A perfume bottle is not just glass with liquid. It is a snapshot of its time, a frozen melody of fragrant notes. From 1900 to 2024, tens of thousands of such 'melodies' have accumulated, and now they can be studied as a single organism.
Scientists compiled the largest corpus of perfume data and measured two things: complexity, how many different notes are in a single bottle, and novelty — how unusual the combination of those notes is. They found that since the 1990s, fragrances have become simpler in composition but more inventive in combinations. The orchestra has shrunk, but it has started playing jazz.
The authors built imitation networks and saw that everyone loves to copy, but more and more notes are 'floating free'—chosen not by template but by intuition. Moreover, a perfumer's style is contagious: it spreads through collaboration and fades with distance in the professional circle. Perfumery turned out to be a living cultural system, just like music or fashion, where society expresses its sensory experiences.
Perfumery has its own 'fashion': in the 1970s, complex chypre fragrances reigned, while today minimalist compositions with a few notes lead — for example, molecular perfumes built around a single synthetic substance.
In Patrick Süskind's novel 'Perfume,' the protagonist creates an absolute scent that subjugates people, but in reality, perfumes rather obey the laws of cultural evolution than chemistry.