Vol. II · No. 2026
Nose Training, Volume II
Sept 2026 – Mar 2027
Chapter I A declaration · the curator
From the desk of Arabelle Sicardi · Vol. II · 2026

"The industry sells scent as a feeling or a fleeting kind of promise. We're going to study it as a material legacy — slowly, in order, with our hands and in community.

Read the full declaration

Every scent molecule is connected to a place, a people, and a history. When we study them together, slowly, against the wave of perpetual launches, in the face of endless consumption, we begin to learn our own desires and tastes better than before. We find ways to relate to each other, ways to remember places we love, memories we want to preserve, and ways to connect to other people. Scent is an invisible bridge we walk on every day.

Our events together are always centered around an effort to honor the materials that make life worth living, that honor the people who make it possible and the places that sustain us. This kind of study, by nature, is deeply political. We will not shy away from that.

We will name perfumers as artists at every opportunity and bring them into the room; we will be open to collaboration, to play, to curiosity, and to connecting ourselves to the innovation and legacies that are under our noses.

Scent is often considered a lesser sense: here, we will revere it as the oldest custodian of our survival, and understand the materials that compose our current smellscape.

We're here to learn our noses better, the world around us better, and the products we consume with better intimacy and appreciation.

Welcome to nose training."

Tuition
$150/mo
Pay your way · in four · or upfront
Returning alumni
$123.75/mo
4 payments · or $495 in full
Kit · purchased direct
$107
Perfumer's Apprentice · 40 materials
Duration
6 months
Sept 2026 – Feb 2027 · 13 sessions incl. March closing
Chapter II The evidence · syllabus in six plates

The curriculum is the argument, staged in matter.

24 materials, four a month across six months, drawn from the forty-material archive and organized by family — not by the French canon. Each plate is an argument about where fragrance history actually comes from.

Plate I · Foundation
The ubiquitous molecules
The invisible architecture
Synthetic · Global production
Linalool, hedione, ISO E Super, ambroxan — the invisible architecture of nearly everything you've ever smelled. Why they dominate. What they do structurally. Who gets credit.
Plate II · Resins & Incense
The ancient materials
Where this story actually starts
Oman · Somalia · India · Southeast Asia
Frankincense, myrrh, oud, benzoin, labdanum. Materials traded on the Incense Route before Europe had a perfume industry. We start where this history actually starts.
Plate III · Florals
The source geographies
Who grows them. Who harvests them.
Grasse · Kannauj · Taif · Comoros · Egypt
Rose, jasmine, tuberose, ylang, neroli, muguet. Who grows them, who harvests them, what the labor conditions are, and why the perfume bottle never mentions any of that.
Plate IV · Woods & Earths
The structural materials
Knowing the material = knowing the crisis
Haiti · Java · India · Atlas Mountains · Japan
Vetiver, patchouli, sandalwood, cedarwood, oakmoss. Materials with ongoing environmental and labor crises embedded in their supply chains. Knowing the material means knowing the crisis.
Plate V · Animalic & Musk
The body materials
The transition from animal to lab
Synthetic (formerly Tibet · Siberia · Ethiopia)
Musk, civet, ambergris, castoreum — now nearly all synthetic, but with histories of extraction and exploitation that shaped entire industries. The transition from animal to lab and what it cost.
Plate VI · Citrus & Fresh
The democratic molecules
The 1990s aquatic revolution
Calabria · Synthetic · Calone: USA
Bergamot, neroli, petitgrain, calone, dihydromyrcenol. The 1990s aquatic revolution — how synthetic "freshness" became the dominant aesthetic of mass-market Western fragrance and what it replaced.
Chapter III The curator
Arabelle
Sicardi
Curator · Perfumed Pages
Taiwanese American They / She Beauty writer Queer Scentiments columnist
"Beauty is an art form, an act of care, and a tool of political possibility. Fragrance is where those three things get the most interesting — and the most dishonest."
The House of Beauty — W.W. Norton
Allure · Harper's Bazaar · Elle · The Cut
Institute for Art and Olfaction
Perfumed Pages event series
Statement of position

Arabelle Sicardi is a Taiwanese American beauty writer whose work focuses on beauty as an art form, an act of care, and a tool of political possibility. Their book The House of Beauty (W.W. Norton) investigates the power structures — colonial, capitalist, patriarchal — behind the beauty industry. They've been a recurring judge for the Institute for Art & Olfaction Awards, the Coveteur Beauty Awards, and are considered by CULTURED Magazine as one of the top fragrance critics working today.

Perfumed Pages began as a hybrid workshop pairing scent with creative writing prompts and informal gatherings celebrating scent culture. It expanded with focused workshops centering diverse perfumers working today, growing from their belief that fragrance education should start where the history actually starts — not with Chanel N°5, but with Tapputi-Belatekallim in 1200 BCE Assyria, and with Al-Kindi in Baghdad, and with the Kannauj attar tradition that predates French perfumery by centuries.

The project and its events have been covered in T Magazine, Dazed, Allure, and elsewhere.

From the curator's desk · new in paperback
Lessons from the Image Industry · W. W. Norton

Arabelle's book on the power structures — colonial, capitalist, patriarchal — behind the beauty industry. The same politics that shape this curriculum, at book length. Out in paperback October 20, 2026.

Pre-order the paperback →
Chapter IV Appendix A · the kit

Forty vials. Pre-diluted. Bought direct.

Perfumer's Apprentice · Perfumery Notes Kit · $107 · 40 pre-diluted materials, ready to sniff. Five of the forty, and what studying them actually involves:
Kit · 01
Linalool
Synthetic · pre-diluted in DPG
What "clean" means in Western consumer culture — the same molecule in lavender, coriander and basil, used East and West and unnamed for millennia. Commercial extraction ran through Amazonian rosewood, Aniba rosaeodora, whose populations declined rapidly under destructive harvesting for oil and which now sits on CITES Appendix II. Your vial is synthetic. That sequence is the industry's relationship to a plant in miniature.
Kit · 02
Hedione
Synthetic · Firmenich, Geneva, 1962
Édouard Demole characterised and synthesised it at Firmenich between 1957 and 1962. It reached the public in Eau Sauvage, 1966 — a perfume credited to Edmond Roudnitska. Perfumery names its composers. The chemists who make the composition possible are house employees, and the house keeps the name.
Kit · 03
Frankincense
Boswellia sacra · Dhofar, Oman
UNESCO inscribed the Dhofar frankincense sites as World Heritage in 2000: the trees at Wadi Dawkah, the caravan oasis 170 km inland, the ports that moved resin to Mesopotamia, India and China. Antiquity's most valuable luxury trade, formally recognised as heritage — and still harvested at the same site.
Kit · 04
Vetiver
Chrysopogon zizanioides · Haiti / Java
Botany moved it out of Vetiveria and into Chrysopogon; the fragrance trade still writes Vetiveria, because that is the name the market learned first. Who holds the authority to rename a plant, and whose name survives the change, is not a footnote in a material's history.
Kit · 05
Rose absolute
Rosa damascena · Bulgaria / Turkey
One species, four harvests: Bulgaria, Isparta in Turkey, Iran, Kelaat M'Gouna in Morocco. The market has decided Bulgarian is the most prized. Cultivation spread through the Ottoman Empire and Persia — the prestige settled on a European valley. In Kazanlak the flowers are still picked by hand before sunrise and distilled the same day.
And 35 more
Full archive
Six continents · Ancient to synthetic
You buy the kit directly from Perfumer's Apprentice — $107 for all 40 materials, pre-diluted and ready to sniff. Enrollment gives you the members-only dashboard: my notes on every material, political and sourcing context, scent profile maps, exercises, and the full tool suite. One material, explored, per week.
Chapter V The system

This isn't a PDF and a Zoom link.

I built out a custom interactive platform for this program, inspired by my own needs and the needs of years of student feedback.

When you sit down with your kit, you have tools that work alongside your nose: an Accord Builder for combining materials into classic fragrance families, a Perfume Deconstructor that maps your kit materials into iconic perfumes so you can sniff along, and a Timed Sniff Notepad with auto-timestamps for structured sensory testing.

As your vocabulary develops, a Smell Word Cloud tracks the language you reach for — words grow larger as you use them more. Flashcards cover study, visual identification, and quizzes. A Scent Journal captures how your perception shifts week to week.

And for context beyond the vials: a Comparison Wheel mapping the full 40-material archive by scent family (including the ones not in your cohort's rotation), and a Bookshelf of essential reading across perfumery science, history, and craft.

Free to explore — no enrollment required

Cohort members can suggest books to expand the Bookshelf at any point.

Chapter VI The desk

Desk notes · the recurring questions.

FAQ · eight items
i. Do I need any prior fragrance knowledge?
No. The curriculum assumes you can smell and that you're curious. It does not assume you know the difference between a terpene and an aldehyde. We build that vocabulary from the ground up, with the political context attached from the start.
ii. When do we meet, and what's the time commitment?
We meet biweekly on Sundays at 2PM ET — 13 sessions, 13 September 2026 through 7 March 2027, with three weeks off over the holidays (no sessions 27 December or 3 January).
2026 · Sep 13 · Sep 27 · Oct 11 · Oct 25 · Nov 8 · Nov 22 · Dec 6 · Dec 20
2027 · Jan 10 · Jan 24 · Feb 7 · Feb 21 · Mar 7
Every session is recorded, the recording goes up within 24 hours, and it stays in the archive for your full 12 months — if you can't make it live, you can catch up asynchronously. Between sessions, on your own time: daily sniffing exercises, 5–10 minutes — that's the spine of the training, and it's built to be small enough to actually do. Add 20–30 minutes to read the material note, and 1–2 hours if you take the optional writing prompt. You can engage lightly or deeply.
iii. How do I get the materials?
Materials are purchased directly from Perfumer's Apprentice. The kit is their Perfumery Notes Kit — $107, 40 pre-diluted materials, ready to sniff. An optional accompanying book is $20 (hard copy) or $15 (ebook). This keeps your spend with an independent supplier and gives you full transparency over exactly what you're buying.
iv. Are there discounts or payment plans?
Pay your way, in four, or upfront. $600 new, $495 returning alumni — same total either way, no extra cost for instalments. New students can also use Pay Your Way: set your own amounts and dates, $100 minimum to start.

Sliding scale and scholarship seats are funded by brand support. Very limited — join the waitlist. I sincerely hope to be able to offer more in the future.
v. What does the tuition actually cover?
40 individual material pages — each researched, written, and designed by me with sourcing history, molecular context, cultural geography, and structured exercises. 13 live sessions — biweekly Sundays: 12 teaching sessions across the six months, plus a closing session in March. 12 months of access from the day you purchase to the full digital archive, plus the full interactive platform (Chapter V). If it hurts you financially to take this program, I want you to put your needs first.
vi. What makes this different from Scentbird, YouTube, or a weekend workshop?
Depth, politics, and tooling. Subscription boxes send you samples with no context for what you're smelling or why it matters. YouTube teaches fragrance as consumer opinion. Weekend workshops compress everything into a single session and call it done. This is six months with a rotating selection of materials from a 40-material archive — a political and historical lens on each one. You aren't watching content. You're building a vocabulary.
vii. What happens after the program ends?
You get 12 months of access from the day you purchase — the 40 material pages, all the tools, your scent journal, the full archive. That runs past the end of the live program, so you can keep working through the material after the cohort closes. Access ends before the next cohort begins; if you rejoin at the returning alumni rate, a fresh 12 months starts then. The work you did doesn't disappear.
viii. Can a brand sponsor a seat?
Yes. Sponsorship means paying full price ($600) plus materials (~$107) for a participant to attend. It is not a brand placement, a discount, or an editorial relationship. Sponsored participants are full members of the cohort with the same independent curriculum as everyone else. Guest perfumers do not influence what I write about their materials, and sponsorship does not purchase editorial influence of any kind. Learn how you can support this program.

More questions before you enroll — safety, allergies, kit logistics, session policies? Read the full Safety & Logistics FAQ.

Not ready yet?
Get notified when enrollment opens, plus dispatches from the Perfumed Pages archive. No weekly newsletter you'll have to mute.

2026 cohort $150/mo