I recently got an inquiry from a client about my Coffee Wonderful fragrance. “I can smell the cinnamon,” she wrote me, “but I can’t smell the coffee!”
Considering that an actual coffee bean infusion is the largest component of the fragrance, I quickly sampled a batch myself and got a second opinion from my very patient boyfriend. In the first five minutes, yup, all he smelled was cinnamon. I could smell the coffee - I’d put it there, so I knew what I was looking for. But I realized that someone who does not spend a good portion of every day just sniffing things might not realize right away what was happening. After an hour, the coffee and vanilla emerged where the citrus had left off, but again, it was coming off as a single note rather than the multiple easy-to-isolate notes that my client might have expected.
Basically, the coffee and cinnamon were similar enough in texture that the molecules must have bonded to each other. You can test this theory for yourself: get a nice, dark cup of coffee. Also, get yourself a generous spoonful of cinnamon. Take a few moments to take turns sniffing the coffee and sniffing the cinnamon - repeat sniffing each individually (fortunately, coffee’s a palate cleanser so you can do this for awhile without wearing out your nose). Drop a generous pinch of the cinnamon into the coffee. Sniff. Make note of how it changes. If you leave it for a few minutes, the scent changes even more as the coffee and cinnamon interacts. Yes, the cinnamon will still be distinctive, but it’s cinnamon in coffee - not just cinnamon by itself. The cinnamon is a drama queen and will take center stage no matter how small a portion of the performance you give it, but its performance is still richly nuanced by its chemistry with coffee. And while coffee certainly shines alone, the minutes you make it share stage space with any other scent, it assigns itself to a supporting role. Even adding cream and sugar significantly changes the scent, let alone adding a spice with the scene-stealing gusto of cinnamon.
So thus is my lesson about coffee, and how it may behave with other scents. After all, you can’t expect a mocha to smell like dark roast.
