Best perfume: Olfactive families

Grouping perfumes, like any taxonomy, can never be a completely objective or final process. Many fragnances contain aspects of different families. Even a perfume designated as "single flower", however subtle, will have undertones of other aromatics. "True" unitary scents can rarely be found in perfumes as it requires the perfume to exist only as a singular aromatic material. Classification by olfactive family is a starting point for a description of a perfume, but it cannot by itself denote the specific characteristic of that perfume.

1. Tradisional

The tradisional classification which emerged around 1900 comprised the following categories:

- Single Floral: Fragnances that are dominated by a scent from one particular flower, in French called a soliflore. (e.g. Serge Lutens' Sa Majeste L Rose, which is dominated by rose).

- Floral Bouquet: Containing the combination of several flowers in a scent.

- Amber: A large fragnance class featuring the sweet slightly animatic scents of ambergris or labdanum, often combined with vanilla, flowes and woods. Can be enhanced by camphorous oils and incense resins, which bring to mind Victorian era imagery of the Middle East anf Far East.

- Wood: Fragnances that are dominated by woody scent, typically of agarwood, sandalwood and cedar. Patchouli, with its camphoraceous smell, is commonly found in these perfumes.

- Leather: A family of fragnances which features the scent of honey, tobacco, wood and wood tars in its middle or base notes and a scent that alludes to leather.

- Chypre: Meaning Cyprus in French, this includes fragnances build on a similar accord consisting of bergamot, oakmoss, patchouli, and labdanum. This family of fragnances is named after a perfume by Francois Coty. A notable example is Mitsouko (a popular name for girls in Japanese) by Guerlain.

- Fougere: Meaning Fern in French, build on a base of lavender, coumarin and oakmoss.

Houbigant's Fougere Royale pioneered the use of this base. Many men's fragnances belong to this family of fragnances, which is characterized by its sharp herbaceous and woody scent.

2. Modern

Since 1945, due to great advances in the technology of perfume creation (i.e., compound design and synthesis) as well as the natural development of styles and tastes; new categories have emerged to describe modern scents:

- Bright Floral: Combining the tradisional Single Floral & Floral Bouquet categories.

- Green: A lighter and more modern interpretation of the Chypre type.

- Oceanic/Ozone: The newest category in perfume history, appearing in 1991 with Christian Dior's Dune. A very clean, modern smell leading to many of the modern androgynous perfumes.

- Citrus or Fruity: An old fragnance family that until recently consisted mainly of "freshening" eau de colognes due to the low tenacity of citrus scents. Development of newer fragnance compounds has allowed for the creation of primarily citrus fragnances.

- Gourmand: Scents with "edible" or "dessert" like qualities. These often contain notes like vanilla and tonka bean, as well as synthetic components designed to resemble food flavors. An example is Thierry Mugler's Angel.

3. Fragnance wheel

The Fragnance wheel is a relatively new classification method that is widely used in retail and in the fragnance industry. The method was created in 1983 by Michael Edwards, a consultant in the perfume industry, who designed his own scheme of fragnance classification. The new scheme was created in order to simplify fragnance classification and naming scheme, as well as to show the relationships between each of the individual classes. The five standard families consist of Floral, Oriental, Woody, Fougere, and Fresh, with the former four families being more "classic" while the latter consisting of newer bright and clean smelling citrus and oceanic fragnances that have arrived due to improvements in fragnance technology. With the exception of the Fougere family, each of the families are in turn divided into sub-groups and arranged around a wheel.