What I Learned Training as a Perfumer in France (Founder's Notes)

by Sonal Sahani, founder of SOSA Home & Body - 16 May 2026 - 11 min read

I trained as a perfumer in France because India did not, at the time, have the apprenticeship tradition I needed. Five years on, I run SOSA Home & Body from a Mumbai workshop, and the most useful thing France gave me was not a list of ingredients. It was a method for paying attention. SOSA Evening Calm (100ml Rs. 799, 200ml Rs. 1,299) - our lavender and chamomile reed diffuser - is the SKU that carries the most French discipline of anything we make. It is also, not coincidentally, the most restrained. This is a note on why restraint is the highest skill in perfumery.

The day I realised I did not know how to smell

Week one of the program. We sat in a small room. The instructor put twelve blotter strips on a table. She said, "Tell me what you smell."

I had spent thirty years being confident about smell. I was the friend who could tell you which cousin had walked into the kitchen by the soap on their skin. I picked up the first strip. I said "rose." The instructor said, "Which rose. There are four hundred species. Bulgarian, Damask, May, Centifolia? Where is it harvested? When was it distilled? Is it absolute or essential? Is it adulterated?"

I had no answers. I put the strip down. The other eleven strips terrified me before I even picked them up.

That is the first thing France teaches you. The vocabulary you brought is a child's vocabulary. The vocabulary you need is the surgeon's. Until you can name the genus, the species, the geography, the season, the extraction method, and the adulteration risk, you cannot say what a thing smells like. You can only say what it reminds you of.

Why France matters in perfumery history

This is not a chauvinist point. It is a historical one. Grasse in Provence became the perfume capital of the world in the 17th century for a boring reason - the local climate suited rose and jasmine cultivation, and the local economy already had a leather tanning industry that needed scenting. By the 1800s, French chemists had codified the first systematic vocabulary of perfumery. By the early 20th century, the famous Houses had built apprenticeship pipelines that lasted decades.

That tradition produced three things the rest of the industry still uses. First, the olfactory pyramid - the top, heart, base structure. Second, the olfactory family system - the classification of perfumes into chypre, fougere, floral, oriental, citrus and their sub-families. Third, the blind testing protocol - smelling on white blotter strips with no visual cue, scoring on standardised vocabulary, never trusting your nose without a system.

You can learn this from books. I tried. The books give you the framework. They do not give you the four hundred hours of bench time it takes for your olfactory cortex to actually wire itself to the framework. That part requires being in the room.

The discipline of top, heart, base

This is the part most people think they understand and most people get wrong. The pyramid is not a list. It is a timing diagram.

Top notes - the first 15 minutes

These are the lightest molecules. They evaporate fastest. They are what hits the nose when you uncap the bottle or walk into the room. Citrus, light herbs, mint, green notes. In a reed diffuser they last roughly fifteen minutes of olfactory attention before your nose adapts to them. They cannot do the work of the whole scent. They are the handshake, not the conversation.

Heart notes - the middle hours

These are mid-weight molecules that build the personality. Florals, soft spices, light woods. In a diffuser, the heart is what your guests notice when they have been in your room for half an hour. The heart is where character lives. Get the heart wrong and the scent reads as either thin (no heart) or shouty (too much heart).

Base notes - the long haul

The heaviest molecules. Resins, woods, musks, vanillas, ambers. They evaporate slowest, they linger longest, and they do something the top and heart cannot - they hold the scent together. In perfumery vocabulary, the base is the fixative. Without a properly built base, even a beautiful heart collapses within hours.

The discipline is in the ratios. France taught me a working rule that I still use - roughly 15-25% top, 30-40% heart, 35-50% base for a standard structure. Get the percentages wrong and the scent will smell brilliant for fifteen minutes and confusing for the next eight hours. Most cheap home fragrance fails here. They load the top notes for shop-floor impact and starve the base. The bottle smells great in the store and dies in your living room by Tuesday.

The olfactory journal - the most useful object I own

Every French perfumery student keeps an olfactory journal. Mine is a hardback notebook in cream paper, a ruled left page for the data and a blank right page for the impressions.

The data side records the strip number, the ingredient name, the producer, the harvest year, the extraction method, the percentage in any blend, and the standardised vocabulary I would use to describe it - top, heart, base classification, intensity score, persistence in minutes.

The impression side is where I write what the smell does in my body. This is the part students laugh at in week one and rely on by year three. Bulgarian rose at 5% in a heart blend makes me feel warm in the sternum. Damask rose at the same percentage feels higher, closer to the throat. Centifolia rose almost behind the eyes. The data side tells you what the molecule is. The impression side tells you what the molecule does.

I still keep the journal. I have eleven volumes. Every SOSA formula starts in those pages before it ever touches the bench.

How French training reframed the way I smell India

This was the unexpected outcome. I expected to come back knowing how to make European-style perfumes. What I came back able to do was actually smell India.

The Sassoon Dock fish market at 5am

I had walked past Sassoon Dock for years. It smelled, in my untrained mouth, like "the fish market." After France, I could break it apart. Top notes - salt, iodine, fresh cut citrus from the lime carts. Heart notes - the wet wood of the boats, the ice melt, the faint petrol of the engines. Base notes - the slow drift of fish that have been out of the water for ninety minutes, the rope and tar of the rigging. It was not one smell. It was a stack. Once you can see the stack, you can never un-see it.

A Bandra cafe roasting Coorg coffee

The coffee aisle of a supermarket smells of one thing - the volatile top notes of roasted bean dust, flattened by packaging and time. A Bandra cafe at 7am roasting fresh Coorg beans smells of seven things in sequence. Green, almost grassy notes from the unroasted bean. The Maillard browning at the crack. The caramelisation. The sharp astringent edge at the second crack. The grounded woodiness as the bean cools. The faint vanilla edge that comes from the bean's natural sugars. The base of warm dust. You can compose around that stack. We did. SOSA Fresh Brew (100ml Rs. 849, 200ml Rs. 1,349) tries to capture the third, fourth, and fifth note of that sequence without the bitter base. It took eight months.

Bombay monsoon air, three minutes after the first rain

Petrichor first - the geosmin released from soil bacteria when rainwater hits it. Then the wet bark of the rain trees. Then the diesel rising from the road. Then, twenty minutes in, the frangipani comes back into the picture because the rain has cleaned the air. The Bombay monsoon is a four-act olfactory sequence. Before France I would have called it "rain smell." After France, I could write the timing of each act in seconds.

The two ingredients I almost never use - and why

French training also teaches you what not to do. There are ingredients that are technically beautiful and pragmatically wrong for Indian home fragrance.

Heavy oud

Real agarwood oud is one of the most expensive ingredients in perfumery. At the right percentage in the right base, it is breathtaking. In an Indian apartment in May, it is suffocating. Oud's molecular profile thrives in cold European air where it diffuses slowly. In Mumbai heat, it gets pushed to the surface and saturates the room within an hour. I have never built an oud-forward SOSA SKU. I do not think I will.

Aldehydic florals

The famous aldehydic florals of mid-century French perfumery (think Chanel No. 5) are powdered, soapy, almost metallic. Beautiful on the right skin in the right room. Wrong, in my view, for the Indian living room context where the scent will be competing with cooking steam, agarbatti residue, and open windows. I respect aldehydes. I rarely use them.

The single most important French lesson - restraint

If I had to compress four hundred bench hours into one sentence, it would be this. The instinct of every beginner perfumer is to add. The instinct of every trained perfumer is to subtract.

Beginners want to prove themselves with ingredient lists. They build perfumes with fourteen notes because fourteen notes feels like work. Trained perfumers build with three or four notes and spend their time getting the percentages exactly right. The Evening Calm formula has fewer ingredients than most people would guess. Lavender. Chamomile. A small amount of soft fixative base. That is most of it. The reason it works is not the list. It is the discipline of the ratios and the restraint of stopping when the formula is done.

Restraint is hard. It feels like under-delivering. It looks, in a market that rewards loud, like under-marketing. The Evening Calm bottle does not announce itself in a crowded shop. You have to be sitting in a quiet room with three reeds in it for the formula to do its work. That is the trade I made when I chose this discipline. I do not regret it.

How this shows up in every SOSA bottle

All five are non-toxic, phthalate-free, vegan. All five use the same fixative architecture I drew in my French olfactory journal in week six of training. That diagram is the bones of the SOSA brand.

One clear takeaway

Founder note

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