Guide
Notes, accords and the pyramid
The pyramid is the first thing anybody learns about perfume and the first thing worth understanding properly. It is not three layers stacked in a bottle. It is one mixture, evaporating at different speeds.
Checked against the sources named at the foot of this page on 13 August 2026.
What the pyramid actually describes
A finished fragrance is one liquid. There are no layers in the bottle, nothing is released in sequence, and nothing waits its turn. Everything in it is present from the moment you spray, all at once.
What changes is which parts of it are still there. Aroma materials differ enormously in volatility: some evaporate in minutes, others are still sitting on your skin at bedtime. So the smell you get at ten minutes is dominated by the light materials, and by the time those have gone what is left is a different mixture, which smells different. The pyramid is a way of talking about that.
That is why a fragrance cannot be judged from the cap in a shop. The first sniff is the part of the composition that will be gone before you get to the car.
The three bands, and how much they overlap
One mixture, three overlapping bands
On a scale of eight hours. The bands overlap heavily, which is the point: the base is present from the first second and is simply drowned out until the lighter material has gone. These are the ranges the trade works to rather than measurements, and they move with the materials, the dose and the skin.
Top. Citrus, light herbs, some aldehydes. Bright, immediate, and structurally the least important part of the composition despite being the part that sells it in a shop.
Heart. Florals, spices, most of the character. This is what somebody means when they say what a fragrance smells like, and it is where the majority of the formula usually sits by weight.
Base. Woods, resins, musks, vanilla, animalic materials. Two jobs at once: it is what remains at the end, and it is what slows everything above it down. A fragrance with no base does not smell lighter, it smells like it has fallen over after an hour.
Accords are the real unit of construction
Perfumers do not build fragrances one material at a time. They build accords, which are small groups of materials blended until they stop smelling like their parts and start smelling like one thing, and then they build with those.
The analogy with a musical chord is exact and is where the word comes from. Three notes played together produce something that is heard as one sound with a character of its own, and the skill is in the interval rather than in the individual notes.
What an accord does
blended until they stop being three things
None of the three smells of amber. The accord does. This is why a formula can run to eighty lines and still be described in five words, and why perfumers keep a library of accords rather than starting from single materials every time.
The practical consequence for anybody starting out is that the useful thing to build and keep is not a fragrance. It is a set of accords that work, each recorded with what is in it and at what percentage, so that the next fragrance starts three steps further along.
Balance, and why a formula can be technically fine and still wrong
A common beginner formula is nearly all heart and top, because those are the materials that smell nice on their own. It reads well on paper, smells promising for twenty minutes, and then dies. The base was doing more work than it appeared to be, and there was not enough of it.
The opposite fault is a formula so heavily based that the top never gets out from under it. There is no correct ratio, and anybody who gives you one as a rule is describing their own taste. What is true is that the three bands have to be considered against each other rather than one at a time, and that you cannot tell whether you have it right from the formula alone: you have to smell it over hours.
The pyramid on a product page is a different object
The neat three-tier diagram with five or six named notes in each tier is marketing copy, and it is worth knowing exactly how much to trust it.
- It is frequently written after the fragrance was finished, by somebody who did not make it.
- It names impressions rather than materials. A listed fig or sea salt note usually corresponds to an accord rather than to a bottle of anything.
- It is silent about proportion, which is most of what a formula actually is.
- It leaves out the materials doing the structural work, because musk and base resins do not sell a story as well as bergamot and jasmine do.
None of that makes it dishonest. It is a description written for a customer, not a specification. The mistake is reading one as a recipe and trying to reproduce it, which is a reliable way to spend a year producing something that smells like none of it.
How to actually smell what you have made
On a blotter, dated, and over days rather than minutes. Write what it smells like at ten minutes, at an hour, at four hours and the next morning, and write it before you look at what you wrote last time. Skin as well as paper, because they are not the same and the difference is not small.
Give a finished blend time to settle before judging it at all. A fragrance smelled the day it was mixed is being judged before it has finished becoming itself, and the difference after a few weeks can be substantial.
And smell fewer things than you want to. Three or four materials in a session, properly, beats twenty superficially: the nose fatigues quickly and stops reporting honestly long before you notice it has.
How Orris Bench handles this
Where each material sits in the pyramid travels with it in the library, so a formula knows its own balance rather than leaving you to work it out. The balance updates as you build, so you can see a formula going top-heavy while you are doing it rather than discovering it on a blotter a week later.
A band you like can be saved as an accord and reused, which is the working method described further up this page rather than a filing feature. Every version is kept, so a change that turned out to be wrong can be looked at beside the one before it, and two formulas can be compared side by side.
A note on this page
This one describes craft rather than regulation, so there is no official text behind it to cite. The timings are the ranges the trade works to and vary with the materials, the dose and the person wearing it. The family names and the strength bands are customary usage; the glossary on this site defines them, and the guides on IFRA and on EU allergens carry the sources for anything that is actually a rule.
Common questions
What are top, heart and base notes?
They are not three separate things in the bottle. A finished fragrance is one mixture, and its materials evaporate at very different rates. The most volatile reach your nose first and are gone within minutes: those are the top notes. The middle band carries the character for a few hours and is called the heart. The least volatile are still there many hours later and are the base. The same liquid smells like three different things over a day because different parts of it have left.
What is an accord in perfumery?
A group of materials blended so they read as one smell rather than as their parts. It is the fragrance equivalent of a chord: the point is that you stop hearing the individual notes. A perfumer builds accords, keeps the good ones, and then builds fragrances out of accords rather than out of single materials, which is why a formula can run to eighty lines and still be described in five words.
Why does my perfume smell different after an hour?
Because the parts that were doing most of the talking have evaporated. That is normal and it is designed. What you smell at an hour is the heart, and what is left at six or eight hours is the base. It is also why judging a fragrance from the first sniff off the bottle is judging perhaps five percent of it, and why professional evaluation happens on a blotter over hours or days.
Is the pyramid a real thing or marketing?
Both, and it is worth knowing which is which. The underlying fact is real: volatility varies enormously between materials, and a fragrance genuinely does change over time. The neat three-tier diagram with six named notes per tier is a marketing artifact, often written after the fragrance was finished and sometimes naming things that are not in it at all. Useful as a way to think about structure; not a specification.