Top, heart and base notes are not a list of ingredients — they are a timeline. Here is how to predict what a bottle will smell like three hours in.
Every note list you have ever read is arranged as a pyramid, and almost everyone reads it as a recipe. It is not. It is a schedule, sorted by how quickly each material evaporates.
Top notes are the volatile ones — bergamot, lemon, aldehydes, pink pepper. They are gone inside fifteen minutes. Judging a fragrance at the counter means judging the part of it you will wear the least.
The heart is what the composition actually is. Rose, jasmine, saffron and orris live here, and they hold from roughly thirty minutes to three hours. If the heart does not appeal to you, nothing later will rescue it.
Base notes — oud, amber, sandalwood, musk, vanilla — are the slowest molecules in the bottle and the reason a parfum is still legible at midnight. They also anchor everything above them, which is why the same rose reads bright over musk and sombre over oud.
So the practical test is patience: spray, walk away, and come back at the ninety-minute mark. What you meet then is the fragrance you have actually bought.