Perfume

====Fragrance bases====
[[File:Perfume Organ, Grasse.jpg|upright|thumb|A "perfume organ", where perfumers utilize hundreds of essences, in [[Grasse]], France]]
Instead of building a perfume from "ground up", many modern perfumes and colognes are made using ''fragrance bases'' or simply '''bases'''. Each base is essentially modular perfume that is blended from essential oils and aromatic chemicals, and formulated with a simple concept such as "[[Smell of freshly cut grass|fresh cut grass]]" or "juicy sour apple". Many of [[Guerlain]]'s ''Aqua Allegoria'' line, with their simple fragrance concepts, are good examples of what perfume fragrance bases are like.

The effort used in developing bases by fragrance companies or individual perfumers may equal that of a marketed perfume, since they are useful in that they are reusable. On top of its reusability, the benefit in using bases for construction are quite numerous:
#Ingredients with "difficult" or "overpowering" scents that are tailored into a blended base may be more easily incorporated into a work of perfume
#A base may be better scent approximations of a certain thing than the extract of the thing itself. For example, a base made to embody the scent for "fresh dewy rose" might be a better approximation for the scent concept of a rose after rain than plain [[rose oil]]. Flowers whose scents cannot be extracted, such as [[gardenia]] or [[hyacinth (plant)|hyacinth]], are composed as bases from data derived from [[headspace technology]].
#A perfumer can quickly rough out a concept from a brief by combining multiple bases, then present it for feedback. Smoothing out the "edges" of the perfume can be done after a positive response.