Level 2: Olfactory Training
How smell works, how to evaluate a material properly, and the drills that build recognition, vocabulary and reliability.
Lessons
The instrument
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How Smell Works: What a Perfumer Needs to Know
A working perfumer's guide to the sense of smell: receptors, sniffing, adaptation and why people differ, and what each fact changes about how you practice.
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Olfactory Fatigue: How to Rest Your Nose
Why your nose stops noticing a smell, what really resets it, why coffee beans have little evidence behind them, and how to plan sessions around fatigue.
Evaluation method
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How to Smell Raw Materials on a Strip
The method perfumers use to smell a material: why you dilute first, how to dip and label a strip, how to sniff, and what to record over the following hours.
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Build Your Olfactory Vocabulary
Practical exercises to build a smell vocabulary: comparison, sorting, reference smells and a personal lexicon, so you can say what you smell and record it.
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Find Your Own Odor Thresholds
A hands-on odor threshold exercise using a dilution ladder: find where you stop detecting a material, and see why strong materials need such small doses.
Recognition and reliability
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Odor Recognition Drills That Work
Drills for recognizing materials by smell: recall practice, spaced review, confusion pairs and personal associations, with a note on what the evidence shows.
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Blind Smelling Practice for Beginners
How to set up blind smelling practice at home: coding strips, running a triangle exercise, and working out whether your score is real ability or lucky guessing.
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A Daily Olfactory Training Routine
A ten-minute daily smelling routine for learning perfumery, how it differs from clinical smell training, and how to keep it going with very few materials.