A note from Sniffaplooza on Saturday:

At the breakfast, one of the perfume sales representatives began his spiel by asking who in the audience considered themselves a perfume expert.

Not one person (that I saw) raised his or her hand.

The sales rep seemed really surprised.

I mean yes, that breakfast certainly held a lot of informed consumers. We are the fans of perfumedom, for sure. But experts? I can’t speak for anyone else in the room, but I know why I didn’t consider myself an expert and I’d hazard a guess that I know why most of the others didn’t consider themselves experts either.

Almost none of us have ever made a perfume. Few of us ever refer to Ambrox or Galaxolide and when we do, we know we have no idea how to actually use it. Does it make us an “expert” if we can differentiate an apricot note from a pineapple? We didn’t seem to think so, even though I know a lot of the people in that room can do so. Some of the people in the room have been involved in the business of distributing perfume; but not that many. An awful, awful lot of us, though, could have discoursed for a long time about different perfumes, by brand, some of us by year, and talk about the ones we loved, the ones we hated, and the ones that you must try. There was a hell of a lot of knowledge in the room about individual perfumes and perfume lines. All of us love perfume, and that’s really the bottom line of shared experience that was represented there that day.

I thought perhaps we didn’t consider ourselves experts, but I’m sure a lot of people who know nothing about perfume would consider us experts – which just goes to show that what differentiates levels of “expertise” isn’t amount of knowledge, but the existence of it.

So what’s your opinion – what constitutes an expert? A level of technical know-how? Breadth of knowledge? Familiarity with different notes? Why do you think that sales rep considered us “experts” (let’s not be cynical now and let’s not claim he was just buttering us up – though we may have felt the slight touch of butter)? For those of us who were there (or could have or should have been) – what do we consider a perfume expert to be?

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Image is “Professor nils is aan het werk…” by De Vleermuis, via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license; some rights reserved.