So a journey that began in 1983 and that was only supposed to last for a fortnight has turned into a lifelong passion and a career!  

Over the years and with the help and guidance of many friends and colleagues it's inevitable that a certain way of communicating and describing fragrances will be learned, and whilst there will be slight variances from fragrance house to fragrance house it is still fair to say that overall there is a common language that we all use, but perhaps with a slightly different accent!

No doubt you will already have a good understanding of the concept of Top, Middle and Base notes, or as they are sometimes referred to.. Head, Heart and Soul notes. You won't be surprised then to see our use of those terms here in describing each fragrance profile to you, and at Fragrance Liaison we tend to default to top, heart and base.  

The concept of top, heart and base notes will certainly apply where your intention will be to use fragrance within products that are applied to, and that stay on the skin, and this will also include soaps where despite the soap being rinsed off, there will undoubtedly be a wonderful lingering fragrance on your skin. So for these product applications the usual rules will apply of top notes dominating for the first 15 minutes or so, the heart notes dominating from then on for about an hour before finally the base notes come to the fore and leave that wonderful lingering impression that we all remember.  This is part of the skill of the creative perfumer, to create and design fragrances where top, heart and base notes work perfectly well together and that transition seamlessly from one stage to another.

When fragrances are used in products such as candles, melts, diffusers etc. the reality is slightly different in that the top, heart and base notes will have significantly less transition time and instead the 'whole' fragrance will tend to be apparent to you at the same time.  Again, here we happily trust the skills of our perfumers to create fragrances for you that have a host of ingredients working together to give the fragrance character and performance that you and your own customers are looking for.

On the topic of skill, contemporary perfumers work with a range of synthetic, nature identical and natural materials to create wonderful fragrances, and it isn't unusual to see them create a particular 'note' by utilising a number of different ingredients.  They may do this because, for example, a particular flower does not have its own fragrance in nature, or perhaps the flower is too delicate to obtain the fragrance oil through distillation or extraction.  Similarly, a particular spice, wood or resin may be far too expensive to actually use, so in all of these instances the perfumer will use their skill, judgement and palette of materials to recreate the desired 'note', and it will be very much a case of 'the whole being more than the sum of the parts'. So don't be surprised when reading our descriptions as it is normal to find a whole number of fragrance notes being used to achieve a surprising overall fragrance, it's all part of the magic!

As far as our range of fragrances are concerned, these have been selected for their relevance, popularity and suitability for use* in your product formats. Going forward we will work with our trends partner to ensure that we continue to bring you fragrances that you can be confident have been selected because they will be popular with your customers, will be high quality, will be technically suitable for your product formats, and most importantly that smell great!!

We're looking forward to working with you and as always if you have any questions, views or tips, please do get in touch here.

* Each fragrance has downloadable SDS, IFRA and Allergen information available, allowing you to see at a glance maximum fragrance dosages allowed in all product formats.