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I’ve been working for some time on a kind of primer on “getting to know fragrance notes” (or at least, what little I know on the subject). I kept stumbling over the need to debunk some of the common fallacies about the “lists of notes” that are associated with any given fragrance, and I finally gave up and decided to tackle that topic first.

Everything below can be neatly summed up as follows: not everything in a fragrance is necessarily in the list of notes, and not everything in the list of notes is necessarily in the fragrance. There, now I’ve saved you the trouble of further reading.

What are lists of fragrance notes, and where do they come from

The lists of fragrance notes you see here and there on the internet are usually provided by the public relations department of the perfume house in question. They are meant to give some general idea of what the fragrance “contains”, or at least, what the PR department thinks it smells like (or perhaps more accurately, what they think describes it most alluringly to potential customers), but that is all. They aren’t recipes, and they aren’t complete. Sometimes they are very short and sweet. For example, the recently released Ungaro by Ungaro lists only 3 notes: jasmine, saffron and amber. In contrast, Shiseido’s recently re-launched Zen fragrance lists 20: grapefruit, bergamot, peach, pineapple, blue rose, freesia, gardenia, red apple, violet, lily of the valley, hyacinth, rose, lotus flower, patchouli, cedar, musk, white musk, amber, incense and marine plant. There is no reason whatsoever to think that Zen actually contains more separate ingredients than Ungaro…

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