How We Write a Scent Brief (The Process Before the Process)

Every scent we develop starts with a document that has nothing to do with fragrance. No note descriptions, no ingredient wishlist, no reference to other candles or perfumes. Just a set of questions answered about a moment we're trying to capture.

We call it the brief. It's the most important step in the process, and it happens before we source any oils.

What the Brief Contains

The brief is short — a page at most — and it answers a specific set of questions about the target moment:

Where are you? Not vaguely. Specifically. Indoors or out? If indoors, what kind of space? What's nearby?

What time of day is it? What's the quality of the light? Is the sun up or down, and where is it relative to you?

What's the temperature? What's the air doing? Is it moving? Is it cool or warm, dry or humid?

What's happening? Are you active or still? Is there something nearby that's producing a smell — something cooking, something burning, something being made?

How does the moment feel? Not what emotion you want the candle buyer to have. What does the moment itself feel like to be in?

Why We Don't Start With Notes

The alternative approach is to start with fragrance references: "I want cedar, leather, a little smoke, something woody." That's a coherent starting point, but it puts the creative work in the wrong place. You end up describing an assemblage of materials rather than a moment — and when you blend the resulting oils, you're evaluating them as components rather than as a whole.

When you start with a moment, the evaluation criteria are cleaner: does this smell like being there? That question is harder to fake. Either the blend produces the association or it doesn't. The brief makes that standard possible.

How It Shapes the Development Process

Once the brief exists, it guides everything. When we blend an oil combination and evaluate it, we're asking: does this match the temperature we described? Does it have the outdoor character we specified? Is the base note grounding it the way the brief suggested it should be?

The brief also tells us when to stop. One of the harder calls in fragrance development is knowing when you're close enough. The brief gives you a reference that's outside the process — something to check against when you've smelled the same blend so many times it stops making sense. If it matches the brief, it's done.

The Brief as Quality Control

After a scent is finished and in production, the brief becomes a record of what it's supposed to be. If a new batch smells subtly different from what we expect, we pull the brief and evaluate against it. Not against our memory of the previous batch — memory is unreliable in fragrance evaluation — but against the original description of the moment. That separation is intentional, and it's one of the reasons we keep detailed documentation of every formula and every brief.

See also: From Concept to Jar: How a New Scent Gets Born.