Cornflower

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Cornflower is the blue field flower, Centaurea cyanus. It hardly smells, and every source says so. What they describe is a subtle, mildly sweet floral with a grassy edge and a herbal quality, and they are describing a hydrosol or the fresh flower rather than a perfumery material.

Scent Profile

Floral leads and all three sources agree on it, but all three also insist it is quiet: 'subtle and mildly sweet' from ScentSeeker, 'sweet floral' from Florihana, 'pleasant, sweet, floral, herbal' from AromaWeb. The records real dominance inside a small smell, not a loud one. Green is 'lightly grassy'. Aromatic_herbal is AromaWeb's 'herbal', and the same source ranks the flower beside Roman chamomile while stating flatly that 'they don't smell that much alike'. Below the line, sweet_vanillic is the repeated 'mildly sweet'. Warm_spice is the 'hints of clove' that one community source gives and nothing else corroborates.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Floral

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

Origin

Centaurea cyanus is an annual of European cereal fields, and the note is the flower head. There is no cornflower absolute or essential oil in normal trade. What is sold is a hydrosol, the water left over from distillation, and all three sources here describe that or the flower itself. Wikipedia's article on the species carries no scent information at all. The flower's real trade is colour, not smell. Dried petals hold their blue, which is why they end up in tea and confetti, and that is a fair warning that nobody ever grew it for its aroma.

Usage in Perfumery

Parfumo records four placements across four brands. Fragrantica records none. It reads as a name for a blue meadow rather than as a dose of material. In a listed pyramid it signals wildflower and open field, and any floral you can actually smell in the bottle is coming from something else.