Fire

Note Profile

Abstract

About

Fire is a fantasy accord for live combustion. Nobody extracts it, so perfumers rebuild it from the phenols that wood actually gives off when it burns - syringol, the guaiacols and isoeugenol - with resin and incense on top. What separates it from the smoke and ash notes already in this vocabulary is that fire is the burning stage, not the smoke that drifts off it or the grey residue it leaves.

Scent Profile

Smoky above everything, and phenolic with it rather than sooty - the charred-hardwood register of syringol, which is smoke and carbolic at once. Under it, amber-resinous warmth from the incense and labdanum side, and dry woody char from burning cedar and oak. Then a sweet-vanillic edge, which is real chemistry rather than sentiment: syringol and the guaiacols are described as sweet as well as smoky. Smaller: a warm-spice clove tone from isoeugenol, a light leather turn the same phenols produce in tanned-hide accords, a dry tobacco-hay quality, a faint earthiness and a light powdery drift.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeBase · ~24h lasting

Family Woody & Earthy, Amber · Musk · Leather

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

Origin

No source and no extraction. Fire is reconstructed. The smell it reconstructs is the pyrolysis of lignin at roughly 300-500 °C: hardwood lignin yields syringol and its derivatives, softwood lignin yields mostly guaiacols, and both come with isoeugenol, phenol and the cresols. Perfumers reach for birch tar, cade, incense resins and labdanum to build it, and for syringol itself, which is sold as crystals.

Usage in Perfumery

A base note used to put a heat source in a composition. It goes under resins, woods, leather and tobacco, and it is what makes a fragrance read as being near a fire rather than as smelling of a burnt object. In the two measured uses of the bare note it sits in the base beside charred wood and leather in one, and beside musk and vanilla under frankincense and cocoa in the other.