Top, heart, base: three evaporation speeds
A perfume is a blend of materials that evaporate at different rates. The most volatile make up the top notes: citrus like bergamot and lemon, aromatic herbs, aldehydes. They hit hard when you spray and then fade, usually within a few minutes to half an hour. Heart notes, often floral or spicy, settle in next. They carry the character of the scent for roughly one to four hours. Base notes are the heaviest: woods and resins, vanilla or musk, oakmoss. They last for hours on skin and sometimes until the next day on clothing. Treat these times as rough guides. Concentration, skin and temperature all shift them. A cologne can lose its top in ten minutes, while an extrait keeps its base for a very long time.
How to read a pyramid on a perfume page
On every Perfumdle perfume page, notes are listed in three tiers. That order tells you when you will notice each note, not how much of it is in the bottle. A useful habit is to smell the scent on skin three times. Right after spraying, you are judging the top. After an hour, the heart. Late in the afternoon, the base. Plenty of perfumes are bought on their top notes in a shop, yet it is the base that stays with you all day. Eau Sauvage is a good case: bright lemon at first, then a much drier finish of oakmoss and vetiver. One more tip: never judge a perfume on a paper strip alone. Skin warms the base notes and changes the whole balance.
Where the model falls short
The pyramid is a handy simplification, not a law. For a start, the tiers overlap. Base notes are there from the first second, just hidden behind the top. Some perfumes are also close to linear. They barely change between spraying and evening because they are built around a few very diffusive base materials. Mugler’s Angel gives a sense of this: its sugary accord is there from start to finish. Finally, listed notes are often impressions rather than ingredients. The "candy floss" in Angel or the "sea salt" in various scents are built accords, not materials anyone distils. So read a pyramid as a rough map. It helps you get your bearings, and your skin does the rest.
