Cepes

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Cepes is the absolute extracted from Boletus edulis, the porcini mushroom. It smells of raw fungus and wet forest floor, with a faint metallic edge and a nutty, cocoa-touched back end.

Scent Profile

Cepes opens raw and fungal on a wet, humid earthy base, the smell of a knife through a fresh porcini cap. A damp mossy_chypre character sits right behind it and carries the same forest-floor idea further into the dry-down. A green, herbaceous lift from terpene co-volatiles keeps it vegetal rather than rotten, and a faintly metallic mineral edge, sometimes read as blood-like, comes from 1-octen-3-one. Behind the mushroom blast are a raw hazelnut-shell nutty facet, a hay-sweet tobacco_hay warmth and a faint dark coffee_cacao nuance that grows when the mushroom is dried. A marine, seaweed-fresh aquatic lift and a low brothy animalic weight round it out. It is softer and more vegetal than truffle, and carries none of truffle's garlicky pungency.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeBase · ~12h lasting

Family Woody & Earthy, Green & Aromatic

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

Origin

Solvent extraction of the whole Boletus edulis mushroom, which grows under spruce and fir. Hermitage Oils describes the result as a dark brown absolute of thick but pourable consistency. The dominant odour compounds are 1-octen-3-ol, called mushroom alcohol, and its ketone relative 1-octen-3-one. The nose detects 1-octen-3-ol at about one part per billion, which is why a small dose reads as a whole forest.

Usage in Perfumery

Used in trace amounts as a heart-to-base accent for damp-forest realism. Perfumers reach for it in chypre, fougere and woody-vegetative accords, and it can stand in for part of what IFRA-restricted oakmoss used to do. Hermitage Oils recommends it with fougere, smoky blends, musk, forest accords and deep amber bases. Overdose it and the composition smells of soup stock.