Jill McKeever’s ‘Perfume Club’ trains your nose to define, detail, and delight at any scent

For Strange Women studio // Photo provided by Jill McKeever

With just one sniff, Jill McKeever can recognize and correctly describe over 200 unique scents organized in her wooden “perfume organ”. This isn’t because she has a huge nasal cavity (her nose is actually perfectly normal) but because of years of olfactory training and carefully curating her line of all-natural fragrances. 

McKeever’s perfume organ—a crescent moon-shaped wooden row of shelves holding scent bottles—is on a worktable in the back of her perfumery, For Strange Women, where she meticulously crafts her fragrances by mixing extracts down to the thousandth of a gram. 

For Strange Women was established by McKeever in 2009, selling her entirely plant-based scents to a large online audience and from their storefront in Crossroads Art District ever since. While McKeever loves what she does, she says she had to carve her own path: There aren’t many places to learn the science of scent. 

“We don’t have training in real life; we don’t have education,” McKeever says. “We don’t have classes at school that teach us scent, and when we’re young, we don’t get taught scent the way we get taught vision.” 

McKeever has been looking for an outlet to share her expertise in this field and realized that more people wanted to learn her skill than she expected. 

“I’ve noticed an increased interest in the last five years or so,” McKeever says. “People keep asking if I’ll do a workshop or a class; people are really more excited about perfume than they used to be.” 

For Strange Women perfume organ // Photo provided by Jill McKeever

Teaching how to make perfume is certainly no easy task, as McKeever says it would take years to impart her secrets of perfumery. However, olfactory training is a skill accessible to all, and that’s what McKeever has decided to focus on teaching.

According to McKeever, olfactory training is similar to wine tasting with its sensory perception, yet the world of scents has far more to explore.

“With perfume we have so many different natural materials, and all of these have their best regions, exactly the same as wine in terms of the beauty of this craftsmanship,” McKeever says. “This is a palette that is just a million times more interesting and expansive than wine alone, and people love learning about it.” 

McKeever’s first session of teaching scent perception, or her first “Perfume Club,” was July 27 of this year, and she says these workshops will continue on to help her customers learn what they like and how to accurately describe it. 

“I’m trying to bridge a gap for people. They know they love scent, they don’t know why or what they love,” McKeever says. “They’re trying to define what they’re looking for and learn a little more about it. It’s not about making your own so much as having an appreciation for scent itself and perfume.” 

Photo provided by Jill McKeever

Attendees will get a list of terms to help them describe smells, and McKeever will walk them through their feelings, descriptors, and even memories they associate with each scent.

Scent memory is a big focus for McKeever’s fragrance creation as well as the Perfume Club event, as McKeever says that’s the quickest way for people to begin to remember and distinguish smells.

“Once you have a scent memory, once you can say you know what cedar wood smells like, or something else really common in your life, like people love petrichor, the smell of rain, you can begin to branch out from there,” McKeever says. “There are lots of things you already have in your scent memory; it comes down to studying and expanding that slowly.” 

Outside of scent memory and descriptive words, McKeever teaches how to use adjectives associated with senses outside of smell to define a perfume or extract. 

“There are all these other descriptors that aren’t smell-based. This is something I use a lot in my work; I like to go tactile with my perfume. I like to explore dry, dusty, oily, feathery, waxy, silky,” McKeever says. “You want those types of textures in a perfume because you can go that direction with it.” 

The next Perfume Club event will be on August 16. For Strange Women’s store is in Crossroads Art District behind The Bauer and is open Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.