how strong it is · how to say it
Every concentration on a fragrance bottle, spelled out in full, ranked by how much perfume oil is actually in it — and said out loud, because nobody wants to point at the shelf and mumble.
The percentage is aromatic oil dissolved in alcohol and water. It is an industry convention, not a law — no regulator checks it, and houses round generously.
Tap hear it on any entry. French names are spoken with a French voice when your device has one.
also: body spray, fragrance mist, brume
The weakest thing sold as fragrance. Usually water-based rather than alcohol-based, which is why it feels cool and evaporates fast. Made to be reapplied, layered under something stronger, or sprayed on hair where alcohol would be drying.
literally “fresh water” · sometimes “eau de sport”
Mostly water with a little alcohol. Cold, sheer, and gone by lunch. Houses release it in summer, or as a lighter reading of a heavier flagship. Not a flaw — it is doing exactly what it was built to do.
named for Cologne, Germany, 1709 · in Germany: Kölnisch Wasser
The original: citrus, neroli, herbs, splashed on liberally from a big bottle. Traditional cologne is a style as much as a strength — bright, clean, and deliberately short-lived.
Confusingly, American marketing also uses “cologne” to mean “any fragrance sold to men,” regardless of concentration. A bottle labelled cologne on a US shelf is very often an eau de toilette.
from faire sa toilette — to get ready, to groom
The everyday workhorse, and the most common thing on a department-store shelf. Lighter and usually brighter than the parfum version of the same scent — top notes sparkle, the base is thinner.
An EDT is not simply a watered-down EDP. Houses rebuild the formula, often boosting the citrus and aromatics so the opening still lands. Which is why some people prefer the EDT of a scent they own in both.
occasionally: Millésime, Eau de Perfume, EdP
The modern default for anything expensive. Rich enough to last a working day, restrained enough to wear to one. Most niche houses release in EDP and stop there.
Two sprays of an EDP is a decision. Six is a statement other people did not ask for.
also: Parfum, Pure Parfum, Perfume Extract, Esprit de Parfum
The strongest alcohol-based form, and often the quietest in the room. More oil means heavier molecules, less alcohol to fling them into the air — so an extrait sits on the skin and stays there for a day and a night.
Sold in smaller bottles, frequently with a dab stopper instead of an atomiser, because you genuinely need less. This is the format that outlives the shirt.
house-specific tiers wedged between EDT and EDP
Occasional in-between names invented by individual houses. Parfum de toilette was common in the 1980s and has mostly disappeared. Soie de parfum — “silk of perfume” — is a recent Chanel coinage for something deliberately softer and more diffuse than their EDP.
Treat any of these as “roughly EDT-plus” and you will not be far off.
also: parfum huileux, roll-on, oil concentrate
No alcohol at all — the fragrance is suspended in jojoba, fractionated coconut, or similar. Nothing flashes off, so there is no bright opening and almost no projection. What you get instead is a scent that lives about two inches from your skin for most of a day.
Kinder to dry or sensitive skin, and the format of choice if you work somewhere that would rather not smell you coming.
Arabic & South Asian tradition · عطر · مخلط
Traditionally distilled botanicals captured directly into sandalwood oil, applied a single dab at a time. Attar generally means a single-material oil; mukhallat means a blend of several.
There is no alcohol and no dilution, so the usual percentage scale stops being useful. One dot behind the ear is a full application. Two is too many.
It is the only concentration named after a place. An Italian perfumer, a German city, a French name, and a Napoleonic decree that turned a medicine into a perfume.
The Romans raise a settlement on the Rhine to the rank of colonia — Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, after Agrippina the Younger, who was born there and secured the promotion. Everything after this is a contraction of Colonia: German shortened it to Köln, French to Cologne, and English borrowed the French.
So the smell is named after a city, and the city is named after a Roman colony, and the spelling on your bottle is French because English took the French word for a German town.
Giovanni Maria Farina is born in 1685 to a family from Santa Maria Maggiore, in the Val Vigezzo in Piedmont. He settles in Cologne around 1706 as his uncle’s business representative, and Germanises his name to Johann Maria Farina.
Farina writes to his brother Giovanni Battista describing what he has made. It is the most quoted sentence in perfumery, and the reason we know the date:
“I have found a fragrance that reminds me of an Italian spring morning, of mountain daffodils and orange blossoms shortly after the rain.” Johann Maria Farina to his brother, 1708
The family firm is registered in Cologne. It still trades, under the same name — Johann Maria Farina gegenüber dem Jülichs-Platz, “Farina opposite Jülich’s Square” — which makes it the oldest fragrance factory in the world.
Farina names the water after his adopted city. Not after an ingredient, not after a style: after the town he had moved to. He wrote the name in French, because French was the language of the courts he was selling to.
Court perfume of the era was heavy, animalic and musk-based. Farina’s aqua mirabilis — “miracle water” — was built on bergamot, lemon, orange and neroli, and it smelled like almost nothing else available. It was also sold as a medicine, to be drunk as well as worn.
It was ferociously expensive: a single flacon has been reckoned at around six months of a servant’s wages. Its customers were royal houses, which is exactly why every court in Europe knew the word cologne within a lifetime.
Wilhelm Mülhens sets up a competing water on Cologne’s Glockengasse. Company legend has it the recipe was a wedding gift from a Carthusian monk in 1792 — treat that as a nice story rather than a documented fact.
In 1794 the occupying French have every house in the city numbered in one continuous sequence, to make sense of a street plan they found chaotic. Mülhens’ building is number 4711. The house is gone. The number is still the brand.
A decree requires makers of medicinal remedies to disclose their formulas. Rather than publish their recipes, the cologne houses reclassify: what had been a curative water is relabelled a scented one, and sold as perfumery instead of medicine.
That is the moment cologne stops being a drug and becomes a fragrance — a bureaucratic dodge, not a creative decision.
He went through it at a rate that is hard to overstate. A surviving invoice in the French National Archives records 72 bottles ordered in the single month of October 1808, and contemporaries describe him drenching his neck and shoulders after washing — and occasionally drinking the stuff.
The much-repeated detail that he had a special bottle made to slip into his boot is likely embellished. Everyone tells it; nobody produces the boot.
In Germany, Echt Kölnisch Wasser — “genuine Cologne water” — is a protected geographic term: to use it, the essential production has to happen in Cologne.
In American English, meanwhile, “cologne” drifted into meaning any fragrance marketed to men, at any concentration. Both are correct now. Only one of them tells you anything about strength.
These sound like concentrations. None of them are. They are marketing names for a different formula, which may or may not be more potent than the original.
Strength tells you how loud a scent is. The wheel tells you what it is. Fourteen families in a ring, arranged so that anything next to anything else smells related.
A flower, or a bouquet of them, rendered more or less straight.
Neighbours · Fruity ← Floral → Soft Floral
Flowers blurred with powder and wax. Soapy, abstract, slightly unreal.
Neighbours · Floral ← Soft Floral → Floral Amber
A flower with the heat turned up — spice and resin pushing through the petals.
Neighbours · Soft Floral ← Floral Amber → Soft Amber
Warm and resinous, but held back. Incense rather than dessert.
Neighbours · Floral Amber ← Soft Amber → Amber
The full sweet-resinous accord, at full strength. Dense and unmistakable.
Neighbours · Soft Amber ← Amber → Woody Amber
The amber accord dried out and laid over wood and smoke.
Neighbours · Amber ← Woody Amber → Woods
Wood, centred and clean. Dry, warm, grounded, not much sweetness.
Neighbours · Woody Amber ← Woods → Mossy Woods
Damp forest floor. Bitter, green, earthy, faintly melancholy.
Neighbours · Woods ← Mossy Woods → Dry Woods
Smoke, leather, tar, burnt wood. The darkest point on the wheel.
Neighbours · Mossy Woods ← Dry Woods → Aromatic
Herbs and lavender over a mossy, woody base. Barbershop, essentially.
Neighbours · Dry Woods ← Aromatic → Citrus
Peel, zest and bright bitterness. Brilliant for twenty minutes.
Neighbours · Aromatic ← Citrus → Water
Salt, air, wet stone, melon rind. Transparent and cool.
Neighbours · Citrus ← Water → Green
Crushed stems and cut grass. Sharp, bitter, cold.
Neighbours · Water ← Green → Fruity
Fruit that isn’t citrus — peach, berry, apple, blackcurrant.
Neighbours · Green ← Fruity → Floral
The words that come up the moment you start reading about any of this.
An extrait has the most oil and often the smallest sillage. Heavy base materials cling to skin; light citrus and aromatics are what fling a scent across a room.
So the bottle that fills an elevator is usually an EDP, not the extrait sitting next to it.
The two versions of the same name are separate formulas, rebalanced for their concentration. Plenty of people prefer the EDT — and it is not nostalgia, the juice really is different.
Warm spots — the sides of the neck, the chest, the inner elbows. Skin heat lifts the scent through the day.
Don't rub your wrists together. It shears the top notes and shortens everything that follows.
Unscented moisturiser or a swipe of balm first gives the oils something to hold onto. This is the single cheapest way to add two hours of longevity.
Heat, steam and light break down aromatic molecules. A closed drawer or a box in a cool room will keep a bottle good for years; a sunny windowsill will turn it in one summer.
You stop smelling your own fragrance long before anyone else does. If you can still smell yourself clearly after an hour, you applied for the room, not for you.
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