People often try to imagine the scent of a perfume by reading its description. Many perfumeries explain what kind of scents “come through” in their products. This is essentially the perfumer’s attempt to convey the intended fragrance using well-known language referred to as nuances or notes. This description likely forms the backbone of modern perfume marketing techniques. Typically, the fragrance is broken down into top, middle, and base notes (sometimes using fresh metaphors like “heart”), describing how the scent transitions from lighter to heavier over time. With these descriptions in hand, people often spray a tester, rely on the explanation to guide them, and then decide to purchase the perfume.

But what about the reverse? If you were to gather the ingredients listed in the notes and attempt to recreate the scent through a form of reverse engineering, would you get the same fragrance that you imagined while reading the description? The answer is no. No matter how much you try to blend the ingredients, you’ll never end up with the exact same scent. That’s because notes are not the same as ingredients. Descriptions of the fragrance only give you an impression of the scent, not a definitive list of what’s inside. In fact, you could say it’s impossible to know exactly what’s in a perfume just from the notes provided.

For example, let’s say a perfume description reads, ‘Top: apple, Middle: fig, Base: musk.’ It might describe an elegant fragrance with a name like ‘Pecatum Originale,’ where the sensation of fruit transitions into a rich, sensual sweetness, clinging with a cool and voluptuous depth. Or it could be the description of a product sold at a large bookstore—a consumer chemical product, safe to use on the body (or so it claims)—with the mixed scent of apple juice from a convenience store and the smoky aroma of dried figs soaked in rum, like the smell you’d find at a bakery.

So, does this product actually contain real apple or fig? Probably not—no, definitely not. If it smells like apple, it’s most likely a scent engineered to resemble apple juice. Even if someone says, ‘No, really! It’s not that artificial apple juice smell! It actually smells like a real apple! (And it doesn’t give me a headache!),’ sadly, the chance that it contains actual apple is nearly zero. Furthermore, musk obtained from musk deer has been banned for decades now, so what we usually call a musk note is actually the result of a blend of various other ingredients. People typically smell an apple note without any real apple and think of apples, and they detect a musk note without any real musk and imagine the sleek, modern movement of the tongue as it articulates ‘musk,’ rather than the abstract concept of animal-derived musk.

This may sound like it’s only relevant to synthetic perfumes, but the story isn’t so different for natural perfumes either. Of course, if a perfume contains essential oils extracted from plants like bergamot or lavender, there may be instances where the listed notes match the actual ingredients. However, natural perfumes don’t exclusively use essential oils or absolutes derived from the plant itself. There is a growing global trend recognizing perfumes that use ingredients extracted from natural sources—whether as essential oils, absolutes, biotechnology molecules, or molecular isolates—as natural perfumes.(In Korea, natural isolates are not yet considered natural ingredients.) Still, even with natural extraction methods, the resulting natural ingredients rarely smell exactly like the original material.

Take musk notes, for example. Synthetic perfumes create musk notes using compounds synthesized from petrochemical sources. On the other hand, natural perfumes achieve a musk-like sensation by using ingredients extracted from plants like ambrette seeds. Despite this difference, both types of perfumes would likely be classified as having a musk note. The distinction becomes more complex when considering ingredients like isolates. For instance, perfumes with an apple note often use an isolate called cis-3-hexanol. In natural perfumes, cis-3-hexanol is a natural isolate extracted from various plants, including mint, while in synthetic perfumes, it is chemically synthesized, often from organic compounds derived from petrochemical processes.

So then, like a Greek sophist, one could play with words and ask: What is a real apple note? If a fake apple note smells more real than the real thing, is it still fake, or is it real? Is the scent of a real apple the true apple note? And what if the scent of a real apple smells just like a fake apple note? Why did I perceive a fake apple note as the real one? Was I fooled by the fake? If the fake smells better than the real one, even if the fake is ‘wrong’ and the real is ‘right,’ does that mean the fake is actually right, and the real one is wrong? If I can’t tell the difference between real and fake, does that mean my sense of smell is flawed? In a situation where most people think the fake smells real and only a few believe the real thing smells real, what does it mean if I perceive the fake as real?

But there’s no need to worry about such convoluted wordplay. That’s because the name of the scent written on the perfume bottle—the note—is still the most important factor in defining the perfume. As I mentioned earlier, nearly all perfumers begin by putting the scent they want to create into words before they even start blending. So, even if people try to pick perfumes by distinguishing between what’s real and fake, it’s not really about separating real from fake—it’s a philosophical question of what they choose to believe is real, and an aesthetic question of what smells better. One thing is certain: the many words that make up the notes are just arbitrary symbols, giving shape to an invisible scent, and no one can ever truly know the exact ingredients that make up that fragrance.