Lesson zero · The drydown
A perfume is not a smell. It is a story told in hours.
You can't smell a screen, so Sillage teaches your nose another way: through materials, chemistry, history and small experiments with what's already in your kitchen. Drag the clock on the blotter and watch a fragrance unfold.
Move through this panel. The light you leave behind is your sillage.
The first course · six lessons
From “it smells nice” to knowing why
Each lesson takes about ten minutes and ends with something to do with your own nose. They build on each other, so take them in order.
The studio
Tools a perfumer would recognise
Beyond the lessons, Sillage is a working reference: the materials, the structures, the classics and the people who made them.
An independent school
Sillage is free, and always will be
No ads, no sign-ups, no affiliate links: every perfume here is chosen for what it teaches. If Sillage has taught your nose something, you can help keep it growing with a coffee.
The first course
Learn to smell
Six short lessons, from what a note is to how to test perfume like a professional. Your progress is saved in this browser.
The Organ · materials
The perfumer's palette
A perfumer works at an “organ”: tiers of small bottles, naturals and aroma chemicals, each smelled thousands of times. Here are the ones every beginner should know by name.
Tenacity and impact are teaching estimates on simple scales, to help you compare materials. Real behaviour depends on grade, dilution and what a material is blended with.
The Lab · formula
Compose in parts
Perfumers write formulas in parts per thousand. Start from a classic structure, change the proportions, and watch how the character shifts from spray to the next morning.
A teaching model: each material's presence is its parts × impact, fading at a rate set by its tenacity. Real evaporation also depends on vapour pressure, odour thresholds, skin and the way materials hold one another back. Real formulas use dozens of materials, many of them pre-diluted. Presets are sketches of classic structures, not the formulas of any perfume.
Families
Twelve families, one circle
Neighbours blend easily; opposites contrast. Tap a segment to read about it. Simplified from the Fragrance Wheel created by Michael Edwards in 1983.
The Sorting
The six houses
The ceremony sorts every visitor into one of six classic structures, named the way fragheads name themselves.
Classics · with their noses
Every era had its molecule
Perfume history reads best as a chain of materials and the perfumers bold enough to use them. Tap a material to open it in the organ.
In-house perfumers
Houses and their noses
Great houses pass their style from one perfumer to the next, like a workshop passing down a hand.
The Atlas
Perfume didn't start in Paris
Follow the materials back to their places, from Kannauj's copper stills to the rose valleys of Bulgaria.
Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh · featured
Mitti: the first rain, bottled
In Kannauj, attar makers bake discs of clay from dried pond beds, then distil them into sandalwood oil. The result captures petrichor, the smell of rain on dry earth. Its key molecule, geosmin, is made by soil microbes, and the human nose can detect it at extraordinarily low levels.
- Clay discs are baked and loaded into a copper still, the deg, with water.
- A wood fire heats the deg; vapour travels through a bamboo pipe.
- It condenses into a bhapka, a receiver holding sandalwood oil, cooled in water.
- Over days the oil absorbs the scent. No alcohol is used: this is an attar.
Glossary
Speak like a nose
The working vocabulary of perfumers and fragheads, from absolute to volatility.
Smelling journal
Words make smells stick
Log what you smell: the family, three words, how it wore. After a dozen entries, your own taste starts to show. Entries are saved in this browser only.