The Journal
Notes on scent.
Guides, materials and life from the Adelaide studio.
5 stories
Featured · January 2024 · 6 minWhat makes a fragrance smell masculineNothing in a fragrance is masculine by chemistry. What people usually mean is a set of notes that a century of marketing put on one side of the shop: woods, resins, leather, dry spice, bitter citrus and green aromatics, usually with the sweetness pulled back. Those notes are worth knowing because they describe a smell accurately. The category around them is worth ignoring.Read the story
March 2023 · 5 min
A short history of perfumery, and what it means for what you buy
Perfume started as oil, resin and smoke, became a distilling trade, then became a chemistry in the late nineteenth century when it turned out you could build a smell rather than only extract one. Each of those turns still shows up in what you can buy today, including from us, and knowing which is which makes the marketing much easier to read.
March 2023 · 7 min
Sustainable fragrance: what to ask, and what we can honestly claim
The most sustainable bottle of fragrance is the one you finish. Everything after that is detail, and most of the detail sold as green is unverifiable from the outside. This post is about how to read an environmental claim, including ours, and it is short on ours on purpose: we have not had the work done that would let us make one.
March 2023 · 6 min
The science behind scent: why a smell lands before you can name it
A smell reaches the parts of your brain that handle emotion and memory through a very short path, which is why a scent can land before you have worked out what it is. That is the useful part of the science, and it is well evidenced. Nearly everything else sold under the heading of scent and wellbeing is not, so this post sticks to what is actually known.
March 2023 · 7 min
How to choose a fragrance you will actually wear
Start from what you already reach for, not from a personality type. Work out whether you want something that sits close to your skin or something that fills a room, notice the three or four notes you keep liking, then wear a small size for a week before you commit to a big one. That is the whole method, and it costs less than one blind buy.