The Fragrance Masterclass

One long table, twenty places, and a gift at each of them.

The room is ours, on the vineyard, sitting quietly behind the Hut Yoga studio. Paper lanterns down the length of it, steel windows onto the garden, and the fire going by the time anyone arrives.

This is what is waiting at your place. A worksheet with the fourteen families on it and a box at the bottom for your top three, and beside it a packet of Santa Maria Novella wax tablets tied in twine with your name written on the tag by hand.

She is deciding something.

Over two hours you work through the families one at a time and mark the sheet as you go, so what you leave with is written down rather than remembered. Most people arrive certain they know what they like. Most leave with a different answer.

The candles are not decoration at an evening like this. You learn what a Trudon does to a room by sitting for two hours in a room it is doing it to.

The farm is around you while it happens. Vines, an olive grove, an orchard and the picking garden that keeps our venues in flowers. Nothing about it is arranged for the evening. It is simply where we are, and it is a good place to be as the light goes.

Lucy Borland runs it. She is a perfume sommelier, which is a real and rare thing, and she works with Agence de Parfum, who hold the licence for the wheel she teaches from. So this is not a boutique doing a fragrance night. It is the people who work in the classification of scent, teaching it properly.

Twice a year, twenty seats, because past that nobody gets to smell anything properly.

Why smell does this to you and nothing else does

Every other sense goes through the thalamus first. Sight, sound, touch, taste, all of it arrives, gets filtered and relayed, and only then reaches the parts of the brain that handle emotion and memory.

Smell does not. It goes from the olfactory bulb straight into the amygdala and the hippocampus. No stop. No filter. It is the only sense wired that way.

Which is why scent memory outlasts every other kind. It holds longer than what you saw or heard, and it is a better cue to recall than anything else, which is the reason reminiscence therapy using smell is now used in dementia wards. Scent reaches people when names and faces have already gone.

Proust said it first and better. After the people are dead and the things are broken and scattered, smell and taste alone remain, more fragile and more faithful, waiting to remind us.

A fragrance wardrobe

Almost everybody owns one perfume and wears it for everything. It is the equivalent of owning one pair of shoes.

The useful idea is a wardrobe. Something for work that is close, clean and does not fill a meeting room. Something for the weekend that can be warmer and slower and does not need to behave. Something for evening that is allowed to be difficult.

There is a practical reason beyond taste. Your brain will attach the scent to the state, so a different fragrance for work becomes a way of shifting into it and out of it again. People who work from home find this out fastest, because the day has no edges otherwise.

The house counts too

We spend as much of the evening on room fragrance as on skin, because most people have never thought about it as a choice.

A candle, a diffuser and a room spray do three different jobs. A candle builds over twenty minutes and is a decision you make for an evening. A diffuser holds a room at a constant level for three months and asks nothing of you. A spray changes a room in four seconds, which is what you want in the gap between somebody arriving and a candle catching up.

Most houses need at least two of the three.

That is the wheel, at dusk, before anybody has arrived.

The fourteen families

Michael Edwards built it in the early nineteen eighties and refined it in 1998, and it has been the industry's common language ever since. Fourteen families in a circle, arranged so the ones beside each other smell like relatives.

Four groups hold it together. Floral at the top, running from floral through soft floral to floral amber. Ambery next, the soft ambers and ambers and woody ambers, warm and resinous. Woody through the woods, mossy woods and dry woods. Then Fresh, the aromatics, citrus, water, green and fruity, closing the circle back to floral.

The circle is the point. Nothing sits opposite anything by accident. Love two fragrances that are neighbours and you have found your family, and the ones a quarter turn away will be wrong for you no matter who recommends them.

Top, heart and base

A perfume is not one smell. It is three, arriving in sequence, and the sequence is why a scent you loved on a card can disappoint an hour later.

Top notes are the smallest and most volatile molecules. Citrus, light herbs, anything sharp. They arrive in the first minutes and are gone within fifteen. Almost nobody buys a perfume for its top notes and almost everybody chooses one on them.

Heart notes come through as the top fades and hold for a few hours. Florals, spices, the body of the thing. This is the perfume as other people mostly experience it.

Base notes are the heaviest molecules and the slowest to leave. Woods, resins, musks, vanilla, leather. They can last a full day on skin and they are what is still on a scarf a week later.

Which is why the only honest way to choose is to wear it. Spray it on skin, walk away, and decide at four in the afternoon rather than at the counter.

Why it smells different on you

Warmth accelerates the whole sequence, so a perfume moves faster on a hot day and on warm skin. Anything with a heavy base sits closer in winter and carries further in summer.

Skin chemistry is real but it matters less than most counters suggest. Temperature and dryness matter more. Perfume holds far better over moisturised skin, which is the entire reason a house like Santa Maria Novella makes a body cream in every scent it sells.

A scent for a wedding party

This is the thing we are asked for least and believe in most.

Choose a fragrance for everyone who matters on the day. The bridal party, the groomsmen, both sets of parents. Everyone wears theirs from the morning, so the scent is laid down alongside the day itself, in the only sense that reaches memory without being filtered first.

The photographs will be looked at for a year and then put away. The names of half the guests will go. What will not go is that one of them opens a drawer in twenty years, puts it on, and is standing in that room again before she has finished doing up the cap.

We build these properly. Come in, or send us the list and something about each person, and we will choose. Ten or twelve fragrances, each one different and each one right for who is wearing it, wrapped and labelled and ready to hand out on the morning. A significant birthday or an anniversary works exactly the same way.

Write to info@amelieandfranks.com.au and we will start it.

If you cannot get to Red Hill

Buy small. Almost every house we carry makes a discovery set or a travel size, and they exist precisely because this is a decision made over a week rather than over a minute.

Drawn to fresh and citrus. Matière Première Cologne Cédrat, or Santa Maria Novella Acqua della Regina, the sixteenth-century citrus Caterina de' Medici carried to the French court.

Drawn to florals. Matière Première Radical Rose or French Flower, both built on flowers the house grows itself near Grasse.

Drawn to woods and amber. Trudon Mortel for incense, Matière Première Santal Austral for sandalwood, or Frapin, born in a cognac house at Fontpinot.

If you do not know. Come in. That is what a counter is for and it costs nothing.

Shop 9, 159 Shoreham Road, Red Hill South. Open seven days, ten until five.