Mr.P

oud<3er
I am astounded with how much my ability to detect the nuances of a scent changes with repetitive experience of that scent. I find this a little bit disturbing actually. Case in point: the sweet Trat oil. What I smell when I apply this oil now is radically different from my reaction the first 10 times I applied or so. Much of the unpleasant edgy and funky notes become less evident to me. They were so strong at first that this is clearly a case of olfactory fatigue or adaptation.

What I wonder is how anybody who sells or produces oud can have *any* perspective on how they smell to people whose noses are not continuously inundated with agarwood smell. (This is not any kind of criticism or anything - by definition this is what anyone selling scent has to grapple with).

My experience is it doesn’t matter if you take a day off or sniff coffee or whatever - your ability to perceive the nuance of an oil is shot after you smelled it about 10 times. You can sniff a kilogram of coffee for the whole day, doesn’t matter. I’m just getting over the flu and so I have not been sniffing anything for the last four days and when I went back to the sweet Trat, I am just as desensitized to its funk as I was before I took several days off. The four days off made zero difference. This oil smells sweet and charming to me now, but I know it’s got a good kick of skank based on my first reaction and my daughter’s first reaction. What if we’re all walking around thinking we smell like Paradise when in reality we smell like old socks and unwashed bottoms? A recent example: I was wearing km super ateeq. To me ZERO barn / animal, all wood, cola, pepper, earth. I’m walking around thinking I smell like royalty but I overhear “what is that animal / barn smell? I don’t like that”. It’s a mind-fuck to be honest.

If I were making perfumes or trying to sell oud and write accurate scent descriptions, this would drive me crazy (Unless I was confident that all of my customers had the same olfactory fatigue that I had)

Vendors how do you deal with this? I think pretty much your only option is just to describe oud based on how your fatigued senses experience it and know that your descriptions will really only be spot on to people who’ve also recently experienced oud and have similar olfactory desensitization. Do you hire people with less jaded noses to give you some kind of perspective on what your stuff smells like?

I think lovers of agarwood are all trained to hold off on their initial reaction, sniff the oil a few times, and wait until the olfactory fatigue sets in to really appreciate what they’ve got and then start comparing points with your scent notes.
 
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Sproaty

Sproudy
Staff member
I had the same with ASO's 'Aasifah, which, to me was the strongest, barniest Hindi that I've tried - as someone who really likes Hindis, this was borderline unwearable for the first 20 minutes and it was difficult to get through its opening to the olfactory awesomeness that lay beyond!
Now I swipe it and I'm like, "eh". Weird that, right?

So yes I see where you're coming from, but for me, trying some ouds for the first time such as IO's Harbour Supreme and Ensar's Yusuf never hit me as barn-like! Surprising to hear of that to describe a Thai oil.

Although, my colleague's reactions to Ensar's People's Ceylon (another easy-goer to me) was "formaldehyde" and other such erm, not-pleasant descriptions!
 

Mr.P

oud<3er
Formaldehyde... that’s just awful. I’m trying to imagine what aspect of agarwood reminded him of that!

I guess the good news is that the people who are buying lots of oud have already developed the desensitization so vendors and seasoned consumers do probably perceive things similarly.

What worries me though is that I might be walking around thinking I’m smelling great and everyone’s having the reactions that you had to Aasifah. That’s a potentially embarrassing scenario.
 
You’ve touched on a complicated aspect of scent perception Mr.P

I’ve had outright olfactory fatigue (where I cannot detect certain notes at all), selective perception (where I can pick and choose what notes to focus on), variety-influenced perception (where certain oils have certain notes that sometimes become difficult to perceive), ambient factor-influenced perception (where time of day, humidity, and temperature affect the notes percieved), and finally...physical factor-influenced perception (where your physical condition affects how you percieve an oil).

That’s just what comes to mind off the top of my head, but there’s probably more to it, and likely a better way to explain it than my quick blurt.
 

Mr.P

oud<3er
I see what you mean. I get a big "environment" influence (for example, walking outside on a cold day after wearing an oil indoors for a few hours). That change is remarkable. To me though the big one is repeated exposure in that it is consistent, progressive, and does not reverse or randomly change with changes in the other variables. It would drive me nuts if I was producing or blending to achieve some scent goal. It would be like going color blind in the middle of a painting or something. No doubt there is some analogous change in perception that an artist experiences as they work on a single painting - probably notice utterly different things than someone seeing it for the first time.
 
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.....and the kicker is.....even when you achieve your masterpiece......how will it be received by others:confused:
especially after repetitive exposure:(
 
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