Why nobody smells anything neat

A visitor to the bench nearly always asks to smell something out of the bottle. We say no, and it sounds precious, so here is the reason written down.

Loud is not information

At full strength, jasmine absolute is not floral. It is a solvent, a wall, something with a physical shape to it that pushes back. Oakmoss neat is ink and damp cellar and very little else. Rose absolute neat is closer to preserved fruit than to a rose. None of those readings is wrong, exactly — but they are all the same reading, which is too much, and a material that only ever says too much is a material you cannot compare with another one.

Put both at ten percent in perfumer’s alcohol and the differences arrive. The jasmine has an animal underneath it. The oakmoss has a green edge on top of the ink. The rose splits into two or three things depending on the lot. Dilution is not politeness; it is the resolution control.

The number is a compromise and we know it

Ten percent is the trade default and it is not sacred. Some houses evaluate at 1% for the white flowers, and we do that too for jasmine, because it does not behave at 10% and we would rather say so than pretend. Aldehydes go to 1% or lower. A few of the woods are better at 20%.

But one number has to be the default, or nothing can be compared with anything, and for us that number is ten. Every reading on this site was taken there.

It is also why this website looks the way it does

Every photograph on the site is printed at the same dilution — one factor, applied to every file, with the strength cut and nothing else touched. The plates are not black and white and they are not filtered in your browser; they are the picture at ten percent, the same way the materials are.

There is one exception, and it is on the materials page: a single plate printed neat, next to the diluted version of the same photograph. It is there so you can see what we took out, which seemed more honest than describing it.