Celery

Note Profile

Botanical 12 perfumes

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About

Celery is the fresh green stalk of Apium graveolens read as a perfumery note, not the seed. It smells watery-green, angular and unmistakably vegetal, with a faint bitterness and a clean mineral edge. A small warm-spicy tail sits underneath, carried by the phthalide lactones that give celery its identity at very low concentrations.

Scent Profile

Angular, watery green dominates - the smell of a cold celery stalk snapped at the base - with a herbal, aromatic Apiaceae character behind it and a clean mineral edge that stops it reading as wet or aquatic. A brief limonene-citrus flash opens it. Underneath sits a quiet warm-spicy, faintly earthy depth from the phthalides, closer to lovage root than to any culinary herb.

ScentWheel

Breadthfocused

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic

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

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Materials That Can Make This Note

Perfumers can build Celery from materials such as:

Butylphthalide herbal · phenolic · spicy

Smell words come from published sources.

A given perfume with this note may use some of these, or something else.

Origin

Apium graveolens, family Apiaceae, the same family as lovage and angelica. The note names the stalk and leaf rather than the seed. The character-impact compounds are phthalide lactones - 3-n-butylphthalide, sedanolide and sedanenolide - which carry the celery identity at 1.5 to 11 per cent of the oil, while limonene and beta-selinene make up most of its bulk. Raw celery adds (Z)-3-hexenal and (Z)-3-hexenol, the C6 green fraction that boiling destroys. India supplies most of the world's celery material; France is the secondary origin.

Usage in Perfumery

A green modifier used in traces. It gives an angular, savoury lift to floral hearts, to lavender bouquets and to aldehydic compositions, and it adds a naturalistic vegetal edge where galbanum would be too resinous and cis-3-hexenol too generic. It is diffusive out of proportion to its lightness and will take over a blend if dosed carelessly.