A. Many perfume terms come from the language of music. Note and accord are two of them. In music, a note means a musical sound or a written note, and an accord means a chord. Music is created by combining various sounds.
Notes
These refer to fragrance characters, with a number of types, such as floral notes and amber notes, following traditional classifications. A single material may be described as a bergamot note, but it is generally useful to think of a note as a scent created by blending several fragrance materials. For example, a citrus note means a coherent scent formed by combining several fragrance materials, such as bergamot and lemon.
Accords
When a combination of two or more notes works well together and creates a scent that seems to play in harmony, it is called an accord. For example, a truffle accord would be a grouping of notes that combine to create an earthy, rich scent reminiscent of truffles.
In a perfume accord, 1 + 1 + 1 does not equal 3; it equals 1, becoming a single new scent.
Sylvaine Delacourte
