On TikTok, we all see the videos of those people looking for a perfume dupe, or people smelling perfume and perfectly identifying those notes. However, when you’re looking for a new signature scent, it can get extremely confusing, especially shopping online.

Perfume scents have layers to them. They have top notes, heart notes, and base notes. This is the reason why you spray perfume and it smells one way, and then you smell it an hour later and it’s completely different.

Top notes only last for 5-15 minutes, and then go to the heart notes. This is because they evaporate quicker than the other notes. Heart notes typically last around 30-60 minutes, and then they go to base notes. These last this long because they evaporate slower than top notes, but faster than base notes. Base notes can last around 6 hours.

Some common top notes are citrus, fruits/nuts, and herbs. Common heart notes are cinnamon, rose, ylang-ylang, lemongrass, and neroli. Common base notes are cedarwood, sandalwood, vanilla, patchouli, and musk.

Each of these scents are just a subcategory, so there’s other scents within them. Within the citrus category, you can find orange, lemon, bergamot, clementine, pomelo, and neroli. Within the fruits/nuts, you will commonly find acai, apple, almond, cherry, peach, strawberry, and mango.

Floral notes are fairly self-explanatory, because they are flowers, but in that category would be roses and ylang-ylang. There’s also greens and herbs, with scents like mint, tea, leaves, and lemongrass.

Then, there’s spices, with cinnamon, cloves, coffee, saffron, and vanilla. There’s sweets and gourmand scents, including sugar, cake, caramel, cookie, cotton candy, chocolate, honey, maraschino cherry, milk, and vanilla again.

Finally, there’s the mosses and woods, including cedarwood, sandalwood, and mahogany. Musk is a more natural, outdoorsy scent.

For example, Victoria’s Secret Love Spell Body Spray has top notes of peach, cherry blossom, and apple, middle notes of lilac, jasmine, and lily-of-the-valley, and base notes of tamarind, musk, and woods. This means it will originally smell like fruits, and then slowly transition to a light floral, sweet, powdery scent.

Another example would be Sci Fi by Ellis Brooklyn. It has top notes of orange and bergamot, middle notes of green tea and pink freesia, and base notes of vanilla bean and cashmere wood. This means it will originally smell like citrus, and slowly transition to a sweet, gourmand scent with a hint of flowers.

All in all, perfume notes and scents can feel so overwhelming, and not one’s taste, but with some deep dive into the notes, one can find a scent special for them.