Balance is everything in the art of fragrance crafting. Whether you’re layering scents, or wearing a single note, it’s important to get the balance just right in fragrance to create a sweet fruity cohesive experience with a lingering note of beauty on the skin. Why is balance important in a fragrance, but what is it exactly?
In this blog, we’ll focus on the 1 Ingredient that makes (or breaks) the perfect fragrance: essential oils, and why they are so important to the fragrance we create. In this, we’ll present how HBNO sources their best essential oils and how they utilizes them as natural ingredients to bring scent harmony. So whether or not you’re a seasoned perfume junkie or a new devotee, learning about balance will enhance each perfume you wear.
Why Balance Matters in Fragrance
When you apply perfume you create a melodious interchange of top, heart, and base notes. This means that a single note can feel overpowering or another can fade too quickly and throw the whole fragrance out of balance. Balance in fragrance is essential there as well because it makes sure all parts of the perfume gel together to create a beautifully seamless scent journey from beginning to end.
Creating balanced fragrances does require essential oils. Because they’re based directly on nature, meaning they can be layered, they get thick, complex profiles. Another example is — lemon essential oil is bright, and sandalwood essential oil is really deep and grounding, and when you pair them together they feel well-rounded: it smells fresh, but it smells like it’s warm.
At HBNO we focus on using high-quality, essential oils capable of creating harmonious, and long-lasting scents. When you’re littering a custom perfume or using a single oil, the key to signature aroma lies in knowing how the different notes work together.
The Building Blocks of Balance: Top, Heart, and Base Notes
To truly grasp the concept of balance in fragrance, it’s helpful to understand the different layers that make up a perfume: top, heart, and base notes.
- Top Notes: These are the first scents you experience when you first put on perfume. Fresh, light, and fleeting, they tend to grab your notice. For example, citrus oil such as lime essential oil or orange essential oil.
- Heart Notes: The heart notes then materialize after the top notes disappear on the skin. These are the basis of the fragrance, and they linger for longer. Lavender, rose and chamomile essential oils are some of the popular heart notes.
- Base Notes: The base notes are the pyramid of the perfume providing this backdrop with depth and longevity. These are the smells that stick to your skin when your top and heart notes wear off. Basic equivalent base notes are frankincense and cedarwood essential oil.
The secret of a good perfume is a wonderful transition from layer to layer. Top notes, heart notes, and base notes are what make a well-composed fragrance — top notes to draw you in immediately, heart notes to keep you engaged, and base notes to ground the experience.
How Essential Oils Create Scent Harmony
You can use essential oils in your fragrance crafting because they can blend together naturally to create scent harmony. Essential oils offer complex, nuanced profiles, when layered they work together beautifully because they are derived from plant sources.
Suppose you want a blend of bergamot essential oil (top note), chamomile essential oil (heart note), and cedarwood essential oil (base note). Smooth chamomile is uplifted by the zesty brightness of bergamot and earthy cedarwood builds depth and warmth, for a very mellow fragrance.
Essential oils at HBNO all work together well, so it’s easy to put together balanced, harmonious blends. Whether you’re leaning towards a fresh, floral, or earthy vibe, a new combo is brewing.
The Role of Fixatives in Maintaining Balance
This brings us to another important part of balance: the longevity of the fragrance; for a fragrance not to fade unequally over time. That’s where fixatives come into play. They contain fixatives, ingredients to slow down the evaporative action of the more volatile top, and heart notes that make it stay longer on the skin.
The use of natural fixatives, i.e., myrrh or frankincense, can make lighter notes feel anchored and allow the overall balance of your fragrance to be preserved. If you add fixatives into a blend with the perfume it will last longer because all the layers of the perfume will actually stay and come together for a longer period.
At HBNO we often combine our essential oils with with natural fixatives to maintain a well-balanced fragrance from the first place to the last. The richness of myrrh essential oil lends it to adding depth, and longevity to a floral or citrus blend.
Crafting Your Own Balanced Essential Oil Fragrance
It can be fun and rewarding to come up with your balanced fragrance, which is why you should work with essential oils of the highest quality HBNO offers. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started:
1. Choose Your Top, Heart, and Base Notes
You’ll need to have oils of each category to create a balanced fragrance. Pick whether the vibe you are going for is warm and deep, or fresh and light. When you have an idea decide on 1 or 2 oils for each layer.
- Top Notes: Spearmint essential oil, Lime essential oil
- Heart Notes: Rose essential oil, tea tree essential oil
- Base Notes: Patchouli essential oil, sandalwood essential oil
2. Experiment with Ratios
For a start, experiment with the ratio of oils in your blend. Common formula: 30% top notes, 50% heart notes, and 20% base notes, but feel free to experiment with the percentages.
Let’s use this as an example: a blend of 3 drops lime essential oil (top), 5 drops rose essential oil (heart), and 2 drops sandalwood essential oil (base) provides you with the loud citrus, delicate but present flowers, and a perfume-like woodiness.
3. Add a Fixative
If you follow a natural approach to planning your essential oil blend, ensure that your blend will last by adding a natural fixative such as frankincense or myrrh essential oil. It’s these oils that will help balance the more volatile top notes and stabilize the scent so that it stays the same throughout the day.
4. Test and Adjust
Once you have your blend, put some onto your skin and have a sniff to see how the fragrance changes with time. By changing the ratio, you can adjust the amount of the top notes fading before the base, or you can up the base notes if the heart side of it is too weak to be present in a balanced form.
HBNO’s Commitment to Balanced Essential Oil Blends
At HBNO, we think good fragrances are those that have a perfect balance of fragrance composition. The benefits of creating custom blends are endless, thanks to our massive selection of essential oils, which ensures that you can have everything you need on hand to create harmonious and long-lasting blends. Whether you choose to blend your perfume or are just looking for a pre-made blend you know that we make them with care at a level we take pride in. We do this using only our most natural ingredients.
Quality is something that means a lot to us, meaning that all our oils are sourced and tested carefully to deliver the highest quality scent profile. But whatever your daytime floral perfume needs, or your evening dark, woodsy scent needs, HBNO has the oils you need to get the perfect balance.
Conclusion: Finding Your Scent Harmony
As an art and a science, creating balance in fragrance is a science in itself. No, you can’t make a perfume without knowing how top, heart, and base notes work together and what makes a perfume feel well-rounded and harmonious, but you can do it by learning about how top, heart, and base notes work together and by choosing high-quality essential oils.
HBNO’s offer of a wide choice of natural essential oils makes scent harmony easy to achieve. Balance is at the forefront of everyone, and we put care and effort into all our fragrances and our perfumes whether you are making your own or simply enjoying one of ours. Well then, go out and explore the crazy world of balanced fragrances, you’re in for a treat.
