Carissa

Note Profile

Botanical

About

The night-scented white flower of the Natal plum, a thorny South African shrub. Sweet, waxy and white-floral, read by every source through orange blossom and jasmine.

Scent Profile

White_floral leads because both descriptive sources reach for the same two reference flowers. Gardening Know How says the fragrance 'resembles that of orange blossoms' and Garden Oracle gives 'a fragrance similar to jasmine and orange blossoms'. Floral carries the general sweetness that sits under that. Sweet_vanillic and honeyed come from the sweetness every source states, and honey is the usual shape sweetness takes in an orange-blossom-adjacent flower. Fruity is the weakest of the four and rests on a single reading of a soft fruity nuance in a white floral; it is held low and given a spread because no grower source names a fruit. Citrus is the orange-blossom lift, not the fruit. Animalic is small on purpose. Wikipedia records that the 'perfumed scent intensifies at night', and night-emitting white flowers usually gain indole, but nobody measured this one, so it is a lean rather than a claim.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~6h lasting

Family Floral

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

Origin

Carissa macrocarpa (syn. C. grandiflora), Apocynaceae, native to coastal South Africa and widely planted as a hedge in warm climates. The note is the flower, not the crimson fruit. No commercial extract of it is sold. Every description reachable for this dossier is of the living flower on the plant, so the note is a headspace impression rather than a material.

Usage in Perfumery

Used as an idea rather than an ingredient. Compositions that name carissa build it from orange blossom and jasmine materials with a soft fruity lift, which is exactly how the growers describe the smell. Fragrantica attests it on 3 fragrances and Parfumo on none, so it is a rare naming choice rather than a working palette item.