Note Pyramid

Top notes are what you smell in the first 10–30 minutes: usually bright, volatile, often citrus or fresh aromatic. Middle (heart) notes settle in over the next 1–4 hours and define the fragrance's core character — typically florals, fruits, soft spices. Base notes are what's left after 4+ hours and frequently last the longest: woods, ambers, musks, resins. The pyramid is a marketing convention more than a chemistry chart — modern fragrances don't actually move through it as cleanly as the diagram implies, especially gourmands and ambers that compress top through base. But the structure is still useful for reading a fragrance description and predicting how it'll perform.