Scent Notes Feature Faces
Turning complex fragrance data into a scannable, mobile-first discovery layer, reducing purchase uncertainty for GCC shoppers who cannot smell before they buy online.
Selling scent without smell
Faces is one of the GCC's leading beauty and fragrance retailers, with a catalogue spanning hundreds of perfumes across luxury and mass-market brands. In the GCC, fragrance is a significant cultural purchase: perfumes are gifted extensively, worn as personal signature, and often selected based on detailed knowledge of scent profiles.
The problem was that Faces' product pages gave customers almost no scent information. In-store, a sales associate or a physical tester does that work. Online, customers were left to guess or go somewhere else.
I was tasked with designing a scent notes section that integrated seamlessly into the existing product page, felt visually coherent with the Faces brand, and worked primarily on mobile where the majority of traffic arrived.
What GCC shoppers actually need to decide
Competitor analysis across Amazon, Sephora, and GCC-specific perfume retailers revealed a wide range of approaches, from dense ingredient lists to visual scent wheels. User interviews and surveys surfaced what actually mattered to customers buying perfume online in this market:
- Top, middle, and base notes the three-layer structure is how experienced buyers understand a fragrance's journey. It needed to be the primary information architecture.
- Note descriptions in plain language names like "heliotrope" mean nothing to most buyers. Short, sensory descriptions were essential alongside note names.
- Scent family classification "Floral Woody", "Oriental", "Fresh Citrus" help with discovery and comparison, especially for buyers earlier in their fragrance journey.
- Visual icons for each note images of note ingredients made the section scannable at a glance without requiring text comprehension first.
The key insight: fragrance discovery is the purchase decision for GCC shoppers, not a supporting element. The design needed to treat scent information as primary content on the product page.
Structure, hierarchy, and scannability
The classic perfumery three-layer structure became the primary organising principle. Each layer is labelled with a plain-language explanation so users unfamiliar with perfume terminology still understand the progression. Visual note icons, expandable detail sections, and scent family tags allowed both expert buyers and casual shoppers to navigate the feature at their own depth.
Top, Heart, and Base note structure with ingredient icons and plain-language descriptions
Finding products with the same scent profile
Beyond displaying scent information on individual product pages, we designed an overlay that lets shoppers discover other products sharing the same scent profile. A customer who responds to a particular base note like Amber or Oud can now explore the full catalogue through that lens, without needing to know the names of what they are looking for.
This feature extended the value of the scent notes system from a single product detail into a site-wide discovery tool, directly contributing to increased session depth and cross-product exploration.
Scent discovery overlay: browsing other products that share the same fragrance profile
A feature that opened a new product category
The scent notes feature shipped to the live Faces site and was received positively by internal stakeholders who noted strong alignment with GCC customer purchase behaviour. The more telling signal of success came shortly after launch:
Signal of Success
The engraving feature, which I also designed, was added to bestselling perfumes following the success of the scent notes work. A customer who understands a perfume's character deeply enough to buy it online is also a customer who might personalise it as a gift. The scent notes feature created the confidence; engraving captured the gifting occasion.
Engraving on bestselling perfumes, a feature made possible by the confidence the scent notes layer created
What this project taught me about GCC ecommerce
The GCC perfume market operates differently to Western markets in ways that matter for product design. Fragrance is a significant cultural and social category, not just a personal care purchase. Designing a feature without understanding that context would have produced something technically correct but culturally off. The scent discovery overlay that emerged from this work is a direct product of taking that market context seriously from the start.
The next evolution I would pursue: filtering by scent profile across the entire catalogue, and personalised recommendations based on purchase history and browsing behaviour. The signal data from scent note interactions already exists. It just has not been connected to discovery yet.