Notes Are Not Ingredients

At a glance

Every perfume page on Olfactionary lists "notes," like bergamot, musk, or vanilla. A note describes what a perfume is meant to smell like, decided by the brand or a reviewer. It is not a verified list of what's actually in the bottle. Perfume formulas are trade secrets and are essentially never published, which means no perfume database, including this one, Fragrantica, or Parfumo, can honestly claim to show real ingredient composition. We think that's worth saying plainly, rather than leaving it implied.

Why this came up

A data story we published, The State of Scent, originally described note-frequency stats (how often a note name appears in perfumes' listed notes) using words like "ingredient" and "material." Readers pointed out, correctly, that this blurred a real distinction: a note is a description, not a lab result. We fixed that page's wording and are writing this page so the distinction has one clear, linkable home instead of being re-explained piecemeal on every page that touches it.

The musk example

"Musk" is not one material, it's a broad category standing in for any of dozens of musk aromachemicals used in modern perfumery (the historical animal-derived original is not used at all today). A perfume listing a "musk" note could be built on any number of different synthetic musks with very different chemistry and different regulatory status from each other. Saying "48% of perfumes contain musk" as if that names a single ingredient overstates what the note tells you.

The bergamot example

Real, untreated bergamot oil contains furanocoumarins, compounds that make skin sensitive to UV light, which is why it's an IFRA-restricted material. But most fragrances listing a "bergamot" note use a synthetic, furanocoumarin-free (FCF) version bred specifically to avoid that restriction, or a different citrus aromachemical entirely that simply reads as bergamot. So a "bergamot" note being common in our database is not the same claim as "IFRA-restricted bergamot oil is common in perfume formulas." Those are two different, and often unrelated, facts.

What we do instead

On every page and data story where this distinction matters, we use the word "note," not "ingredient" or "material," for anything derived from listed top/heart/base notes. We reserve "material" for genuine entries in our materials database (chemistry, IFRA status, sourced from IFRA's own published standards), which is a separate, real dataset from note listings. If you spot a page that still blurs the two, let us know and we'll fix it.

See Sources & Methodology for how entries generally are researched and reviewed, and The State of Scent for the note-frequency data this page is explaining.