Terms of service
Version 1.4 · Last updated 2026-09-24
These terms are an agreement between you and Sterling Goods Limited (company number 14253296), registered in England and Wales, whose registered office is at 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom — "Topnote", "we". By creating an account or using the app you accept them. If you do not, please do not use Topnote.
1. What Topnote is
Topnote is a community app for fragrance layering: people publish recipes for combining two to four scents, with the order, spray counts and placements that make them reproducible, and rate each other's.
Recipes are written by users, not by us. We do not test them, we cannot verify them, and we do not know how any combination will behave on your skin.
Topnote is offered in the United Kingdom and the United States. It is not offered in the European Union or anywhere else yet; if that changes, these terms will change first.
2. Free of charge
Topnote is currently provided free. There are no purchases, subscriptions or paid features. If that changes we will tell you in advance, and nothing you have already done will start costing money without your agreement.
3. Your account
- You must be at least 16 years old to use Topnote.
- You sign in with Apple, Google, an emailed code, or an email and password. Keep that email account and password secure; anything done through your account is your responsibility until you tell us otherwise.
- You choose a handle. It is public and permanent. We may reclaim a handle that impersonates a person or a brand.
- One person, one account. Do not share it.
- You can delete your account at any time in Settings. Section 8 says what happens to what you have published.
4. What you publish
You keep ownership of everything you write. You are not signing your recipes over to us.
You give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, display, reproduce and distribute your content within the app, and in material that promotes the app, for as long as it remains published. That licence exists so we can show your recipe to other users and put a screenshot in a store listing. It ends when your content is removed, except as section 8 describes.
You can delete a recipe you published from its ••• menu. The same rule as section 8 applies to it: if nobody else has rated, saved or commented on it, or voted on a comment under it, it is deleted; if someone has, it stays published under "[deleted]", and so do your own comments under it, with nothing that identifies you. A recipe with a report waiting for a moderator cannot be deleted until that report has been dealt with.
You confirm that what you publish is yours to publish and does not infringe anyone else's rights.
5. Acceptable use
Our community guidelines form part of these terms. In short: publish recipes you have actually worn, rate honestly, be decent to people, do not sell anything, do not impersonate anyone, and do not give unsafe application advice.
We may hide or remove content and suspend or end accounts that break these terms or the guidelines. Where we do, we will tell you why and you can appeal — the guidelines explain how. Serious or repeated breaches, and anything unlawful, may be reported to the relevant authorities.
Other users can report your content and block you.
6. Safety — please read this one
Topnote is not health, medical or allergy advice.
Fragrance is applied to your body and can cause irritation or an allergic reaction. Nothing on Topnote — not a recipe, not a rating, not a match score, not a "why this works" explanation — is a statement that a combination is safe for you.
- Follow the manufacturer's instructions for every product you use.
- Patch-test anything new, and stop using anything that irritates your skin.
- Check the ingredient list yourself if you have a known allergy or sensitivity. Topnote lists fragrance notes, which describe how something smells. Notes are not an ingredient list and are not an allergen declaration.
- Never apply fragrance to broken skin, or near your eyes or mouth.
- If you are pregnant, have a skin condition, or are treating one, speak to a professional rather than relying on an app.
A recipe's rating tells you what other people experienced. It does not tell you what will happen to you.
7. How recommendations work
Topnote's matching is a deterministic algorithm over published note and accord data. It compares shared notes, how accord families relate, and relative intensity, and it explains its reasoning in plain words. It is a suggestion, not a finding of fact, and it is sometimes wrong.
Beneath those matches, a separate section headed "Also worth trying" is written by a language model from our own catalogue and checked by a person before it appears. It is clearly labelled wherever it is shown.
Those catalogue suggestions use none of your data. The model is given fragrance names, notes and accords from our catalogue and nothing else, and it runs when we prepare the catalogue, never when you open the app.
“From your shelf” is different, and it is off unless you turn it on. When it is available and you have agreed, tapping it sends the names and notes of the fragrances you own, and of the one you are viewing, to our AI provider, Anthropic, which writes suggestions for that moment. Nothing else of yours is sent — not your name, handle, email, wishlist, recipes or comments — and the suggestions are not stored. They are checked automatically against our catalogue, not by a person, so treat them as ideas rather than advice. You can turn it off at any time in Settings. The privacy policy has the detail.
Match scores are Topnote's own opinion, expressed as a number so combinations can be ordered. They are not an objective measure of anything, and the model-written section carries no score.
8. Ending your account
You can delete your account in Settings. Your profile, shelf, wishlist, saved recipes, ratings, comments and requests are deleted immediately.
A recipe that other people have rated or saved is not deleted. It stays published, reattributed to "[deleted]", with nothing that identifies you — so that other users do not lose combinations they had saved. Recipes nobody has rated or saved are deleted with everything else. The same is true when you delete a single recipe, and there a comment or comment vote from someone else counts too (section 4). Please take this into account before publishing.
We may suspend or end your account for breaching these terms. If we do, the same applies to your content.
9. What we do not promise
Topnote is provided as it is and as it is available. We do not guarantee that it will always work, that it will be free of errors, or that anything published on it is accurate.
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss arising from your use of Topnote or of any recipe published on it.
Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be excluded under the law of England and Wales. If you are a consumer, you keep all the rights your local law gives you, and nothing here overrides them.
10. Trade marks
Fragrance and fragrance-house names on Topnote are the trade marks of their owners. We use them only to identify the products a recipe refers to. Topnote is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any fragrance house or brand.
11. Changes
We may update these terms. If a change is significant we will tell you in the app before it takes effect and ask you to accept the new version. Carrying on using Topnote after that means you accept it.
12. Law and disputes
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts have non-exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not affect your right to bring a claim where you live, or to rely on the consumer protections of your own country.
13. Contact
Sterling Goods Limited, 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom Support, reports and legal: support@topnoteshelf.app
This is the same text the app shows.