Cuban Cedar

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Cuban cedar is the wood of Cedrela odorata, the tree also sold as Spanish cedar or cedro. It is not a true cedar. It smells dry, woody and faintly resinous, close enough to true cedarwood that the trade borrowed the name. Perfumery knows it mainly as the cigar-box wood: the dry aromatic wood a Habano is stored in.

Scent Profile

Dry_woody is the whole note and every source leads there. Wikipedia calls the heartwood resin aromatic and insect-repelling, and says the smell resembles that of the unrelated true cedars. Premiere Peau's cigar description puts it as a dry cedar-box opening and as the aromatic wood the box adds. Amber_resinous is that resin, named as resin twice, though no source rates its strength. Below those, aromatic_herbal and fresh_spice are the delta-cadinene and calarene chemistry, which reads dry-herbal-woody rather than sweet. Creamy_woody is held low and wide because nothing calls this wood creamy or sweet, and nothing calls it absent either. Tobacco_hay is the cigar-box association bleeding back, not a facet of the wood itself. Sulphurous carries the one odd claim in the evidence: Plants For A Future records a distinct onion-like odour on freshly cut wood that disappears after two or three days, so it is real but almost never in the bottle.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~18h lasting

Family Woody & Earthy

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

Origin

Heartwood of Cedrela odorata (Meliaceae), a tree of the Caribbean and tropical America. The heartwood carries an aromatic, insect-repelling resin, which is where the name Spanish-cedar comes from. GC-MS of the wood oil (The Pharma Innovation Journal, 2018) found it dominated by sesquiterpene hydrocarbons: delta-cadinene at 26 to 53 per cent, with beta-curcumene and calarene. That is a different chemistry from the cedrol-rich oils of Cedrus and Juniperus.

Usage in Perfumery

Used as a dry woody base and as the wood half of cigar and tobacco accords. It is the cedar element in a Cuban cigar accord, where it supplies the dry cedar-box opening under the fermented leaf. It is also the timber of clothing chests and wardrobes, and that stored-linen association is part of what a perfumer is buying.