I am currently hovering over vial number 107, trying to decide if the vetiver is grounding the jasmine or if it is simply suffocating it like a heavy velvet curtain in a room with no windows. My nostrils are slightly singed from a day of 47 different scent profiles, and my brain is a muddy landscape of olfactory data. Then my manager, let’s call him Marcus, walks in with that specific gait-the one that says he has something uncomfortable to say but he’s been listening to a leadership podcast on his 17-minute commute. He starts with the bread. ‘Sophie,’ he says, leaning against my workbench in a way that he thinks looks casual but actually just threatens to knock over $777 worth of Bulgarian Rose absolute, ‘your work on the summer collection has been absolutely luminous. Truly, your ability to capture the sun hitting dry pavement is unmatched.’

And sure enough, after 7 seconds of calculated silence, he drops it: ‘However, your communication with the bottling plant has been a disaster. They don’t know what they’re doing, and frankly, neither do we after reading your last three emails.’ Then, before I can even process the sting of being called a ‘disaster’-a word that feels particularly sharp in a lab where precision is everything-he adds the top slice of bread: ‘But really, we’re so glad you’re on the team. Your energy at the morning stand-ups is such a boost for everyone!’

He leaves, feeling like a champion of management. He thinks he ‘handled’ me. Meanwhile, I am standing there with my vetiver, feeling entirely infantilized and, worse, I now realize that his first compliment about my luminous pavement scent was likely a lie. It was a tool. A means to an end. It was the sugar to help the medicine go down, but all it did was make the medicine taste like fermented syrup. The feedback sandwich is not a technique; it is a confession of cowardice. It is a way for the person giving the feedback to protect their own ego from the discomfort of being direct. They don’t want to be the ‘bad guy,’ so they wrap their criticism in a fluffy layer of insincerity that serves no one.

The Rot Beneath the Citrus Top Note

When you try to hide a critique between two compliments, you aren’t being kind. You’re being ambiguous. You’re creating a psychological environment where the recipient starts to view all positive reinforcement as a threat. Every time Marcus tells me I’m doing well now, my heart rate spikes to 107 beats per minute because I’m waiting for the ‘but.’ You’ve essentially poisoned the well of your own praise.

I realized this with a startling clarity yesterday when I discovered I’ve been pronouncing the word ‘hyperbole’ as ‘hyper-bowl’ for nearly my entire adult life. I said it in a meeting with the creative directors. Nobody corrected me. They probably all went home and joked about the fragrance evaluator who doesn’t know her Greek roots. If someone had just stopped me 17 months ago and said, ‘Sophie, it’s hi-per-bo-lee, you sound like an idiot,’ I would have been embarrassed for exactly 7 minutes. Instead, I’ve been walking around in a state of linguistic delusion because everyone was too ‘polite’ to be direct. This is the corporate version of that. We are so afraid of the friction of truth that we prefer the slow slide into mediocrity and hidden resentment.

The Fragrance Lab Ethos: Brutal Honesty

In the fragrance world, we have to be brutally honest. If a scent smells like a damp basement, we call it ‘musty’ or ‘earthy-decaying.’ We don’t say, ‘The bottle design is innovative, but the liquid smells like a wet dog’s ear, although I do like your shoes.’ We just identify the problem so we can fix it. When we lose that directness, we lose the ability to create anything of value. We become mired in a swamp of ‘nice-ness’ that is actually quite cruel.

This lack of transparency is a disease in modern work culture. It suggests that employees are too fragile to handle the truth of their own performance. It treats adults like children who need a sticker on their forehead before they can be told they’ve colored outside the lines. And let’s be honest: the middle of the sandwich-the actual feedback-is often the only part that matters. The bread is just filler. It’s the stuff we discard when we’re actually hungry for growth.

I think about this often when I consider the way we interact with services and people outside the sterile bubble of the corporate office. There’s a certain spirit I’ve encountered, a directness that is actually warmer than any polite corporate hedging. It reminds me of the ‘Dushi’ spirit you find in the Caribbean. In Curaçao, ‘Dushi’ means sweet, or nice, or good, but it isn’t a fake, saccharine sweetness. It’s an authentic appreciation for life. When you stay at Dushi rentals Curacao, there is a sense of genuine hospitality that doesn’t need to hide behind scripts. If something isn’t right, it’s addressed with a smile but also with clarity. That is the difference. Honesty is a form of respect. Hiding the truth is a form of dismissal.

I once spent 27 days trying to balance a scent that had too much Civet in it. It was aggressive. It was unpleasant. My mentor at the time didn’t sandwich her feedback. She took one sniff, handed the strip back to me, and said, ‘This smells like a zoo in a heatwave. Start over.’ I didn’t cry. I didn’t quit. I went back to the lab, reduced the Civet by 77%, and created one of the most successful evening fragrances of that year. Her bluntness was a gift. It saved me another 27 days of wasting my time on a failing formula.

Directness vs. Aggression

We have to stop equating directness with aggression. They are not the same thing. Aggression is intended to harm; directness is intended to inform. When we use the feedback sandwich, we are actually being aggressive in a passive-aggressive way. We are manipulating the emotions of the other person to make our own job easier. We are saying, ‘I don’t respect you enough to believe you can handle the truth, so I’m going to lie to you for a bit first.’

I’ve spent 17 hours this week thinking about how to reform Marcus’s approach. If he had just come in and said, ‘Sophie, the bottling plant is confused by your emails. They need more technical specifications and fewer adjectives. Can we look at the last one together?’ I would have respected him more. I would have felt like a partner in a problem-solving exercise rather than a child being managed. We could have solved the issue in 7 minutes and gone back to our work. Instead, we spent 27 minutes dancing around the issue, leaving me confused and him feeling like he’d checked a box on his ‘Human Resources Best Practices’ list.

Serving the Truth, Unadorned

I’m going to go back to my lab now. I have 107 more vials to get through before the end of the day, and I need to figure out why the sandalwood is reacting so poorly with the citrus. I’m not going to tell the sandalwood it looks pretty before I try to change its chemical composition. I’m just going to change it. Because the sandalwood doesn’t have an ego, and neither should we when it comes to the quality of our work. If we want to build cultures of excellence, we have to be willing to endure the minor discomfort of a direct conversation.

We need to stop feeding each other these soggy, insincere sandwiches and start serving up the truth, raw and unadorned. It’s more digestible in the long run. It leaves a better aftertaste. And it certainly doesn’t leave you wondering if you’ve been saying ‘hyperbole’ wrong for the last 37 years while everyone around you nodded and smiled and told you how ‘luminous’ your vocabulary was.

Building Blocks of Excellence

What would happen if we just said what we meant? What if we valued the person enough to give them the unvarnished reality? We might find that people are much stronger than we give them credit for. We might find that work gets done faster, better, and with 47% less anxiety. We might even find that when we finally do give a compliment, it actually means something.