A perfumery glossary

How a fragrance is built

Accord

Several materials blended so they read as one smell rather than as their parts. Borrowed from music, and the analogy holds: the point of a chord is that you stop hearing the separate notes. Most fragrances are built from accords rather than from single materials.

Note

Used two ways, which is the cause of most confusion. A single material as you smell it, and also a descriptive term in marketing copy that may correspond to no material at all. A fragrance advertised with a fig note may contain no fig.

Top note

The most volatile part of a blend: what you smell first and what is gone within minutes. Citrus, light aldehydes, some herbs.

Heart note

Also called the middle. What carries the character of the fragrance for the few hours after the top has burned off. Florals and spices mostly live here.

Base note

The least volatile part, still present many hours later. Woods, resins, musks and animalics. Also what holds the rest together.

Drydown

What a fragrance becomes in its final hours, once the volatile material has left. The part a perfumer judges most carefully and a customer smells least in a shop.

Sillage

The trail left behind the wearer. French, for the wake of a boat. Not the same as strength: a fragrance can be loud on the skin and leave nothing behind it.

Projection

How far the fragrance carries from the skin at a given moment. A skin scent has almost none by design.

Tenacity

How long a material or a fragrance lasts. Measured on a blotter in days for a base material, and on skin in hours for a finished fragrance.

Linear

A fragrance that smells much the same from first spray to last hour, rather than developing. Neither a fault nor a virtue; some are built that way deliberately.

Facet

One aspect of a complex material. Patchouli has an earthy facet, a camphoraceous facet and a sweet one, and a perfumer may be reaching for only one of them.

The families

Ways of grouping finished fragrances by character. Useful for describing and for shopping, and not a technical classification: nothing enforces them and houses disagree.

Chypre

Pronounced sheep-ruh. A structure rather than an ingredient list: bright citrus at the top over a base of oakmoss, labdanum and patchouli. Named after Coty's 1917 fragrance. Modern chypres are usually rebuilt, because oakmoss is now tightly restricted.

Fougere

French for fern, though ferns do not smell of anything. Lavender, coumarin and oakmoss, and the backbone of most traditional men's fragrance for a century.

Amber, formerly oriental

Warm, sweet and resinous: vanilla, benzoin, labdanum, spice. The older name is being retired across the industry, and amber is what most houses now use.

Hesperidic

The citrus family: bergamot, lemon, orange, grapefruit, petitgrain. From the Hesperides of Greek myth and their golden apples.

Aldehydic

The soapy, waxy, abstract lift associated with the fatty aldehydes, and with Chanel No. 5. Powerful at very low dose and unforgiving above it.

Gourmand

Edible: vanilla, caramel, almond, chocolate, coffee. A modern family, generally dated to the 1990s.

Green

Crushed leaves and stems, cut grass, galbanum. Sharp rather than sweet.

Materials, and how they are made

Most of these words describe an extraction method rather than a plant. Knowing which method produced a material tells you a great deal about what is in it and what is not.

Essential oil

Obtained by distillation, usually with steam. Only what survives the heat and travels with the steam ends up in it, so an essential oil is never the whole smell of the plant.

Absolute

Extracted with solvent rather than distilled, at low temperature, then washed with alcohol. Keeps the heavy and heat-sensitive molecules distillation would destroy. Jasmine, tuberose and narcissus are absolutes because they cannot usefully be distilled.

Concrete

The waxy solid from the first solvent extraction, before the waxes are removed. The intermediate step on the way to an absolute, and occasionally used in its own right.

Resinoid

A solvent extract of a resin or balsam rather than of a flower: benzoin, labdanum, myrrh. Thick, dark, and usually a fixative as much as a smell.

Tincture

A material steeped in alcohol over weeks or months, and then used as the diluted liquid. The oldest method in the book and still the only way to get at some materials.

CO2 extract

Extracted with carbon dioxide under pressure, which leaves no solvent residue and needs no heat. Often smells markedly closer to the living plant than the distilled oil does.

Expression

Cold pressing, used for citrus peel. No heat at all, which is why expressed citrus oils smell so bright and why they carry the furocoumarins that make several of them phototoxic.

Enfleurage

Laying flowers on fat until the fat takes up their smell. Historically important, now essentially obsolete outside demonstration and craft work.

Isolate

A single molecule separated out of a natural material rather than synthesized. Natural in origin and single in composition, which puts it awkwardly between the two categories most people use.

Aroma chemical

A single defined molecule, whether synthesized or isolated. Predictable, reproducible, and usually far more powerful than a natural, so used at a fraction of a percent.

Musk

Now always synthetic in commercial perfumery, in three broad chemical groups: nitro musks, largely abandoned; polycyclic musks, restricted on environmental grounds; and macrocyclic musks, the modern default. Some people cannot smell some musks at all, which is normal and is called specific anosmia.

Fixative

A material that slows the evaporation of the things around it, so the fragrance lasts and holds its shape. Usually a heavy base material.

Headspace

Analysis of the air around a living flower or object, so that its smell can be reconstructed without extracting anything. How a fragrance can contain lilac or seashore, neither of which yields a usable natural material.

At the bench

Concentrate

The finished fragrance oil before it is diluted into alcohol, wax or a base. Also called the compound or the juice. Every IFRA limit and every allergen threshold is a percentage of the finished product rather than of this.

Dilution

A material pre-mixed with solvent at a stated strength, so a small amount can be weighed accurately. Kept because a balance cannot honestly weigh four milligrams, not because it is convenient.

w/w

Weight for weight. The convention throughout perfumery: 10 percent w/w means 10 grams of material in 100 grams of finished solution, never 10 milliliters in 100.

Maceration

Leaving a finished fragrance to stand for weeks after blending, so it settles into itself. Judging a fragrance the day it is mixed is judging something that is not finished.

Blotter

The paper strip a material is smelled from. Also mouillette, or smelling strip. Dated and labeled, because the useful part is smelling it again tomorrow.

Batch

One making, identified by a number that appears on the product. The thread from a bottle in a customer's hand back to the lot of every material in it, and what makes a targeted recall possible.

Lot

One delivery of one material from one supplier, with its own certificate and its own composition. Two lots of the same natural are not the same material, which is why the lot is recorded and not just the name.

Solvent

What a material is diluted into. Perfumer's alcohol for most fine fragrance work; dipropylene glycol, triethyl citrate, isopropyl myristate and benzyl benzoate for dilutions and for products where alcohol will not do. They are not interchangeable, so a dilution bottle should say which one it holds.

Strength

The percentage of concentrate in the finished liquid. The names below are customary bands and nothing in law fixes any boundary between them.

Extrait, or parfum

The strongest, roughly 20 to 30 percent concentrate.

Eau de parfum

Roughly 15 to 20 percent. The most common strength for a modern fine fragrance.

Eau de toilette

Roughly 5 to 15 percent.

Eau de cologne

Roughly 2 to 5 percent. Also, confusingly, a specific classical citrus and herb structure that has nothing to do with strength.

The regulation

IFRA

The International Fragrance Association, and by extension its Standards: the industry's own rules on which materials may be used and at what concentration. Not law, and very hard to sell without.

IFRA category

Which kind of finished product the fragrance ends up in, numbered 1 to 12 with lettered subdivisions. A limit is always a limit at a category. Fine fragrance is 4; a candle is 12.

INCI

International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients. The naming system an ingredient list must use, so that the same material is written the same way in every country. Parfum is an INCI name.

CAS number

A unique identifier for a chemical substance. The reliable way to know that two differently named things are the same material, which is why compliance work matches on the CAS and not on the name.

Annex III

The list of restricted substances in the EU Cosmetics Regulation, and where the declarable fragrance allergens live. Annex II is the outright prohibitions.

Fragrance allergen

In the regulatory sense, one of the entries that must be named on the label above a threshold. Not a statement that the material is dangerous, and not a statement about you: it is there so somebody who reacts to it can avoid it.

Responsible person

The named entity that answers for a cosmetic in a given market, holds its file and appears on its label. The EU and Great Britain each require their own.

PIF

Product Information File. The dossier the responsible person keeps for ten years after the last batch, holding the safety report, the method of manufacture and the evidence for any claim.

CPSR

Cosmetic Product Safety Report. Part A is the safety information, which you assemble. Part B is the assessment, which only a qualified assessor may sign.

CPNP and SCPN

The EU's notification portal and Great Britain's, which are separate submissions to separate systems. Notifying one does nothing for the other.

CLP

Classification, labeling and packaging, which is what the initials stand for: the EU chemicals rules that apply when you sell a mixture rather than a finished cosmetic. Where the hazard pictograms come from.

SDS

Safety data sheet: sixteen numbered sections describing a substance or mixture for the people who handle it. Needed when you supply a concentrate to a business, and not needed for a finished cosmetic sold to a consumer in the EU or Great Britain.

MoCRA

The Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022, which gave the US its first real cosmetics regime: facility registration, product listing, adverse event reporting and safety substantiation.

Phototoxicity

A reaction that happens only when treated skin meets sunlight, caused in perfumery mostly by furocoumarins in expressed citrus oils. Why bergamot carries a low limit in leave-on products and none at all in a candle.

A note on this page

The bench and trade terms are craft vocabulary and there is no authority to cite for them; they are defined here as they are actually used, and where usage is genuinely unsettled the entry says so. The regulatory terms are as defined in the instruments named in the other guides on this site, each of which carries its sources.