Every fragrance is built from notes, and most people have smelled all of them without ever being told what they were called. This is the plain-English version: what each note smells like, how it behaves once it is in the air, and which Wisp oils carry it.
No marketing adjectives that mean nothing. Where a note is divisive, it says so.
Perfumery splits notes into three layers, and in a diffuser the difference is more obvious than it is on skin.
Top notes are small, light molecules. They hit first and leave first — usually the citrus. In a heated diffuser or a candle they are largely destroyed before you smell them, because heat boils them off. In a cold-air diffuser nothing is warmed, so they survive.
Heart notes arrive a few minutes in and carry the middle of the evening. Most florals live here.
Base notes are heavy and slow. They are what is still in the room hours later, and what you smell faintly the next morning. Woods, resins, musk.
A good blend is not a list of nice smells. It is a sequence.
Lemon — sharp, clean, zesty, and the first thing to go. The note that benefits most from waterless diffusion.
Orange — rounder and sweeter than lemon. Reads warm and fresh at the same time, which is a hard trick.
Bergamot — a citrus with a floral softness and a faint bitterness. This is the Earl Grey note.
Jasmine — loud, sweet, heady, with an almost animal edge at full strength. Strong enough that a small room needs less of it.
Rose — nothing like rose soap. Can be dewy and green, or deep and jammy, depending entirely on how it is handled.
Violet — two different things under one name. The flower is powdery and shy; the leaf is green and crisp.
Sandalwood — creamy, soft, milky. The least sharp wood there is, and one of the longest-lasting.
Cedar — dry and pencil-like. Gives a blend a spine, and keeps a room smelling clean rather than cosy.
Amber — not the fossilised stone. A built accord: warm, resinous, slightly powdery, the note that makes a room feel like it has a fire in it.
Vetiver — a root, not a wood. Earthy, smoky, dry. The most divisive note on this page.
Leather — an accord rather than a material. Smoky and dry, closer to a tack room than a handbag.
Musk — soft, warm, close to clean skin. Almost boring alone; it is what holds everything else together.
Persimmon — honeyed and gentle, between apricot and ripe pear, without the sharpness most fruit notes carry.
There are over a hundred notes across the Wisp range. Most of them appear in one or two oils, and a page for each would be a hundred near-identical pages saying very little. These are the notes that run through enough of the range to be worth writing about properly.
If you are looking for a note that is not here, the Fragrance Finder will get you to the right oil faster than a list would.
Wisp oils are composed fragrance oils, made for how a room smells. They are not essential oils and we make no therapeutic claims for them. Several of the notes above — musk, amber, leather, persimmon — do not exist as extractable materials at all and are built in a laboratory, which is normal practice in fine fragrance and has been for a century.
Every oil comes in 50ml and 125ml for reservoir machines. If you want to know whether our oils will work in a diffuser you already own, the diffuser compatibility guide covers it by mechanism. If you have not got a machine yet, plug-in diffusers that do not need water explains the options.
