Cocoa Wood

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Dry bitter timber carrying an unsweetened cocoa cast

Scent Profile

Dry_woody and coffee_cacao sit almost level, because the two sources disagree about which one leads and neither is stronger. Pierre Guillaume puts wood first ('the woody bitterness of Cacao Wood'), the Nest reviewer puts cocoa first ('bittersweet dry cocoa powder' enrobing the wood). Scoring one clearly above the other would invent a verdict. Creamy_woody is the 'smooth-as-butter creamy sandalwood and cedar-ish' side the same reviewer names, and it is what stops this reading as sawdust. Sweet_vanillic is capped low on purpose: every sweetness word in both sources is qualified as bitter or bittersweet. Powdery is 'dry cocoa powder', the texture both sources reach for. Mineral is the brand's own phrase, 'warm and mineral woody scent'. Earthy, nutty, sour ('slightly acid coffee notes'), a small amber_resinous floor, a trace of smoky and a fusty tobacco_hay edge run below. Spreads are throughout because every descriptor here was smelled inside a finished perfume with saffron, amyris or sequoia alongside it, never as an isolated material.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~7h lasting

Family Woody & Earthy, Sweet & Gourmand

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

Origin

No supplier catalogue, datasheet or analysis of a 'cocoa wood' material could be found. Both documented uses are composed accords, not an extract. Pierre Guillaume's Anti-Blues (2019) names Cacao Wood as a heart material and describes 'the woody bitterness of Cacao Wood, Saffron and Amyris'. Nest's Cocoa Woods (2018) pairs cocoa with a sequoia-wood accord. Nothing found treats the timber of Theobroma cacao as a fragrance material in its own right, so this note should not be read as an oil of the cacao tree.

Usage in Perfumery

Parfumo's note page claims 5 perfumes and says the note 'often occurs in the heart note', first used in 2008 and most recently in 2026. This repository's own count of the Parfumo data finds 4 placements across 3 brands. Two unrelated houses eight years apart reach for the same idea: a wood that carries bitter cocoa, used where a gourmand chocolate would be too sweet.