Buckwheat

Note Profile

Botanical 1 perfume

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About

Buckwheat is a grain note. It reads dry and nutty over a grassy, earthy base, with a bitter edge that keeps it from being comforting in the way wheat or oat are. Toasting shifts it towards malt and smoke and pushes the nuttiness up. Raw it is milder and greener.

Scent Profile

Buckwheat smells dry and nutty, close to almond, sitting over a grassy, earthy base. A bitter edge keeps it from feeling comforting the way wheat or oat can. Raw, it is milder and greener, closer to fresh grass than toasted grain. Toasting pushes the nuttiness up and adds a dry, hay like, malty warmth, with a faint smoky note at the edges.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~5h lasting

Family Sweet & Gourmand, Green & Aromatic, Woody & Earthy

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

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Materials That Can Make This Note

Perfumers can build Buckwheat from materials such as:

Nonanal rose · fatty · waxy
Salicylaldehyde phenolic · spicy · hay
Bigarane™ Trans-2-nonenal cucumber · fatty · orris

Smell words come from published sources.

Allergens perfumes with this note can list: Salicylaldehyde

A given perfume with this note may use some of these, or something else, and may or may not contain the allergens above.

Origin

Buckwheat is the seed of Fagopyrum esculentum, a plant in the dock family and not a grass, so it is a pseudocereal rather than a true cereal. The odour material behind the note is the groat, either raw or dry-roasted as kasha or as the roasted-groat tea sold as soba-cha. The academic literature names salicylaldehyde as the character-impact compound of dehulled groats, which is the almond-like thread inside the nuttiness. No perfumery house was found selling a buckwheat extract, so a composition using this note is almost certainly building an accord rather than dosing a natural.

Usage in Perfumery

Perfumers use buckwheat as a heart-stage gourmand and cereal accent, in the same slot as barley, oat and malt. It sits under milk, honey and tonka in a grain accord and gives a drier, more bitter reading than wheat. Fragrantica files it under greens, herbs and fougeres rather than gourmand, which fits the grassier raw form.