A fragrance family is the way the perfume trade groups scents by a shared frame. The table of the Société Française des Parfumeurs has seven families: Citrus, Floral, Fougère, Chypre, Woody, Amber and Leather, divided into 47 subfamilies. A family describes the structure of a scent, not its quality.
One table of names for thousands of bottles
Every year brings hundreds of new perfumes, each with its own list of notes. Nobody can remember them all. Perfumery needs a shorter table of names, enough to say that two bottles with different names are built the same way. That table is the fragrance family.
The short definition: a fragrance family groups scents that share a frame, a few materials or accords that decide the overall impression, usually in the heart and base. The classification used as the reference in the trade is the table of the Société Française des Parfumeurs (SFP), the French professional society of perfumers and evaluators. It has seven families, coded A to G, and 47 subfamilies.
The seven are: A Citrus (Hespéridé), B Floral, C Fougère, D Chypre, E Woody (boisé), F Amber (formerly called Oriental) and G Leather. The second most used system is Michael Edwards' fragrance wheel, with 14 families arranged in a circle.
The most important point about families is that they describe structure, not quality. A Chypre is not better than a Floral. Knowing a bottle's family helps predict how it will change on skin after an hour, and helps find other bottles built the same way. The Lê Mai library has a page for every fragrance family and every subfamily.
The main families
Each family has a group of materials at its centre. Citrus is built on oils expressed from the peel of bergamot, lemon and orange; its classic model is Farina's Eau de Cologne from Köln in 1709. It is bright, light and quick to fade, so its technical problem is keeping freshness on skin.
Floral takes one flower or a bouquet as its theme, and shares with Woody the largest number of subfamilies: nine each. Some flowers yield usable materials, such as rose, jasmine, orange flower and ylang ylang; others, such as lily of the valley and lilac, must be rebuilt from combinations of molecules.
Woody rests on cedar, sandalwood, vetiver and patchouli, usually dry, warm and long lasting. Amber is the warm, sweet, powdery family built on resins, vanilla and labdanum; Shalimar of 1925 is a landmark. Leather evokes tanned hide through smoke, tar, birch and tobacco; Tabac Blond of 1919 is a landmark, and this is the smallest family, with only three subfamilies.
The remaining two, Fougère and Chypre, carry the name of a perfume rather than a material. They deserve their own reading below, since each is a layered structure more than a group of materials.
Subfamilies and facets
A family's frame can take on an extra shade without changing family. Subfamily names therefore usually join the family name to an adjective: Fruity Chypre, Aldehydic Floral, Marine Woody. The SFP calls this unit a sous famille, and there are 47 of them across the seven families.
The same adjective can appear in several families. A leather note is present in family G Leather, in subfamily D4 Leather Chypre and in subfamily E6 Spicy Leather Woody. This shows that a subfamily is not a closed box but a position in the space of scent, where the main family decides the frame and the adjective decides the lean.
At a smaller scale still is the facet of each material. Rose has lemony, honeyed, spicy and winey facets; each can be brought forward or hidden. The library's Families and Facets page uses this kind of sorting for essential oils: seven teaching families and fifteen common facets, to look up which way an oil leans.
The two approaches complete each other. The SFP table starts from the finished perfume and moves down to structure. The families and facets page starts from each bottle of oil and moves up to the family.
Chypre and fougère: two structures
In 1882 Paul Parquet of Houbigant built Fougère Royale from lavender, bergamot, geranium, oakmoss and synthetic coumarin. Coumarin, the hay and almond smell of tonka bean, had been synthesised by William Henry Perkin in 1868. This perfume named an entire family: fougère, French for fern, though ferns hardly smell this way.
The fougère structure is a vertical contrast: bright lavender above, sweet dry coumarin and bitter damp oakmoss below. In the twentieth century it became the main axis of men's perfume. From the late 1980s many fougères reduced oakmoss and added marine and green fruit notes, with Davidoff's Cool Water of 1988 the usual example.
In 1917 François Coty released Chypre, the French name for Cyprus. Its structure put bergamot on top, rose and jasmine in the heart, and oakmoss, labdanum and patchouli in the base. This bottle also named a family: chypre. Remove one pillar of the base and the scent belongs to another family.
Both families rely on oakmoss, and both had to adjust when the rules changed. Regulation (EU) 2017/1410 banned atranol and chloroatranol in cosmetics, and the IFRA Standard requires oakmoss extracts to hold each below 100 ppm. Many chypres and fougères today use oakmoss reduced in both, or replace it with synthetic woody and mossy molecules. The pieces on the chypre accord and the fougère accord try building both structures with essential oils.
The scent wheel
A table arranges families in columns; a wheel arranges them in a ring. In 1984 Michael Edwards published The Fragrance Manual, a guide to help retailers suggest perfumes. The 1992 edition was the first with a wheel: families placed around a circle, each blending into its neighbours.
Edwards' wheel now has 14 families: Floral, Soft Floral, Floral Amber, Soft Amber, Amber, Woody Amber, Woods, Mossy Woods, Dry Woods, Aromatic Fougère, Citrus, Water, Green, Fruity. Water was added in 1998. In June 2021 Edwards replaced the word Oriental with Amber in all English family names.
The wheel and the SFP table differ in three ways. The SFP is a coded table in which each bottle belongs to one subfamily; Edwards is a continuous ring. The SFP keeps Chypre and Leather as separate families; Edwards has neither, and Chypre sits closest to Mossy Woods. Edwards makes Water, Green and Fruity families of their own, while the SFP handles them as shades within subfamilies.
The wheel's advantage is that it shows a path: from a familiar scent, the neighbouring family is where similar scents lie. The Lê Mai library's scent wheel is its own version, arranging 21 groups in four concentric rings and linking each to representative essential oils.
Finding the family of a familiar bottle
The top barely helps with classification, since almost every family opens with citrus. What decides whether a bottle is a chypre, a fougère or an amber lies in what remains after an hour. So finding the family starts with time.
Spray a blotter, wait an hour, then smell. If what remains is clearly floral, the bottle is probably Floral. If there is a bitter moss, damp earth quality under florals or citrus, it leans Chypre. If dry lavender sits over a sweet hay base, it leans Fougère. If sweet, warm, powdery and resinous, it leans Amber. If dry wood dominates, it leans Woody.
The result is often untidy. Many bottles sit on a border and are classified differently by different sources; Guerlain's Jicky of 1889 is the familiar example, sometimes placed in Fougère, sometimes in Amber. A blurred border is not a flaw in the table but the nature of scent.
Knowing the family of a familiar bottle is a starting point. From there one can read other bottles in the same subfamily, move to the neighbouring family on the wheel, or read the history of classification itself in the piece Those who tried to put smell in boxes.
A family is a frame, not a rank.
Two bottles with different names can share one skeleton.
What remains after an hour tells where a bottle belongs.