A fragrance is a pleasant smell, especially one that's deliberate or carefully crafted. When you walk past a bakery and catch the fragrance of fresh bread, or when you smell flowers in a garden, you're experiencing a fragrance. The word suggests something more refined than just any old smell: a fragrance is usually sweet, appealing, or delicate.

Perfume makers create fragrances by carefully combining different scents, sometimes mixing dozens of ingredients to get exactly the right smell. A single fragrance might include vanilla, lavender, citrus, and other natural or synthetic scents. Similarly, companies add fragrances to soaps, candles, and cleaning products to make them smell nice.

While smell is a neutral word that can describe anything your nose detects (good or bad), fragrance specifically means something pleasant. You wouldn't call the smell of garbage a fragrance, but you might describe the scent of pine trees in a forest that way. When something is fragrant, it means it gives off a pleasant fragrance naturally, like fragrant roses or fragrant herbs in a kitchen garden.