is experienced as a continuous unity whose identity is inseparable from its transitions.

What we call notes are not entities discovered in perception. They are interpretive conveniences imposed after the fact. The pyramid therefore fails ontologically. It mistakes the structure of explanation for the structure of being.

Even within its own logic, it fails. Scent does not unfold in clean phases. Materials overlap. Accords persist. Base components are present from the beginning. What dominates at a given moment is often relational, not simply chemical.

Time in scent is not tiered. It is continuous.

Modern technology and the collapse of the pyramid

The pyramid’s logic is often defended by volatility. But modern perfumery has increasingly engineered volatility itself.

Contemporary materials and technologies disrupt the pyramid’s assumptions:

Volatile impressions can be stabilised
Diffusion can be extended
“Top-note effects” can persist into the dry-down
Facets can be made to pulse or re-emerge
Encapsulation can release impressions later
Fixation architectures can change temporal behaviour

This means the pyramid is no longer even a reliable approximation. It becomes an aesthetic narrative that can be chosen or ignored, but the deeper point is not that technology makes the pyramid obsolete. It is that technology reveals what the pyramid always was: not a law of scent, but a story we tell about scent and stories shape perception.

The unavoidable human condition: smell first, speak second

There is a deeper problem beneath the pyramid.

Scent is experienced internally before it is expressed externally. That fact has consequences.

If Person A smells something and Person B smells the same thing, Person A can attempt to describe their experience. But Person B cannot access Person A’s perspective. There is no shared object to point to.

With a painting, Person A can point to a specific part of the canvas. Person B can look at the same point. They may interpret it differently, but they share a reference. With scent, there is no such anchor. The experience is private, even when the stimulus is shared.

This makes olfactory communication structurally different from how we speak about most arts, scent must be encountered first, then spoken of and even then, speech cannot point to the experience itself. It can only gesture toward it.

Why modern language was never built for scent

Modern language evolved around what can be pointed to.

It evolved around stable objects, shared spatial reference, and public visibility. The noun dominates. The object dominates. The visible dominates. Even our metaphysics in the modern era — our default assumptions about reality, tend to privilege what can be seen, measured, isolated, and controlled.

This is why we have rich vocabularies for colour, shape, texture, and material. It is why we can describe architecture in detail. It is why we can talk about paintings with precision. It is why we can coordinate around what is visible, but we have very little vocabulary for olfaction.

We can say “sweet,” “smoky,” “fresh,” “animalic,” “clean,” “dirty,” “woody,” “spicy.” But these are broad and often metaphorical. They are borrowed from taste, touch, or visual categories. They are not grounded in a shared olfactory infrastructure. This is not accidental. It is historical.

Language, in its development, did not take scent as central. It took sight as central. It took objects as central. It took the external world as the primary reference point.

Scent was relegated to the margins: associated with instinct, with the animal, with the primitive, with the private. Modernity often treated smell as something to be controlled, deodorised, sanitised, and removed, and yet scent remains one of the most powerful forces in human experience.

So we live in a contradiction: we are shaped by scent, but we lack the infrastructure to speak about it. The pyramid and note culture are attempts to solve this contradiction.

The Pyramid as a Social Technology

Once we see the problem clearly, the pyramid becomes easier to understand. The pyramid is not merely a perfumery model. It is a social technology. It exists to coordinate communication in the absence of shared reference.

It allows people to pretend they are speaking about the same thing, even when they are not. It allows a buyer to feel oriented. It allows a reviewer to sound authoritative. It allows a brand to sell. It allows a community to compare. In this sense, the pyramid is successful, but its success comes at a cost. It replaces encounter with inventory. It replaces presence with explanation. It replaces relational reality with object-like parts.

And because it is a social technology, it is hard to remove. People can be aware of its inaccuracies and still use it because they still need coordination. Truth does not defeat coordination.

To replace the pyramid, one must offer a new system that performs the same social function without flattening reality. This is why critique alone is insufficient.

From Ontological Error to Ethical Error

At this point, it becomes clear that the pyramid’s failure is not merely conceptual. It is ethical.

When perfume is described as a stack of parts, scent becomes an object. It becomes something that can be owned, mastered, extracted, and controlled. Language shifts subtly toward possession: “it has oud,” “it contains amber,” “it is built around rose.”

The note list becomes a form of dominance. This is not always intentional. It is simply what reduction does. Reduction encourages mastery. Naming encourages control. Categorisation encourages possession, but scent resists this posture.

Scent exceeds us. It enters without permission. It dissolves boundaries. It cannot be held still. It cannot be fully captured. It is closer to breath than to object. To treat scent as property is already to misunderstand it.

Here the ethical issue becomes clear: reduction is not merely simplification; it is a kind of violence. It forces a phenomenon that is relational, temporal, and atmospheric into a framework built for objects. It turns presence into parts. It turns encounter into control, and the cost is a loss of humility.

Why People Keep the Pyramid Even When They Know It Is Wrong

At this point one might ask: if people are aware of the pyramid’s limits, why do they not change?

The answer is that the pyramid does not survive because it is believed. It survives because it protects, It protects the user from uncertainty.

To encounter scent without a model is to encounter ambiguity. It is to admit that one cannot fully explain what one smells. It is to accept that perception varies, that memory shapes experience, that context changes reality. It is to accept that one’s language is not authority. This is uncomfortable.

The pyramid offers certainty. It offers a structure that makes the experience feel manageable. It offers the illusion of shared perception. It offers a narrative that reduces anxiety, so even critics return to it.

They may say, “it’s flawed,” but then they use it anyway because they still need coordination. This is why the problem is not solved by awareness. It is solved only by building a new infrastructure.

Why Scent is Closer to Language Than to Image

It is tempting to think of perfume as closer to painting than to speech: a work of art that can be perceived, interpreted, and admired. But scent is not structurally like image. It is structurally closer to language.

An image is spatial. It is presented all at once. Even if the viewer moves, the image remains there, stable. One can return to the same point on a canvas. One can point to a detail. The image offers a shared surface. Language is not like this.

Language unfolds in time. It is sequential. It is relational. Its meaning is not located in individual words as isolated objects, but in the relations between them: syntax, rhythm, emphasis, context, implication. A sentence is not a bag of words. It is a structure of relations that produces meaning through arrangement. Scent behaves in a similar way.

A perfume unfolds in time. It cannot be grasped all at once. Its identity is not located in any single material, but in the relations between materials as they appear, overlap, recede, and return. A perfume is not a bag of ingredients. It is a structure of relations that produces presence through arrangement. This is why the note list is so misleading.

A note list treats perfume like a still image: a collection of parts that can be named and catalogued. But perfume is not a still image. It is closer to a sentence. It is closer to speech. It is a temporal phenomenon whose meaning arises from movement.

There is another parallel.

Language is inherently social. It exists because humans must share internal life. We speak to translate experience, to coordinate, to reveal, to persuade, to remember. But language is also imperfect. It never fully captures what it gestures toward. It is always secondary to the thing itself. A word is not the object. A description is not the experience. Scent occupies a similar position.

Scent is private and internal, yet it demands socialisation. It demands translation. We are compelled to describe it, even though description will always fall short. We attempt to share it, even though it cannot be fully shared. We build systems to speak about it, even though those systems distort it.

This is why scent is closer to language than to image: both are attempts to make the internal communicable, and both are structured through time and relation.

The tragedy is that modern perfume discourse has borrowed its models not from language, but from objecthood. It has treated scent as a thing to be listed rather than a phenomenon to be articulated.

A more truthful perfumery would treat scent as we treat language: with humility, with attention to structure, with sensitivity to context, and with an acceptance that meaning is relational rather than possessed.

The Barrier Before Words

This is where a new approach must begin.

The solution is not to abandon language. Humans cannot. We must socialise, we must share, we must teach, we must transmit. Culture requires expression. The solution is to place a barrier before language is used.

Not a barrier of silence, but a barrier of discipline. Before describing a scent, one must acknowledge what description cannot do.

One must acknowledge that olfaction has no shared object. That it is privately instantiated. That it is memory-laden. That it is context-dependent. That language is secondary. This barrier changes everything. It turns description from a claim into an invitation. It turns language from dominance into humility. It turns notes from ownership into orientation. It makes speech accountable.

It does not make description accurate, it makes it justified. This is a profound shift. It is not a new set of adjectives. It is a new ethics of speech.

An Islamic Inflection: Creation as Trust, Not Extraction

Islamic tradition contains a discipline that modern perfumery often lacks, It is the discipline of humility before creation.

Not everything that appears is meant to be extracted. Not everything that can be experienced is meant to be owned. Creation is not raw material awaiting control; it is sign, trust, responsibility.

This does not mean rejecting craft. It means situating craft within ethics. Scent belongs to the category of phenomena that resist possession. It is closer to atmosphere than to object. It arrives, changes, and leaves.

To reduce it to notes is to impose an object-based metaphysics on something that is not an object. To speak about it as if one owns it is to forget that it is a trust. This is not merely religious language. It is ontological clarity, scent demands humility because it cannot be mastered.

Toward a Relational Ontology of Perfumery

If scent is relational, then perfumery must become relational. This means:

Ingredients are not notes; they are participants.
Identity does not reside in parts; it emerges between them.
Time is not tiered; it is continuous.
Meaning is not listed; it is encountered.

A perfume is not a sum of materials. It is an emergent unity.

This does not deny chemistry. It does not deny volatility. It does not deny technique. It simply refuses to grant technique the status of ontology.

The pyramid asks: “what is this perfume made of?” A relational approach asks: “what does this perfume become?” The shift is subtle, but it changes everything.

What This Means for Practice

A relational approach changes perfumery practice in concrete ways.

Formulation becomes less like assembly and more like composition. Materials are chosen not for how loudly they announce themselves, but for how they shape the field. The perfumer listens for relations: tension, harmony, contrast, emergence.

Time is not divided into top, heart, base. It is shaped as a continuous becoming. The opening is not a layer; it is an event. The dry-down is not a base; it is a transformation. The perfume is not a narrative of notes; it is an unfolding presence. Language changes as well.

Instead of listing notes, one might speak of:

density
radiance
grain
humidity
temperature
pressure
atmosphere
movement
persistence
emergence

These are not metaphors borrowed from sight. They are attempts to build a new vocabulary for what scent actually is. Such language will never be perfect. But it will be closer to the truth, and because it begins with a barrier, an acknowledgement of limits, it will be ethically safer.

The Need for a New System of Expression

At this point it becomes clear that the problem is not perfumery alone. It is the modern expressive system itself

Modern language, modern critique, modern marketing, modern categories — all are built around objects. Scent resists objecthood. So scent is forced into object-based systems. The result is reduction, dominance, and misunderstanding.

To change this, one must build a new system. Not merely new words, but new rules, rather a system that:

acknowledges the private nature of olfaction
respects the relational ontology of scent
resists ownership language
allows multiple perspectives without forcing consensus
provides coordination without false precision

This is not easy. It requires discipline. It requires institutional effort. It requires continuity.

This is why individuals critique the pyramid but cannot replace it. Replacement requires a house, a tradition, an institution.

A Quiet Conclusion

The scent pyramid is useful. But usefulness is not innocence.

When a model teaches us to treat perfume as a stack of parts, it narrows perception and flattens responsibility. It replaces encounter with explanation. It mistakes reduction for understanding. It encourages possession where humility would be truer.

Scent is not a list, It is not a thing, It is relation unfolding in time.

To smell well is not to identify more accurately. It is to attend more carefully, and perhaps perfumery, at its most honest, begins there.