Ingredients - The Perfume Society

Fragrances today are mostly a fusion of ingredients taken from nature – or inspired by nature – together with the synthetics (man-made ingredients) that are used to make them last longer, ‘carry further’, or stay ‘true’, when worn on the skin.

Here, you can read about literally hundreds of the different perfume elements in use today. If you know which ingredient you want to read about, you can either input the name into our ‘search’ box (top right). Or click on a letter of the alphabet below – and it’ll take you to a collage of all the ingredients that start with that letter. Alternatively, let your eye travel over the scrolling, rolling collage below – and click on whatever takes your fancy: a visual ‘lucky dip’…

# - A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z - All

Rich, floral, green, heady: like burying your nose in springtime itself. Or as perfumer Julie Massé explains to The Perfume Society: 'An opulent sensation of green-leaf, or the hissing of hot, wet summer lawns - a strangely intense and yet cool floral.'

Narcissus has been exciting perfumers for millennia. The Arabs used it in perfumery, then the Romans, who created a perfume called Narcissinum with the oil from what’s become one of our favourite modern flowers. In India, meanwhile, narcissus one of the oils applied to the body before prayer, along with jasmine, sandalwood and rose. (Nobody’s quite sure where the first flowers were grown; some believe it originated in Persia, and made its way to China via the Silk Route.)

There are hundreds of different species of Narcissi today – white, yellow, some with a touch of pink or orange (including our ‘everyday’ daffodil) – but not all are fragrant. The Pheasant’s Eye Narcissus (a.k.a. Poet’s Narcissus, or Narcissus poeticus) is native to Europe, and growers cultivate it in the Netherlands and the Grasse area of France, extracting an oil which smells like a blend of jasmine and hyacinth.

The scent can also be extracted from the so-pretty ‘bunched’ variety – Narcissus tazetta – is native to southern Europe and now also grown widely across Asia, the Middle East, north Africa, northern India, China and Japan. A third variety, Narcissus jonquil, can also be used, and in one form or another this beautiful ingredient is said to make its way into as much as 10% of modern fragrances - despite the fact that a staggering 500 kilos of flowers are needed to produce a kilo of ‘concrete’, or just 300 g of absolue, making it very pricy.

It’s so powerful, though, that only a touch is needed – and perfumers must proceed with caution: the scent in a closed room can be overwhelming. (Narcissus actually gets its name from the Greek word ‘narke’, which made its way into Roman language as ‘narce’: that meant ‘to be numb’, and alludes to the effect the oil can have.)

The supposed Greek legend linked with the flower is well-known: Narcissus was a handsome youth who fell in love with his own reflection, on seeing it in a pool. Unable to leave behind the beauty of his image, Narcissus died – to be replaced by this flower…

Smell narcissus in:

Boucheron Boucheron
Chanel Coco Noir
Chanel No. 19
Creed White Flowers
Dior Miss Dior
Donna Karan DKNY
Givenchy Ysatis
Guerlain Samsara
Lancôme Magie Noire
Maison Francis Kurkdjian Lumière Noire Pour Femme
Miller Harris Jasmin Vert
Van Cleef & Arpels First

Oakmoss is among perfumers’ most beloved ingredients: an essential element of fragrances within the chypre family (which you can read more about here), in partnership with bergamot: it ‘anchors’ volatile notes. Its more romantic French name is ‘mousse de chêne, but this tight-curled plant – botanical name Evernia prunastri - is actually a lichen which grows on oaks throughout Europe and North Africa, only flourishing in unpolluted air. It can range in colour from light green to black depending on whether it’s dry or damp - and it smells a lot more beautiful than it looks.

Oakmoss smells earthy, and woody, sensual with hints of musk and amber and is really not like anything else in the perfumer’s ‘palette’ because it also works fantastically as a ‘fixative’ to give scent a longer life on the skin. As you might suspect, there’s a touch of damp forest floor to this material, too.

The use of oakmoss in perfumery goes back a long, long way. Coty’s Chypre perfume, in 1917, popularised this type of fragrance – but in fact, chypre scents, inspired by the island of Cyprus, had been beguiling people for centuries. For hundreds of years, from Roman times (that’s as far back as we know about) this style of perfume blended styrax, calamus and labdanum; in the Middle Ages, oak moss began to be added, to create ‘pastilles’ for burning.

But there’s one snag with this exquisite material: it’s been ‘blacklisted’ by the International Fragrance Association (IFRA) as a potential irritant, its use restricted by European regulation to 0.1% in perfume compositions that are applied to the skin – a restriction which has sent ‘noses’ into tailspins in labs across the world, as they were forced to remove or reduce this lynchpin ingredient in their often very famous formulations. Some ‘noses’ played around with ingredients like patchouli, or synthetic ‘imitations’ of oakmoss to try to achieve some of the same effects as this wonder of the natural scent world, but there’s no question that some favourite fragrances started not to smell like themselves.

Now, though, there’s a way through – which is glorious news for chypre-lovers everywhere. Through a process of ‘fractionation’ – separating the different elements of an individual ingredient, and removing the potential sensitiser – it’s possible to get an ingredient that’s much closer to the oakmoss we know and loved.

However, as Guerlain’s in-house perfumer Thierry Wasser explained to us, whenever something is removed from an ingredient through fractionation, ‘it leaves a hole’. Thierry’s stroke of genius was to plug the gap with a touch of celery seed, instead. Hey, presto: Mitsouko – probably the most famous chypre in the world still available today – is restored to its former glory. (And we just love the way that perfumers rise to challenges like this…)

PS Oakmoss has a near-relation, known as ‘tree moss’ - Evernia Furfuracea - which grows on pine trees, has a turpentine-y scent before it’s blended, and is also very highly-prized among perfumers.)

Smell oakmoss in:

Guerlain Mitsouko

A fragrance without roses is almost as unthinkable as a love affair without kisses. Not only are roses the most romantic of flowers to look at: they’re an absolute cornerstone of perfumery – the most important flower of all, from the point of view of a nose: sometimes powdery, sometimes woody, musky, myrrh-y, clove-like, sometimes fruity, or just blowsily feminine – but always, intensely romantic. Roses are said to feature in at least 75% of modern feminine fragrances, and at least 10% of all men’s perfumes.

Today's savvy perfumers, however, are far from the first to recognise the sheer sensual potential of this 'Queen of Flowers'. In Classic myth, the rose was linked both with the Greek goddess Aphrodite and her Roman counterpart, Venus. When Cleopatra welcomed Mark Antony to her boudoir, her bed was strewn with these aphrodisiac blooms and the floor hidden under a foot and a half of fresh-picked petals. Who could resist rolling around in that? Certainly no hot-blooded Roman, homesick for a city where rosewater bubbled through the fountains, awnings soaked in rose oil shielded VIPs in public amphitheatres from the baking sun, pillows and mattresses were stuffed with rosepetals (the better to propel the weary towards dreamland) and where rose garlands were the ultimate Roman must-have status symbol. The same flowers turned up in delicately-scented puddings, love potions and medicines. At one bacchanale, the Emperor Nero, clearly no tightwad, had silver pipes installed so guests could be spritzed with rosewater between courses.

The fragrant liquid which refreshed Roman guests and was flung up by fountains all around town, however, was rosewater - the water in which roses have been steeped, then discarded. In reality, rosewater is the poor relation of the ‘true’ rose scent, from the oil that’s so essential a component of the perfumes which today send our senses into a delicious spin.

Rose essential oil can come in the form of rose otto (also known as attar of roses), or rose aboslute. Rose otto’s extracted via steam distillation, while the more precious rose absolute, via solvent extraction, or CO2 extraction.

The roses most commonly used in perfumery are the Turkish rose, the Damask (or Damascene rose) and Rosa Centifolia (the ‘hundred-leafed rose’), which is grown around Grasse in the south of France, and generally considered to produce the highest quality rose absolute. (This rose is also known as Rose de Mai, because it generally blooms in the month of May, and – romantically – ‘the painter’s rose’, because it features in many works of the old masters.)

Around 70% of the rose oil in the world comes from Bulgaria; other significant producers are Turkey, Iran and Morocco, and precious, limited quantities from Grasse. The task of the rose-picker is to pick the dew-drenched blooms before 10 a.m. at the latest, when the sun evaporates their exquisite magic. So fast does the rose fade, in fact, that some farmers in Turkey and Bulgaria transport their own copper stills to the fields, heating them on the spot over wood fires to distill the precious Damask Rose oil, which separates from the water when heated in only the tiniest of quantities: 170 rose flowers are said to relinquish but a single drop.

Smell rose in:

Goutal Paris Rose Absolue
Maison Francis Kurkdjian À la rose
Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle Lipstick Rose
Goutal Rose Pompon
Acqua di Parma Rosa Nobile
Floris A Rose For...
Diptyque Opône
Floral Street Neon Rose
Lancôme Trésor
Yves Saint Laurent Paris

Can a perfume roar? Can it purr? Can it be ‘sex-in-a-bottle’…? If any single ingredient can create those effects, it’s musk. As the excellent fragrance blog Perfume Posse puts it, ‘Musk speaks carnally in whispers or shouts…’ And it’s in almost every scent we dab, spritz and splash onto our skins - because at the end of the day, most of us wear perfumes to feel more alluring…

But musk does more than this. It’s incredibly versatile, in a perfumer’s hands: it softens, balances, ‘fixes’ (adds staying power and keeps a fragrance on the skin, while stopping other short-lived ingredients from disappearing too fast). It smells like skin itself. It almost hypnotises…

And it’s controversial: the original musk came from a sex gland secretion from a specific a species of deer, the Tibetan musk deer, which became endangered - though since 1979 this creature has happily now protected by CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora). Numbers of musk deer dwindled, unsurprisingly, because it took 140 musk deer to produce a kilo of perfume ingredient. But its use goes way back: musk makes its first appearance in the 6th Century, brought from India by Greek explorers. Later, the Arabic and Byzantine perfumers (including the famous Al-Kindi) perfected the art of capturing its aphrodisiac powers, and musk’s popularity spread along the silk and spice routes.

Of course we’ll never know someone, somewhere along the way, got the idea that it would be a good idea to try this potent ingredient out in a perfume: in its raw state, musk oil smells – well, a bit like poo... And yet, and yet – at the same time, strangely intriguing… A well-known German fragrance chemist, Phliip Kraft, brilliantly captures musk’s love-it-hate-it complexity. ‘The more one studies its character that of natural musk tincture, the more contrasting, vibrant and oscillating it becomes: repulsive-attractive, chemical-warm, sweaty-balmy, acrid-waxy, earthy-powdery, fatty-chocolate-like, pungent-leathery, fig-like, dry, nutty and woody, to give just some impressions’.

It’s said that if you added drops of natural musk oil to a handkerchief, you’d still be able to smell it 40 years later. Today, of course, it’s not the natural stuff that perfumers use, but a huge array of synthetic musks, ranging from sweet, powdery musks to almost metallic versions. Vast amounts of perfume industry research dollars have gone into creating alternatives to this cornerstone ingredient: patented notes like Galaxolide, Andoxal, Nirvanolide, Celestolide, Velvione, Helvetolide, among other inventively-named creations. (We secretly long for a job naming compounds like this...!)

Other ingredients, too – like extracts of ambrette seed, galbanum and angelica root – can also deliver a musky sensuality to a perfume. Although if you have trouble smelling musk, you’re not alone: ‘anosmia’ to some - or all - musk ingredients is actually pretty common…

Smell musk (or try to!) in:

Frederic Malle Musc Ravageur
L’Artisan Parfumeur Mûre et Musc
Miller Harris L’Air de Rien
Narciso Rodriguez Essence
Narciso Rodriguez for Her

Fragrances can be ‘leathery’ – but it’s not really essence-of-leather in that bottle, as Andy Tauer explains below. It might be from birch tar (which has a leathery smokiness), or juniper, aldehydes or other synthetics, designed to give a skin-like scent. Patchouli, black tea and tobacco can also conjure up that old library/leather-jacket sensuality. Women’s chypres, and men’s fragrances, are most likely to have a leathery sensuality, but perfumers can take leather on all sorts of fragrant journeys: woody, aromatic, floral, even gourmand.

Here's what leather means to perfumer Andy Tauer, and how he uses it in his creations. 'The first association, when you tell me "leather", honestly, is "Swiss Army" and me serving there as soldier: my generation had the privilege of serving in thick leather shows that were made to endure a Swiss invasion of Moscow, including the way back. Solid and as uncomfortable as can be. Every evening we had to brush them, polish them. As mixed as my memories of proudly serving in the Swiss Army are, I loved the scent of my leather boots. Rough leather, made from Swiss cows, with a thickened skin due to a happy but rough life in the Alps (we can dream, can't we?). Leather in perfumery is not a natural essential oil that you buy.

He echoes our comment above: 'You have to make your leather chord. Birch tar can be one of the ingredients going in there. Leather as side note brings out, by contrast as so often in perfumery, flowers. Flowers bloom on skin when there´s leather in the base of a fragrance. It is like sticking bright colored flowers into my army boots. Wonderful, and a reminder how precious peace is.'

Leather and perfumery go way back together, meanwhile. The links are rooted in the tradition of the ‘gantier parfumeurs’, a guild of glove-makers in Paris who fashioned gloves for royalty and the aristocracy as far back as the 15th Century. The whole tanning process smells repulsive, though, so leathers were treated with oils, musk, civet and ambergris, to mask the smell of the animals’ skins.

The very first ‘leather’ scent, so far as records show, was worn by King George III: Creed’s Royal English Leather. He was so taken with the smell of scented gloves that he asked Creed to make it into a fragrance – and you can still smell that today…

Smell leather in:

Chanel Les Exclusifs 28 La Pausa
Chanel Les Exclusifs Cuir de Russie
Guerlain Shalimar
L’Artisan Parfumer Dzing!
Paco Rabanne 1 Million

Jasmine and rose are the two ‘foundation stones’ of perfumery. There’s barely a scent out there which doesn’t feature a type of jasmine somewhere in its construction – but all jasmines aren’t created equal, and (dare we say it) there’s a lot of snobbery about jasmine, with fragrance houses falling over themselves to boast of the priceless quality of their jasmine…

There are actually over 200 species of jasmine – but two members of the beautiful white-flowered jasmine family are most ‘prized’. The first is Jasminun grandiflorum, which translates as ‘big-flowered jasmine’; Chanel have their own fields of this in Grasse, and you can read about the harvest and maceration process here - and this is sometimes just referred to, then, as ‘Grasse jasmine’, because it grows so well there. The other precious member of the family is Sambac Jasmine – sometimes known as Tuscan jasmine, or Arabian jasmine, depending on who you’re speaking to… Nowadays, jasmine is grown for the fragrance industry everywhere from India to France, Morocco, Algeria, Spain and Morocco. (It actually originated in India and China, and – who knew? – is a member of the olive family.)

Jasmine gives a richness and intensity to fragrances: a sweet floral note, but with a dead-sexy muskiness to it. If you smell different concentrated ‘absolutes’ (the oily liquids created through macerating the jasmine flowers), they have their own characters: some smell medicinal, some sweet, some musky, some green. It’s extraordinary that a single plant can smell so different, depending on where it’s grown. The genius of perfumers is knowing just what they have to do, to blend those into perfectly constructed scents for us to wear.

Once upon a time, jasmine’s scent was extracted through a process called enfleurage: the flowers were pressed into layers of fat, and gradually the scent migrated to the fat, from which it could be extracted. Nowadays, it’s usually a somewhat less romantic solvent process. Whatever: it takes kilo upon kilo of flowers to produce the oil – around 8,000 hand-picked blooms to produce one millilitre (1 ml) of the ‘absolute’ – which is why it’s so extraordinarily expensive. (Jasmine’s one of the priciest ingredients in perfumery.) It can also be created synthetically – and often is, why may explain why the brands which use ‘real’ jasmine are so keen to share its story…

No wonder it’s known simply as ‘La Fleur’, in the perfume world – or ‘The Flower’… Because there’s probably no note (other than the aforementioned rose) which is so important, to ‘noses’…

Smell jasmine in:

Acqua di Parma Gelsomino Nobile
Goutal Paris Le Masmin
Bulgari Mon Jasmin Noir
Chanel No. 5
Creed Jasmal

Lime blossom (linden)

Vanilla doesn’t just smell sweet, nuzzleable and delectably comforting: it’s kind of magic, in flavour and perfume terms. When we smell or taste anything, our ‘receptors’ constantly wipe those fleeting encounters to prepare for the next flavour or a smell. But when vanilla is added to food or fragrance, naturally-present vanillin (and other vanilloids, which we’ll talk about in a moment) work to ‘hold open’ our vanilloid receptors, slowing down this wiping process – which in turn gives us more time to perceive, experience and enjoy both scents and flavours. (Vanilloids are also found in cocoa, allspice, cinnamon, cloves, ginger and hot peppers – which partly explains why they’re all such ‘taste sensations’.)

Vanilla comes from the seeds of a dried pod from a climbing orchid-like plant which flourishes especially well in Madagascar; the very best quality of vanilla comes from the Île Bourbon, now known as Réunion. It gets its name from the Spanish word ‘vaina’ (meaning sheath or pod, and translates simply as ‘little pod’. (Strangely, the flower itself is scent-less.)

Perhaps because vanilla is the second priciest spice in the world, after saffron, the vanilla you smell in many perfumes today is synthetic vanillin: clever chemists have worked to mimic the real thing – although the most gifted noses will probably tell you that real vanilla is earthier, with touches of treacle and a touch of ‘booziness’.

We love this legend about vanilla which we found on the excellent Perfume Shrine blog. ‘According to the Australian Orchid Society, "Old Totonac lore has it that Xanat, the young daughter of the Mexican fertility goddess, loved a Totonac youth. Unable to marry him due to her divine nature, she transformed herself into a plant that would provide pleasure and happiness – that plant was the Vanilla vine. This reputation was much enhanced in 1762 when a German study found that a medication based on vanilla extract cured impotence — all 342 smiling subjects claimed they were cured.”’

Vanilla’s reputation as a powerful aphrodisiac endures, and it’s often present in ‘sexy’, come-hither fragrances, especially Ambrées and gourmand fragrances, as well as ‘girly’, ‘younger’ creations. And it’s probably one of the most easily-recognised perfume ingredients of all…

Smell vanilla in:

Dior Addict
Dior Hypnotic Poison
Guerlain Shalimar
Guerlain Spirituelle Double Vanille
L’Aritsan Parfumeur Vanille Absolument

Read The Perfume Candy Boy's Guide to Vanilla, here

Orange blossom

Mint

Instantly cooling and utterly refreshing, mint has been infused for centuries in various preparations to be taken as a herbal remedy for digestive complaints, to soothe inflamed skin and also to splash on as a tonic for the senses.

In Greek mythology, mint is seen as "the herb of hospitality^"- early records show mint was strewn over floors to deodorise and freshen rooms, as stepping on the leaves helped to spread its scent through the room, masking noxious odours best left undescribed...

Correctly known by the name Mentha (also known as mint, from Greek míntha) there are many differing varieties - the species ranging from 13-18 depending on who you ask, and proving rather indistinct to categorise exactly as hybridisation between the species occurs naturally. Indeed, there are so many varieties and cross-overs (see below for a selection from Wikipedia's extensive page), that to date, no one author has successfully categorised them all.

Mentha aquatica – water mint, marsh mint
Mentha arvensis – corn mint, wild mint, Japanese peppermint, field mint, banana mint
Mentha asiatica – Asian mint
Mentha australis – Australian mint
Mentha canadensis – American wild mint
Mentha cervina – Hart's pennyroyal
Mentha citrata – bergamot mint, orange mint
Mentha crispata – wrinkled-leaf mint
Mentha dahurica – Dahurian thyme
Mentha diemenica – slender mint

Mentha laxiflora – forest mint
Mentha longifolia (syn. Mentha sylvestris) – horse mint
Mentha piperita – peppermint
Mentha pulegium – pennyroyal
Mentha requienii – Corsican mint
Mentha sachalinensis – garden mint
Mentha satureioides – native pennyroyal
Mentha spicata (syn. M. viridis, M. cordifolia) – spearmint, curly mint (a cultivar of spearmint)^[10]
Mentha suaveolens – apple mint, pineapple mint (a variegated cultivar of apple mint)
Mentha vagans – gray mint

Highly aromatic, merely brushing against the dark green leaves releases the potent scent, all varieties of the plant have some common characteristics - mostly perennial, mint simply adores to be near water, pools and in partial shade.

Traditionally used as a medicinal herb - mostly in order to treat stomach ache and nausea - the Menthol mint essential oil (used at 40–90% concentration in compositions) has long been enjoyed for its skin-cooling and spirit-reviving properties in Colognes, perfumes and cosmetic products, and overall, mint is enjoying something of a resurgence in both male and female fragrances over the past few years.

Used by the handful for a bracing freshness or plucked by the leaf to add just a hint of breeze, mint is a favourite that's here to stay.

Smell mint in:

Roos & Roos Mentha Religiosa
Giorgio Armani Acqua di Gioia Essenza
M.Micallef Ylang in Gold

Deep, dark, earthy and present in plenty of Ambrée perfumes, patchouli’s still got a hippie-dippy aura, even now. (It’s been called ‘the scent of the 60s’, because the essential oil was often worn neat on the skin of music-loving, party-loving – and sometimes drug-loving – youth.) So it’s always blown our minds that patchouli isn’t a wood, or a root: it’s actually a frilly green-leafed, purple-flowered member of the mint family, called Pogostemon patchouli.

Amazingly, from those fragile-looking leaves comes a sweet, spicy, smoky, cedar-y scent so powerful it has to be handled with care: patchouli is the most powerful of any plant-derived essence. But perfumers wouldn’t be without patchouli, for the richness that it gives to fragrances – and not just those heady Ambrées: patchouli makes its way into many chypre and powdery fragrances, swirling exotically alongside lavender, sandalwood, labdanum and bergamot, clove, clary sage, as well as vetiver. (It’s a little like vetiver, if you close your eyes.) Used alongside rose, it extends and ‘fixes’ rose’s sweetness.

The name, quite simply, comes from the old Tamil words patchai (‘green’) and ellai (‘leaf’). It originated in India, Malaysia and Indonesia and made its way to the Middle East via the exotic silk route: patchouli is a fantastic insect repellent, effective against flies and other bugs. (We’re going to try it out on our cashmere, and will report back.) Paisley shawls were traditionally layered with patchouli leaves in transit. Frenchwomen in the 19th Century swathed themselves in these patchouli-scented shawls against the cold – a fashion started by the Empress Eugenie - and patchouli became desirable, as a fragrance ingredient.

The quality of the oil can vary hugely. The very best stuff comes from the three or four top pairs of leaves, where the highest concentration of the fragrant oil is found. Once cut, they’re turned frequently to prevent them breaking down too quickly. Then the leaves are stripped and placed into woven baskets, where a process of fermentation takes place that releases the incomparable fragrance. Then the leaves are either CO2-extracted, or steam-distilled. It’s highly skilled work, and only a few distilleries produce patchouli of a high enough quality to please a VIP ‘nose’, or creator. On a blotter, meanwhile, a single drop of patchouli can last for months.

For many today people, it’s still a love-it-or-hate-it ingredient, evoking plenty of prejudice. But we happen to adore it…

Smell patchouli in:

Chanel Chance
Chanel Coco Mademoiselle
Givenchy Very Irresistible L’Intense
Jovoy Psychédelique
Cartier L’Heure Defendue VII
L’Artisan Parfumeur Patch
Thierry Mugler Angel
Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb