756 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS the fragrance conveys to the consumer, the connotations and asso- ciations which it evokes. In this sense, the meaning of a fragrance is its most important quality it is its reason for being. The function of a fragrance is always to convey a message about the woman (or man) who wears it or about the product in which it is used. If it succeeds in conveying the right message forcefully, the fragrance will be successful (2). If we accept this to be true, it becomes obvious that a perfumer, no matter whether his job is to create fragrances or to select them, must have a good under- standing of their meaning and of the message they convey. To be more exact, since the product with which he is involved will have to be sold to a specific public, he must understand the meaning which his fra- grances hold for that public. Understanding the meaning of a fragrance is very closely related to that most valuable gift a perfumer can have: the gift to predict what will sell. To get this understanding, the perfumer traditionally has had to rely on three sources of information: introspection (what message does this fragrance convey to me?), observation of market performance (what kinds of fragrances are successful in what products ?), and an understand- ing of certain chemical relationships (phenolic odorants occur in smoke and hence connote danger citrus oils smell refreshing since they are associated with sour fruits fatty aldehydes and indol are related to components of bodily excretions and hence have erogenous meanings (2). All of these approaches are indirect, and all have their pitfalls. Intro- spection fails if the perfumer is not completely in tune with his public market performance depends on many things other than the fragrance and the effect of chemical relationships on meaning has been largely in the realm of speculation and could not be proven. The direct approach--to go to a consumer or to a group of consumers and ask: What does this fragrance mean to you ?--has not been considered feasible in the past. There are several reasons for this. Every perfumer has had bad experiences with the layman's ability to identify odors or to react to them in any consistent way. He has repeatedly run into normal, intelligent people who fail to recognize the odors of the most familiar flowers or even of their own perfume, or who on Monday definitely prefer fragrance A over B only to reverse their judgment, with equal conviction, on Tuesday. After a few of these encounters, a perfumer tends to get discouraged about using laymen's judgments for guidance (3). Also, if you give people a fragrance and ask them to describe it, you usually

MEASURING THE MEANING OF FRAGRANCE 757 don't get much that is useful. Most respondents will tell you that it is "very nice" or "fragrant" or maybe that "I don't like it much" and if you are lucky, you get some more specific descriptions, such as "smells like something you eat," "like my grandmother's garden" or "like a drugstore." If, as is the case, every respondent who says anything at all says something different, how can you combine and interpret the comments ? There are, then, real difficulties. Still, if fragrance is, in essence, a message, it is highly important to search for techniques which will re- liably measure the meaning of this message to the consumer. And it is a milestone in perfumery that such techniques have recently been devel- oped and are beginning to get used. ODOR PROFILES AND THE SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL In 1960, Paukner (4) obtained from respondents unschooled in perfumery descriptions of the odorants, citral, p-methyl quinoline, eugenol, geraniol, menthone, and hexenyl formate, which were very interesting since they partly confirmed but also partly conflicted with the meanings which these materials hold for professional perfumers. More important, these descriptions could be said to have statistical reliability. There are several noteworthy features about Paukner's approach. For one thing, he did not use just a handful of people in his test he used 287 respondents. In tests of this type, there is real value in large numbers. People disagree about such questions as "To what extent is the odor of citral stimulating?", but if you take a sufficiently large group, the opinions of those who find the odor extremely stimulating will be counterbalanced by a group of people who hardly find it stimulating at all. Averaging all the votes, you arrive at a value which is valid in the sense that a very similar value can be obtained by posing the same question about citral to a different group of respondents. Poffenberger, in 1932, conducted an experiment which, although it does not deal with odor, nicely illustrates this point (5). He presented his test subjects with ten different shapes and asked them to rank these in order of decreasing area (Fig. 1). Poffenberger then scored each indi- vidual's performance by calculating the rank correlation coefficient be- tween the actual order and the order guessed by the subject. Lining up the shapes in perfectly correct order would result in a coefficient of +1.00, doing it all wrong (reverse order) would give a coefficient of -- 1.00, and guessing at random would usually give values between +0.40 and -- 0.40. Judging the area of these complex shapes is not easy. When