Patchouli is a deeply spiced, thickly herbal and immediately recognizable note - it’s “dirty hippie” reputation doesn’t do it justice. Patchouli’s scent lies somewhere between cumin’s sharp and acrid tang and nutmeg’s smooth, sweet warmth, and it can carry a fragrance or blend easily with other, spicier notes. It is ideal in heated, spicy perfumes that feature leather, smoke, resins, and lighter aromatic notes like lavender and geranium. Patchouli’s exotic strength can be an acquired taste in perfume, but it’s many moods and blends make it an endlessly fascinating note to explore in the spicy end of the scent spectrum.

Alluring, sensual, enticing… Musk is well-known for its aphrodisiac powers. Perfumers play with a myriad of synthetic musks to fix, blend and mold ingredients in a number of intoxicating accords. These notes are clean and transparent—lending a velvety, skinny effect. Musk notes in perfume used to be processed from the actual musk glands of animals to impart a gamey, warm, and sensual texture. But this practice is illegal in modern times, and nowadays musk notes in fragrance are entirely synthetic. Musk’s tangy aroma can range from sheer, metallic and bright to very animalic and even as intimate as the scent of warm, damp, human skin. Musk adds a sultry, sensual feel to demure feminine scents, as well as making masculine notes like tobacco and leather vividly expressive in cologne. For perfume fans who enjoy the alluring scent of warm, clean, skin - musk is a must-have note in fragrance.

An entrancing note of suave, floral facets. Ylang-ylang blends beautifully in floral bouquets—adding an ethereal nuance that is both spicy and quintessentially modern. A generous dose of salicylates gives ylang-ylang its exotic solar scent, and its molecular structure is intriguingly similar to both jasmine and tuberose.

The fragrance of ginger is distinctly fresh and spicy, offering a sparkling top note to complex accords. Used across both men’s and women’s scents, ginger is an unmistakably zesty note that evokes a sort of olfactory duality: bitingly light and lemony, yet deeply pungent and peppery.