So it is like a Dalmatian dog, you don’t look at it as being a listing of 100 dots; you see it at the end just as a dog. And you can see how if you have this dog, on the black and white picture, you can remove a few dots from the dog, you will still see the dog and then at one point when you remove two or three dots, the dog is going to disappear in the whole picture. So that’s what we do in perfumery. We put enough of those dots to recognize a certain facet, a floral facet, a woody facet...

— Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, from Creating the Scent of a Virgin: A Lesson on Fine Fragrance Perfumery at Big Think.

Update: Joe points out that to see the actual quote I clipped above, you have to click on the links in the Big Think article — those links will take you to the interview.