Notes
Notes are the strangest and most esoteric-seeming part of perfume hobbery. Especially because notes aren't always used consistently and vary a lot from house to house, culture to culture, and market to market. This section will likely be the most work-in-progress, as I'm still learning a lot about notes and their explanations. As you peruse this section, I want you to image notes like color names. My turquoise might not be the exact same turquoise as yours but our concepts of them are both similar enough (blueish green) to share experiences in a relevant way.
In this section, I'll go over some of the language used around notes and then also go note by note in alphabetical order.
Top, Middle, and Base
Perfume is a fleeting experience, and not just in a poetic way, the smells you smell are the death throes of the scent chemicals in the fragrance. That is, as entropy occurs and the materials break down, tiny particles break off and float away. Once these particles hit the olfactory center of a creature (or perhaps before, if a tree falls in the forest?), they become smells.
Some chemicals in the fragrance oil itself, break down quicker than others. This is where we get the concept of "Top, Middle, and Base" notes and the most intriguing portion of the art of perfumery imo.
Top
Top notes chemically break down the quickest. This means that they're going to be much stronger at first application, but die quickly. Many rare, hard to find in a perfume fragrance components would be classified as top notes (if their essences can be captured at all), because they are already so volatile, that they're destroyed or die naturally during the extraction process. Processes used to capture these scents, like enflourage, also famously create very light, short-lived scents. In most cases when you find a scent with lilac as a note, for example, that fragrance has been created using synthetic components that, while maybe don't create a perfect match, get the essence of the scent into the fragrance, though usually still as a fleeting top note. I mention this because it's important to temper your expectations when you discover a note you love is a top note. It's not that perfumers don't like your note and formulate it to disappear, it's that that scent simply can't exist for too long.
Top notes tend to stick around from anywhere between 5-30 minutes. But chemical magic can be done to keep the sense of a top note around in the fragrance. For example, a lemon pie scent that, while far less lemoney 2 hours in, still smells like a lemon pie. It's likely the perfumer added something longer lasting but still tangy/sour to work with the gourmand elements to create the illusion of lemon pie.
Examples of top notes:
- Citrus Fruits
- Light, Airy Florals
- Bright herbals (bergamot, basil, eucalyptus, lavender, and most notably - mint)
- Effervescense (aldehydes, ozone)
Middle
Middle notes are just what they sound like. Notes that don't stick around for too long but don't disappear right away either. While technically you spend the most time with the base notes, the base notes usually spend awhile as background singers, and when they do come to the forefront it's usually small and close to the skin. My opinion is that you spend most of your meaningful perfume time with middle notes. When I'm scanning notes of a fragrance, my eye goes right to the middle notes. To me, they will give you the best sense of what your experience with the perfume is going to be. I think you can get away with trying frags with top or base notes you aren't a huge fan of, but not middle notes.
Middle notes stick around from anywhere between 1 and 3 hours, give or take. Sometimes they smear their remnants onto the base notes, like some kind of frag goo trail.
Examples of middle notes:
- Many spices, especially the Christmas Spices (cinnamon, clove, allspice, but also black pepper and cardamom)
- White florals (jasmine, gardenia, tuberose)
- Spicy florals (carnation)
- Powdery florals (violet, rose, iris)
- Red fruits (raspberry, strawberry, blackberry)
- Stone fruits (plum, peach, nectarine)
- Zingy green tree-types (balsam, pine, that sort of thing)
Base
Base notes are the notes deep in the belly of the perfume. Sometimes completely hidden until their louder, shorter-lived counterparts keel over. I've noticed online as of late people seem to be fully base note oriented, and I can get why. Longevity is incredibly popular in the perfume market right now and if base notes stay around the longest, it follows that people would hone in on them when choosing fragrance. But, as mentioned, I don't find this to be the best course of action. Base notes sometimes function the way good folley work does, you don't specifically notice them, but their presence lends itself subconsciously to the fragrance. But, this isn't always true, and tends not to be true for certain types of fragrances like gourmands, whose most recognizable elements tend to be their base notes.
Though not always immediately noticable, base notes tend to stick around for anywhere between 3 and 8 hours.
Examples of base notes
- Zingy wood tree-types (cedar, balsam, sandalwood, that sort of thing)
- Savory, bitter elements (coffee, benzoin)
- Resins (frankincense, myrrh, dragonsblood)
- Gourmand elements (vanilla, sugar, "friedness")
- Deep herbals (patchouli, vetiver, cumin, tumeric)
Note List
Classic Notes
These are the notes even non-hobbyists tend to know. Old, well established notes, usually the names of actual substances used in perfuming. Let's take a look:
- Amber
Amber isn't actually made of the hardened tree sap we all know from Jurassic Park. Much to many folks' surprise, Amber is a fantasy note. Amber in perfume refers to a combination of elements that most commonly combine to create something resin-ey, warm, and just a little bit delicious. These elements can include vanilla, ambergris, patchouli, styrax, or benzoin. However, Amber is very versatile and sometimes shows up in blends with color word modifiers. Ambers like "Blue Amber" or "White Amber" are usually cooler and more bitter, often having a soapy sensation.
- Ambergris
Ambergris is a waxy substance found in the digestive systems of sperm whales. Nowadays, most ambergris is actually ambroxan, a synthetic substitute. It is characterized by its sweet and salty complexity. A vanillic wonder tinged with the brine of the sea.
- Aquatic Notes
Aquatic notes are notes people often refer to and intrinsically understand, but find hard to explain. Aquatic notes are described as fresh, watery, sometimes soapy. Usually, these notes are made of elements like ozone, juicy green notes (herbs like mint and basil), airy florals (like lilac or iris), and occassionally some fruits like melons. Some folks don't like the use of this note term, because it doesn't truly have any uniting factor or component. But I like that it's a vibe.
- Animalic Notes
Animalic notes describe scent components originally derived from animals. These include musk, the indoles (poop), ambergris, and components that read meaty, fleshy, milky or sweaty. The most common animalic notes are ambergris, civet, musk, castoreum, honey, and milk.
- Castoreum
Castoreum is a type of musk derived from the glands of aquatic mammals like beavers and platypus. It is described as smelling similar to raspberries and vanilla.