Have you ever wondered why perfumers often use spices when crafting their bottle of fragrance? It’s not just to pad up their marketing materials by mentioning all of the ingredients that they’ve used, nor is it meant to make the perfume sound like it’s made by stirring magical mush in a pot for several hours and out goes the bottle of perfume! No, it’s much simpler than that, and to make it much easier to explain, we’ll have to explore this through perfumery’s closest cousin; cooking.
You’ve definitely been in this situation before, you’re eating a chocolate cake and you think that it’s not too sweet and you feel like you can probably munch an entire box of it on your own. But then you realize how much sugar is actually in the cake and you’re starting to doubt your senses:
Are they starting to get desensitized?
Are you losing your senses?
Well, not quite. You see, it’s a common thing in the world of baking to add a pinch of salt when making a cake. This would sound rather counterproductive as you’d think that the pinch of salt would ruin the usual sweetness of the cake, but that’s not how it works. Contrary to popular belief, you can actually make something taste much sweeter than it actually does by simply adding a pinch of salt into the mix. This is how most chocolate bars are made. Salt has the tendency to make things taste much sweeter than they actually are, all while suppressing bitter compounds, again, making things taste sweeter.
Spices do more or less the same thing. You see, when perfumers are trying to make a fragrance with an underlying scent of citrus, they don’t just add compounds that smell like oranges and call it a day. This is because when you add just one thing into a mix, it will just be very dull and you’ll get tired of it quite quickly. What perfumers would normally do instead, is to add other fragrances into the mix that accentuates the underlying citrus fragrance, giving it a certain level of complexity, enabling you to enjoy the fragrance for longer since it’s not as boring as just smelling an orange for hours on end.
Spices can also be used to achieve a certain goal, like making a fragrance smell “warm”. It’s not to say that the fragrance is applied when it’s warm, it just gives the impression of warmth thanks to the presence of spices in the initial mix. This is the same reason as to why ginger is quite popular during winter as it gives us the impression of warmth, something that is very valuable when our surroundings start to get very cold.
Spices in fragrance are, and should be treated like salt. This is because, when used properly, it can help enhance and highlight the fragrances that you want. But we also need to keep in mind to not abuse it; something very easy to do. When spices aren’t treated like salt, there’s a tendency for us to use too much and overpower the scents that we want to highlight in the first place. It’s an exercise in self-control and not everyone is a master at it.