Reading the data · 12
The pyramid says 28 notes. The brand says 6. How many materials are actually in there?
· 21 min read
A beginner counted the notes on a fragrance page and asked whether all of them were really dosed. Fifty-four replies split into two camps and nobody opened the source. I checked the brand's own copy, then parsed 954 deduplicated public demo formulas: median 17 materials, but a median of 10 carries 90% of the weight. The longer the list, the longer the sub-1% tail.
Someone on r/DIYfragrance posted a note pyramid, counted it, and asked whether all of those were really dosed or whether a few were there to give the copywriters something to work with.
Fifty-four replies split into two camps. One said notes are pure marketing and bear no relation to the formula. The other said a few dozen materials is unremarkable for a modern perfume and some formulas run past a hundred. Both camps had a point. Neither opened the source page.
I opened it.
The short version
- The fragrance is Carthusia's Fiori di Capri (1948). The brand's own copy names 6 notes. The Fragrantica pyramid lists 28.
- Lily of the valley, the note the brand leads with, does not appear in the 28. The brand's "oak" shows up in the pyramid as "oakmoss", which is a lichen that grows on bark, not a tree.
- I pulled 399 pages of public demo formulas and deduplicated them down to 954. Median material count per formula: 17. Sort by weight and a median of 10 materials carries 90% of it.
About a 9 minute read.
I went and checked that perfume
Directly under the pyramid on the Fragrantica page sits a button labelled "Vote for ingredients". The notes are voted in by site members. That fact is on the page. Nobody scrolls that far.
A little higher on the same page is the brand's own line: the floral refinement of lily of the valley and wild carnation, with amber, sandalwood, ylang-ylang and oak. Carthusia's own product page carries the same sentence. Count them: 6.
The pyramid runs 10 top, 11 middle, 7 base. Total 28.
Four line up: carnation, amber, sandalwood, ylang-ylang. Two don't. Lily of the valley is simply gone, and oak has become oakmoss, which is Evernia prunastri, a lichen that smells damp, dark green and earthy. Not the same thing as oak.
Someone in the thread pasted the brand copy and said the brand "only lists 5". They undercounted by one. A one-word error like that is exactly why it pays to open the original yourself.
One material can read as several notes
A note list and a formula are two different documents, and they fail to line up in both directions.
Downward: one material can carry several notes. A natural oil is a mixture of hundreds of molecules, so a single bergamot oil justifies both "bergamot" and "citrus" in the copy. Synthetics do it too. The same material at ten minutes and at four hours can be recorded as two different notes by the same nose.
Upward: one note often takes several materials to build. Lily of the valley cannot be distilled. Every muguet on the market is constructed. So the brand leading with lily of the valley and the voters not picking it can both be true at once: there is a muguet structure in the formula and the people smelling it read it as something else.
One reply in the thread put it cleanly: notes are what you might smell, materials are what the perfumer used to make that happen.
What 954 public formulas actually look like
There is no standard governing notes. There are numbers on the formula side.
This site's database holds 1,642 links to public demo formulas. I sampled 400 pages, retrieved 399, and parsed out 4,801 formula blocks.
That 4,801 is fake, and I got it wrong first. Every formula appears on the page of every material it contains, so I had counted the same documents many times over. Duplication rate: 79.4%. Deduplicating left 991, and dropping anything under five materials left 954.
| 954 formulas | Median |
|---|---|
| Materials per formula | 17 |
| Share held by the single largest | 25.0% |
| Top 3 combined | 55.0% |
| Top 6 combined | 77.5% |
| Materials needed to reach 90% of weight | 10 |
| Share of materials dosed under 1% | 15.1% |
The tenth percentile is 8 materials, the ninetieth is 30, and the longest formula in the set runs 57. So "a few dozen is normal" survives contact with the data: 14% of this set runs 28 materials or more.
The longer the list, the longer the tail
Group the formulas by length and the shape appears.
| Materials | Formulas | Top 6 share | Materials to reach 90% | Share under 1% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5–9 | 143 | 97.8% | 5 | 0.0% |
| 10–14 | 229 | 86.0% | 7 | 7.7% |
| 15–19 | 224 | 75.0% | 10 | 11.8% |
| 20–29 | 253 | 69.3% | 12 | 28.0% |
| 30–60 | 105 | 60.3% | 17 | 44.4% |
Monotone across all five bands. Longer formulas give the top six less to hold (97.8% down to 60.3%) and grow the sub-1% tail (0% up to 44.4%).
Look at the absolute count in the fourth column. Going from roughly 7 materials to roughly 45 moves the number carrying 90% of the weight from 5 to 17. Most of what gets added is not added by weight.
Do the trace materials do anything
They do. Doing something and being countable by you are separate questions.
An experienced reply in the thread was specific about it: cyclamen aldehyde usually sits under 1%, violet leaf is almost certainly under 1%, and the pineapple esters are effective from 0.1%. That is a statement about strength, not about importance.
This site's database holds 2,251 materials that have both a supplier and an odour-strength record. Of those, 248 (11%) carry an explicit recommendation to evaluate at 1% or weaker, and 53 say 0.1% or weaker. The caramel furanones say 0.01%. One of those dosed at 0.05% looks like rounding error on the weight sheet and runs the show in the glass.
Running the other way: the median smallest line across these 954 formulas is 0.50%, not 0.001%. Doses low enough to be pure decoration are not common in this set.
Food research shows the same shape
Dunkel and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Angewandte Chemie in 2014 covering more than 220 food samples. Each food's odour signature is defined by roughly 3 to 40 genuine key odorants, drawn from a pool of about 230 — against a background of roughly 10,000 known food volatiles. The authors argue that pool co-evolved with our roughly 400 olfactory receptors.
Ten thousand volatiles, a pool of 230, and 3 to 40 doing the work in any one food. A long list with a short working subset is not a perfume-industry quirk. Strawberries do it too.
The formula side agrees. Cai and colleagues, building an automatic formula generator in Heliyon in 2024, extracted composition data from 210 working formulas and built their reference library from 344 common materials. A few hundred materials in regular use, against a catalogue of 42,000.
How a beginner should use a note list
Three things.
Read the pyramid as a map, not an ingredient list. It tells you what the bottle wants to be smelled as, which is genuinely useful, and it cannot tell you how many materials are inside. For that, find a demo formula. Those come with grams.
When the numbers disagree, go back to the brand's own sentence. A gap of 6 against 28 is not evidence that somebody lied. Two lists are answering two questions. One is the image being sold; the other is what a crowd reported smelling.
When you formulate, let six materials carry eighty percent. That is the shape of the median formula in this set. Build the skeleton first. Trace materials trim edges; they are poor structure.
What this doesn't establish
74% of these formula blocks carry a patent or source row. A patent example is not a commercial formula. It may be simplified, or written broad to cover ground. These numbers describe what public demo formulas look like, and cannot be pushed onto the bottle on the counter.
13.2% of material rows are pre-dilutions, named with a percentage such as "pomarose 10%". Their real active content is lower than the sheet says, so the "under 1%" figures are underestimates.
49% of the formulas contain a solvent row such as DIPG or DPG. I recomputed with solvent rows removed: the median top-6 share moves from 77.5% to 78.0%. The conclusion doesn't shift.
Notes and materials cannot be mapped one to one, so this piece does not answer how many materials sit behind those 28 notes. That needs the actual Fiori di Capri formula, which is not public. What I can show is that at least one of the 28 was voted in, and that the brand's own lead note didn't make the list at all.
References
A. Dunkel et al., Nature's chemical signatures in human olfaction: a foodborne perspective for future biotechnology, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 53(28), 7124–7143 (2014). PMID 24939725. doi:10.1002/anie.201309508
J. Cai et al., A rapid approach based on empirical formulas and graph traversal algorithms to automatic generation of fragrance formulas, Heliyon, 10(24), e40873 (2024). PMID 39720048. doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e40873
Carthusia official product page, Fiori di Capri Eau de Parfum, checked 2026-08-27.
Fragrantica, Fiori di Capri by Carthusia, checked 2026-08-27; pyramid of 10 top, 11 middle, 7 base notes.
Related: Material names mislead, How long does this last, How big is the starter palette.