Fruit Salad

Note Profile

Botanical

About

A bowl of mixed cut fruit, read as ripe and juicy rather than tart or candied. The one commercial fragrance built on this note is described as pear, tangerine, peach and raspberry, so the mix is orchard fruit and berry with a citrus lift. A separate source associates a shop-bought fruit salad with pineapple, so a low tropical edge is carried but not led on.

Scent Profile

Fruity leads and every source agrees on it. It is ripe and succulent, not tart and not candied: the retailer copy for the one fragrance named on this note calls it 'super luscious, fruity, juicy, tempting and succulent' and builds it from pear, peach and raspberry. That is why it sits below red-fruits at 0.82 in tartness terms but at a comparable height, and why it is not pushed to a candy register. Citrus is tangerine, one of the four fruits named outright, plus the orange segments a cut fruit salad normally carries. Tropical is pineapple and is the weakest of the three named facets: it comes from a community source saying a readymade fruit salad 'often contains pineapple', while the one fragrance-specific source names no tropical fruit at all. Its spread is nearly as wide as the value, which is the honest statement of that disagreement. Below the naming threshold, sweet_vanillic is the ripeness rather than added sugar, green is cut flesh and rind, lactonic is the peach, sour is the raspberry and tangerine bite that no source names but that the fruits carry, and aquatic_ozonic is the juice in the bottom of the bowl. All five are held low with wide spreads because they are inferred from the fruits listed, not stated by anybody.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Fruity

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

Origin

A constructed accord with no natural source. Fruit salad is a food, not a material, and no supplier sells a fruit-salad extract. Perfumers assemble it from fruit esters and lactones. A trade guide gives the usual shape of a fruity accord as roughly a quarter lactonic fruit such as gamma-undecalactone for peach, a fifth berry material such as frambinone for raspberry, a fifth tropical esters, and a fifth woody or musky material for depth and longevity, used at 1-5% of the formula.

Usage in Perfumery

Used as a heart note. The same trade guide places fruits in perfumery 'primarily as heart notes'. In practice the note appears in cheerful, daytime, all-fruit compositions rather than as a modifier. Demeter's Jelly Belly Fruit Salad, since discontinued, is the one named fragrance built on it and is sold as a light day-wear scent.