Common Perfume Base Notes

The Most Popular Scents Used to Warm and Fix Fragrances

Mar 12, 2008 Dulcinea Norton-Smith

Base notes of perfume are perhaps the most important as they last the longest. There are many base notes but some are more popular than others.

Perfumes are usually made up of top, middle/ heart and base notes. The base notes will usually be the heaviest and strongest scent and will be smelt long after the top and middle notes have faded.

How Are Base Notes Chosen?

Base notes will be chosen because of their fixative properties, their strength, their scent or more often than not all three of these. The base notes will often help dictate which fragrance family a perfume sits in. There is no prescriptive scent which a base note needs to have however they will usually be one or more of the following:

• warm
• sensual
• mossy
• spicy
• exotic
• smoky
• woody
• heavy, heady or strong

Many base notes have been used for centuries and so are now rare and exotic and only used in the most exclusive and expensive scents such as Clive Christian No 1, the world's most expensive perfume. In addition many base scents are now seen as politically incorrect as they may be taken from rare animals. This has led to almost identical synthetic versions being created. Most other base notes are extracted from plant and tree resin.

Some of the Most Common Base Notes

• Amber is very often found as a base note of perfumes as it is a good fixative and liked by most people. It is warm and woody. It most often comes from fossil resin of the fir tree.
• Ambergris is from the stomach of sperm whales and is a fatty substance. It is very unpleasant until processed but then becomes warm and pleasant. For obvious reasons, it is rarely used nowadays and a synthetic version is used in its place.
• Opoponax is a resin which smells like sweet liquorice.
• Patchouli is earthy and sweet and instantly recognisable to anyone who lived through the '70s or has a fondness for incense sticks. It comes from the South East Asian patchouli plant. Patchouli is very heady and is one of those love-it-or-hate-it scents.
• Tonka bean is used in many perfumes as a base note to give an oriental flavour. It is strong and comes from the pod of the South American tonka tree. It smells of caramel and marzipan. Due to its candy shop smell it is quickly becoming a very popular base note for many celebrity scents and other fragrances marketed towards the younger consumer.
• Musk, like amber and tonka bean, is one of the most commonly used base notes. Traditionally it came from the musk glands of the Himalayan musk deer, but is today synthetically created. It can be quite strong, but is now produced in a variety of strengths.
• Sandalwood is almost as widely used as amber and musk and it comes from the sandalwood tree. Yardley has a fragrance entirely dedicated to sandalwood.
• Balsam is a resin from some trees and plants, and is sweet-smelling.
• Benzoin is a resin from the stryax tree. It is an excellent fixative and gives a chocolaty note.
• Courmarin is found in tonka beans and smells like marzipan.
• Leather nowadays usually comes from specific birch and fir trees rather than animal hides, and gives a warm smoky scent.
• Oakmoss comes from a lichen most often found on oak trees. It is oaky and mossy.
• Olibarnum is a resin from the boswellia tree and is spicy and strong.
• Vetiver is extracted from khuskhus grass from, among a few other places, India and the Caribbean. Its scent is green and earthy.

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fir tree