Gourmand

Crème Brûlée

Note Profile

Prepared 1 perfume

About

Crème brûlée is a two-layer gourmand accord: a vanilla custard body with a torched sugar crust over it. The crust is the whole point of the note, and it is what separates it from plain custard. Commercial interpretations keep the layers apart in their own note pyramids, listing vanilla custard and burnt sugar crust as two different things.

Scent Profile

Sweet caramelised sugar dominates, over a lactonic custard and cream body. The torched crust adds a smoky, faintly bitter catch that plain custard has none of, and a warm balsamic depth sits beneath it. Smaller facets: a jammy fruitiness from furaneol and ethyl maltol, a toasted nutty edge, a fenugreek-maple flick of warm spice from sotolone, and a trace of egg-yolk richness from the custard underneath.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeBase · ~16h lasting

Family Sweet & Gourmand

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

Origin

A prepared dessert whose smell is created by the process. A set egg custard is topped with sugar and burnt with a torch or a red-hot iron until it hardens to a caramel sheet. Perfumery rebuilds the crust with the caramel molecules - ethyl maltol, maltol, furaneol and sotolone - laid over a vanillic and lactonic custard base. Nothing is extracted.

Usage in Perfumery

Perfumers use crème brûlée as a heart-to-base gourmand where they want caramel with a dairy body under it rather than caramel alone. It gives depth behind vanilla, tonka and coffee, and its slight bitterness stops a sweet composition going flat. It is the reference note for the whole ultra-gourmand category.