There's no reason that a perfume writer who knows their stuff can't occasionally drop a "benzene" in their writing-- the average reader is no more familiar with oak moss's (creamy, rich, powdery) scent than they are benzene's, but none of us shy away from invoking the notes stated on the marketing materials.

Of course, there are some perfume writers who don't know anything about the chemistry who are talented enough writers of anything that their emotional and sensory evocations would be unnecessarily littered with scientific terms. I'm not talking about them at all.

But there is a trend of perfume writers getting paid and even winning awards for their work who rather transparently don't have any grasp of the materials about which they are writing, and whose work is almost exclusively paraphrasing of the perfume company's marketing materials. Their perfume "writing" is really infomercials for a product, not an exploration of an art form.

@emdeesee I mean, you need that to know what I'm talking about either way, though-- if you know (or look up) indolic, and I tell you something is very indolic, you would need to know how far into mothball (of feces!) territory we're talking.

@emdeesee OR not OF. Damn my non-tattooed thumb!

@SuzanEraslan "of" was evocative of tattoos :grin:

@SuzanEraslan "Suzan forgot to check her tattoo," ran through my head, for realz.

@emdeesee We really gotta get these tattoos. Or at least temporary ones in bulk. :wink: