Fragrance Editing and Proofreading Services

A perfume is described as "a captivating blend of florals with woody undertones, perfect for the modern woman." Nothing in that sentence tells a customer whether it smells sweet or sharp, whether it will still be noticeable four hours later or gone in one, or whether it resembles anything they have smelled before. They are being asked to spend sixty pounds on a scent they cannot smell, based on a description that could apply to roughly four hundred other perfumes on the same website.

We edit what fragrance brands and retailers produce to help customers buy scent without smelling it first — fragrance note breakdowns and their sequencing, longevity and sillage descriptions, scent comparison and "smells like" content, sample and discovery set copy, ingredient and allergen disclosures, and the customer service responses to fragrance-matching questions. Our editors work on the page that has to do a nose's job through text alone.

The specific note sequence is what gives a customer something to actually picture, and its failure is an evocative sentence that names a mood instead of a scent. Captivating and modern describe a marketing aspiration; bergamot, jasmine and sandalwood describe what is actually in the bottle. We work through these so notes are broken into top, heart and base with what each contributes at each stage, since a fragrance smells different in the first ten minutes than it does two hours later, and a customer needs to know both rather than a single blended impression; so longevity and sillage are described with an actual timeframe and projection, given that "long-lasting" could mean four hours or twelve and a customer choosing a fragrance for a work day needs to know which; so comparisons to well-known fragrances are offered where genuinely accurate, because "similar in character to Chanel No. 5, warmer and less powdery" gives a customer a real reference point that no number of adjectives can replicate; so the actual smell experience is described using specific, concrete language rather than only abstract descriptors, as "smells like a walk through a lemon grove after rain" pictures something and "fresh and invigorating" does not; so sample availability is made prominent rather than an afterthought, given that a customer genuinely uncertain about a scent should be offered the option to try it before committing to a full bottle; and so ingredient and allergen information is complete for the small number of customers checking for a specific known sensitivity. Descriptions written this way sell fragrance to people who cannot smell it and get fewer of them returning it because it was not what they expected.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including formulations, ingredient data and customer information. We are editors rather than perfumers, fragrance chemists or allergists, and we offer no view on formulation, safety or ingredient composition. What we can do is make sure the description gives a customer something real to imagine.