A 'hole' in my perfume? Understanding bridging notes questions.

Hmm, I would think that any heart note would be considered a "bridging" note. Nothing beats experimentation. It sounds like you could use a larger amount of florals and spice. Oh, and I've always thought of frankincense as a heart note. Certainly the citrusy aspect of frankincense doesn't last into the base. Perhaps you need less frankincense to keep it from sticking out. Just a few thoughts.

Good luck

I think a great way to experiment and not to waste too much ingredient is to put together your top, heart, and base notes, dilute, then experiment with the ratios you'd like. For instance, if you want a green, woody base, two parts cedar, one frankincense and vetiver, a heart with two parts jasmine and rose, one of nutmeg, and a top of one part galbanum and ten of citrus, then blend to see which ratio brings out the facets you'd like. This can be very tedious, but it's worth it when it glows. Best of luck and remember this is just one of many ways to create and learn about your fragrance materials.
Additionally, I would recommend augmenting heart notes that are expensive, such as rose and jasmine with cheaper florals such as ylang, or with linalool rich woods like rosewood, and consider litsea cubeba to bring lemon notes into the heart. Hope it helps.

If it's any consolation, this is a pretty common problem. After all, if finding the right balance of ingredients were a simple matter, there'd be a lot more brilliant perfumers out there.

The issue you've described is the one I frequently find the most frustrating: there are many times when I come up with accords which, I feel, have interesting potential... but then everything falls apart when I try to marry them with other aspects of my fragrance.

I would echo what Roy said about working on the base/heart/top notes separately, but that approach isn't without its problems either, because sooner or later, the moment will come when you have to see how the whole thing hangs together.

I suspect the only answer is trial and error... followed by more trial and error. Sorry if that seems discouraging, but I think it's probably the only realistic solution. Of course, you could also carry out as much reading as possible on the different ingredients/notes in order to see what other perfumers have discovered about their behaviour... but in the end, it's still going to come down to you, sitting on your own, waving tester strips under your nose, hoping for that magic moment. Keep going :-)

So far, I haven't diluted EO's in anything. I fear I won't be able to smell them enough I kind like them with their full strenght
OR maybe I am wrong and I am loosing a lot of ingredients?

Ancika, I don't dilute EOs either. They get diluted in the final perfume anyway and I like to smell them full strength. If they're very strong, I just use less.

Mumsy, congratulations on your first "bespoke" perfume. I usually mix base, middle and top separately, then put them together (in a small amount) after I'm satisfied with each on its own. At that point it becomes clear what needs to be tweaked in each part. As others have said, this process is trial and error, but I'm finding that with experience the "trial" becomes more educated guesses. The down side of having more experience (and a much wider selection of raw materials) is that I'm far more critical of what I make than I was when I first started out, so the tweaking process goes on a lot longer. I suppose that's a good thing.

Different people formulate perfumes in different ways. I generally go by something that approximates the T/M/B system, knowing that every component is, as you say, on a sliding scale, with different amounts of temporal overlap. If you use natural ingredients, many of them will be present on all time scales since they contain multiple molecules that evaporate at different rates. You could think of the process of formulating a perfume sort of like choosing the rhythm, tempo, mode, key, melody, instrumentation, chords, chord progressions and larger structure that make up a piece of music - each can be analyzed separately, even though the composer knows more or less from the beginning how they will function as a whole. In fact, it is often the whole that is envisioned first, and the process of actually producing the music or writing the score requires some analysis and perfecting of the separate elements. To me, making perfume is a similar process. I "smell" it in my mind the same way I would "hear" a piece of music and then have to figure out how to actually design the formula or write the score. I suppose you would call this a top-down approach. Others take a bottom-up approach, building a piece of music from a basic rhythm or a chord progression, then noodling around that simple skeleton until they have something complex enough to start sounding like music. I'm sure many perfumers take the same approach, starting with some very basic building blocks and messing around until they come up with something that smells good and is more than just the base elements.

One way of thinking about the different classes of notes is as the base versus everything else, with the top notes being ones that actually disappear completely at some point during the course of the drydown, with the other notes persisting at some level throughout. The latter would be the "bridging" notes, which would roughly approximate the middle or heart of the composition. This is probably a more realistic approach than the strict T/M/B scheme.

As you have realized, there is no single way to make a perfume, and everyone has to find their own methods. I use the T/M/B method sometimes, other times I think in terms of T/B with bridging notes, and other times I do everything in parallel. It just depends on what seems like the best approach for the scent that I want to make.

I think some perfumes do function as you suggest - with completely different "instruments" playing different segments, but to me it seems more satisfying to try to construct perfumes using a scheme something like the typical AABA scheme of a jazz standard or popular song in which the main theme is introduced at the beginning, is then reinforced with variations, there's a bridge that may be very different, but then the main theme is reprised (with variations) in the end, bringing closure. This means that the base notes would be somewhat perceptible from the beginning, with other things accompanying them in various ways as the scent develops. This is just my ideal of how to construct a scent and others will go about it from very different points of view. In the end, there is no "right" way to create anything whether it be music, art, or perfume. You have to do it in whatever way works for you.

While the old T/M/B method developed by Septimus Piesse in the 19th century is still useful in creating a full-bodied perfume, it is, in my mind, somewhat irrelevant in this day of using mostly synthetic materials to create a scent. So many scent chemicals today are so powerful and singular in their affect, that they all arise together once arranged by proportion into a beautiful perfume.

Sometimes you just have to bring chaos to order though, throw in a red-herring, so-to-speak, and stir things up with an addition that would normally be unthinkable. If your perfume is just a tad lackluster, perhaps adding something completely 90 degrees from your original intended scent, could give your perfume the punch and complexity you are looking for. I have found that some of the experiments I have tried, while initially smelling off, morph into something quite beautiful given time to mature. Anyway, it is just a suggestion worth experimenting with.

i like the perhaps old fashioned way of starting with the base, the ultimate perfume. once that is right, it should pretty much stay that way. and then i rather like to think of the middle notes as modifiers. they can work in all sorts of ways, together with the basenotes: bridge, mask, stretch, enhance, add a melody, harmony or movement, whatever you need to do to create the shape and development that you have in mind. when that stands, you probably need to finish the top, in such a way that the perfume is appealing straight away.