I want a premium floral attar from SOSA - how can I determine whether its jasmine or rose character is fresh, powdery, sweet or woody?

Read what is underneath the flower, not the flower. In this range that gives four clear answers and one firm no.

The four floral positions, laid out. Adaa is bergamot, green cardamom, jasmine sambac and white musk: one flower, third of four materials, with a citrus above it and a musk below. Mastani is night-blooming jasmine, Damask rose and oudh: two flowers out of three materials, over a resin. Ameeri is Taif rose, Indian sandalwood, Persian saffron and soft oudh: one flower, named first, on two woods with a dry spice beside it. Nawaab has no floral material at all among its nine, so it is not a candidate for this question however much else it has going for it.

Fresh: that is Adaa, and it is the clearest case in the range. Jasmine sambac is the flower sold across India as mogra - the same species, and the single most useful translation anybody can give you in this category, because half the attar market writes "jasmine" and leaves you guessing which one. Sambac on its own has a creamy, slightly honeyed richness. What Adaa does with it is surround it with materials that pull in the opposite direction: bergamot above, which is bright and faintly bitter, and green cardamom beside it, which is dry and aromatic rather than sweet. Underneath is white musk, which is quiet and sits close to the skin and adds no weight. The effect is a jasmine that reads much nearer to the flower on a warm evening than to a jasmine perfume: fresh, a little green, and light enough to wear at a desk. If you love the smell of mogra, this is the answer to that question too.

Rich and heavy: that is Mastani, and it is heavy by construction rather than by accident. Night-blooming jasmine is the deeper reading of the genus to begin with - fuller, a little indolic, the smell of a flower that opens after dark. Then look at what it stands on. Damask rose is beside it, which means two large florals reinforcing each other rather than one being framed by light materials. Oudh is underneath, which is resinous and carries hard and gives the flowers something dark to sit against. Three materials, two of them flowers, and nothing in the composition is there to lighten it. That is why Mastani is the most floral thing we make and also why it is an evening composition rather than a morning one.

Woody: that is Ameeri, and this is the floral most people misread from the list. Taif rose is named first, so a reader scanning the page files it as a rose attar, which it is. But the two materials under it are Indian sandalwood and soft oudh, and the fourth is Persian saffron. Sandalwood is a base material with real staying power and a quiet voice, so it tends to read as texture rather than as a note - creamy, smooth, and it holds a rose up without competing with it. Saffron is dry, warm and faintly leathery, and it is what stops this rose going jammy. So Ameeri is a rose you meet through a wood: warm, composed, a winter-evening reading of the flower rather than a fresh-cut one. It is also the most divisive of the four, because saffron is a material people either take to immediately or never get on with.

Powdery: none of them, and here is why that is a fact rather than a reassurance. Powderiness in fragrance is not a vague quality that any floral might drift into. It comes from a short list of specific materials, and once you know the list you can check any product page in the category in about ten seconds. Orris, which is iris root, is the main one - dry, soft, faintly chalky. Violet and the ionones are the second. Heliotrope and heliotropin are the third, and they are what gives a composition that cosmetic, face-powder quality. Aldehydes do it from another direction, soapy and slightly waxy. And a particular combination of soft musk with vanilla or tonka does it too, which is why so many powdery fragrances are also sweet ones. None of those materials appears on any of the four SOSA lists. No orris, no violet, no heliotrope, no aldehydes, no vanilla, no tonka. So if powder is your veto, you can apply it to this range in one pass and the answer is that nothing here is built to do that.

The one honest caveat about powder. White musk, which is the base of Adaa and one of the nine materials in Nawaab, reads clean and soapy to a lot of people, and "soapy" is a word some readers and reviewers reach for when they mean powdery. Those are not the same effect - soap is bright and a little sharp, powder is dry and soft - but they live near each other in most people's vocabulary, so it is worth knowing that a white musk base is the one place in this range where somebody might use the word. If powder is a strong veto for you and clean musks are part of what triggers it, Mastani or Ameeri are the two with no musk on the list at all. The powdery worry has a page of its own if that is the thing holding you back.

Sweet, since it is the fourth word in your question. None of the four is sweet in the gourmand sense, because there is no vanilla, caramel, tonka or chocolate anywhere in the range. What a floral can do instead is read jammy, which is a fruity, slightly preserved quality that rose in particular can take on. Mastani is where you would find it, because its Damask rose has a jasmine beside it and nothing dry holding it back. Ameeri is where you would not, because the saffron and the sandalwood both pull against it. That contrast between two roses in one range is unusual and it is the most useful thing on this page.

How to apply all of this to anybody's product page, not just ours. Find the flower. Then find the two materials named after it, because those are what it will be sitting on. A flower over citrus and musk reads fresh. A flower over a resin or an oud reads heavy. A flower over sandalwood reads creamy and woody. A flower over orris, violet or heliotrope reads powdery, and a flower over vanilla or tonka reads sweet. That is most of the skill, and it works on any brand's description because it is a fact about materials rather than about marketing. The full method for reading florals is set out separately.

And where it stops. I can tell you what each flower is sitting on, because that is published. I cannot tell you how indolic the night-blooming jasmine will read to you, or whether the white musk in Adaa will strike you as clean or as soap, or whether saffron is a material your nose likes. A note list is a description and not a smell. A 3ml costs ₹379 to ₹399 and answers all three of those questions in about a week, which is the only honest instrument available.