Sentia

Perfume notes

Reviewed by Lucy Grant, co-owner and fragrance reviewer — 24 September 2026

What are perfume notes?

Perfume notes are the smells a house names in a fragrance, sorted into top notes you notice first, heart notes that follow, and base notes that last longest.

  • Top notes go first. A 2021 review gives citrus top notes 15 to 30 minutes on skin.
  • Heart notes carry the character. The same review gives them three to four hours.
  • Base notes last longest. The review gives amber and musk base notes more than four hours.
  • Houses mostly agree. Bergamot is a top note in 330 of the 331 house pyramids that name it.

Start with one bottle in Sentia: the notes its house publishes come with it — free.

The pyramid

Three tiers, and what each one does

A perfume is one liquid, but you do not smell all of it at once. The review below credits Jean Carles with the picture of a pyramid, and gives each tier a job and a rough life on skin.

  1. TopThe first minutes1/3
    • Citrus
    • Green notes
  2. HeartOnce it settles2/3
    • Spice
    • Leather
    • Florals
  3. BaseWhat is left hours later3/3
    • Amber
    • Musk
Top
First impression
15–30 min
Heart
The main character
3–4 h
Base
What stays
over 4 h

The tiers are a model, not three separate stages you can switch between. The same review describes a competing view, from Brahms and Benaim, in which there are really only top and base notes, and what we call the heart comes from their faster and slower molecules together.

Tier roles, typical materials and times on skin from Rodrigues, Nogueira & Faria, Molecules (2021), a peer-reviewed review read in full on PubMed Central, 15 September 2026.

24 notes, placed

Where houses actually put 24 common notes

A textbook pyramid is a picture of the idea. To see how houses use it, we counted every record in Sentia’s catalogue where the house publishes all three tiers: 1,038 pyramids from 32 houses, each read from the brand’s own product page.

Each figure is the share of pyramids naming that note which place it in that tier. A note listed in two tiers of the same fragrance counts in both, which is why a row can pass 100%. Ordered from notes houses open with to notes they finish on.
NoteTopHeartBase
Bergamot331 pyramids100%0%0%
Lemon134 pyramids98%2%1%
Mandarin144 pyramids97%3%0%
Grapefruit75 pyramids97%3%0%
Pink pepper119 pyramids76%12%12%
Cardamom122 pyramids66%22%11%
Saffron139 pyramids64%29%8%
Lavender72 pyramids42%56%6%
Jasmine286 pyramids10%87%4%
Rose333 pyramids14%88%1%
Orange blossom93 pyramids23%78%1%
Iris / orris146 pyramids3%66%31%
Violet107 pyramids33%64%6%
Oud / agarwood149 pyramids15%27%73%
Leather107 pyramids3%21%77%
Cedar / cedarwood269 pyramids3%20%78%
Patchouli301 pyramids0%17%83%
Vetiver175 pyramids1%13%87%
Sandalwood314 pyramids1%11%89%
Amber261 pyramids2%11%90%
Vanilla376 pyramids2%10%91%
Tonka146 pyramids0%21%79%
Benzoin102 pyramids2%12%86%
Musk429 pyramids2%3%97%

How this was counted

  • Only pyramids with all three tiers. A single list with no tiers says nothing about order, so it is left out.
  • A note counts when the material’s name appears in it as a whole word: “Calabrian Bergamot” is bergamot, “Ambergris” is not amber. Iris is merged with orris, oud with agarwood, cedar with cedarwood.
  • These are fragrances, not houses. Oakcha supplies 227 of the pyramids on its own. With it removed, every one of the 24 notes still lands most often in the same tier.
  • Recounted by web/scripts/note-tiers.mjs on 15 September 2026.

The disagreement

Where the textbook and the houses part ways

The review lists spice, leather and florals as typical heart notes. The florals fit what houses publish: rose sits in the heart of 294 of the 333 pyramids that name it, and jasmine in 249 of 286.

The other two do not.

  • Leather is written as a base note. It is in the base of 82 of 107 pyramids and the heart of only 23.
  • Spices are written at the top. Saffron opens 89 of 139, cardamom 81 of 122, pink pepper 91 of 119.

A review describes typical materials, and a product page is written for the person buying the bottle, so the two do not have to match. The practical point: if you learn notes from what houses publish, expect spice near the start and leather near the end.

A few notes refuse to settle. Iris and orris appear in the heart 97 times and the base 45 times. Lavender is split between the top, 30 times, and the heart, 40 times. Oud is mostly a base note, 109 of 149, yet 22 pyramids open with it.

What does your own shelf lean on?

When a bottle you add to Sentia is in the catalogue with a published pyramid, the pyramid comes with it, so you can read what is in the fragrances you already own.

Once at least two of your bottles have a published list, Look up tells you which scent families they lean towards and shows fragrances that lean the same way.

Open Sentia

Read closer

One pyramid at a time

The table shows the pattern. These guides take a single house’s list apart, including the notes it leaves out.

Questions

Still wondering

What is the difference between top, middle and base notes?
How long they stay. Top notes make the first impression and fade within about half an hour. Middle notes, also called heart notes, give the fragrance its main character for a few hours. Base notes are what is still there after that. Some houses write 'head' instead of 'top'; it is the same tier.
Do all perfumes have top, middle and base notes?
Not on paper. Some houses publish one list with no tiers at all, as Initio does for Side Effect. When we counted Sentia's catalogue on 15 September 2026, 1,038 of the 1,300 records with a published note list named all three tiers; the others gave one or two.
Why do websites list different notes for the same perfume?
They copy from different places. A house publishes its own list, while community databases collect notes that members add over the years. This site uses the house's list and names where it came from. The Creed Aventus guide puts the two versions side by side.

Every pyramid counted here is in Sentia’s catalogue of 2,798 fragrances. Look one up, or add the bottles you own.