How to describe a perfume.
By not describing it at all.
A Scent Artefact

Feeling: New Spaceship Smell, The Vacuum of the Infinite, The Close Proximity of Glass, Neon-Grey, Oxidized Metal, Burnt Concrete.
Materials: Metalic Rose, Orris, Ambergris, Cashmere Wood, Cumin.
Perfumer: Mark Buxton

Where incense codifies a space for the people in it, perfume encodes the body for the people around it and shapes the intrinsic state of the wearer as an invisible, persistent coat—creating a character of proximity; tuning a personalized spatial mass as you move temporally through a day.

The message sent is subvocal. Our smell part of the brain developed before the verbal language centers and the finite descriptive power of the word—and as such, describing smell is, at best, post-primitive, at worst, impossible. A discussion as cerebral as this intellectualized description is a directionless, futile march into the wastelands, made instantly redundant at the first moment of smell: when the olfactive molecules, riding high on a volatile wave of ethanol and oil, touch those intimate membranes of your smell receptors.

And whether from a consenting or unexpected inhalation, the undeniability of smell and the involuntary, total reaction is why we long for deep, indescribable, nasal with strangers.