Green Plum

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Green plum is the unripe stage of a stone fruit, tart and cut-leaf green with a bitter-almond edge under it. It is caught mid-ripening: the sour still wins, but a juicy, faintly peachy body has started to come through. It is bright and short-lived, and it fades to a thin stone-fruit memory within about two hours.

Scent Profile

Green is the cut-leaf top and the reason the note carries the word. Première Peau traces it to cis-3-hexenol and calls it 'a sharp top of cis-3-hexenol green'. Sour is the other half of the identity: the accord is 'tart' and the source is explicit that in the ripening it describes 'the sour still dominant but the sweet starting to surface'. Fruity is the stone fruit itself, the 'juicy, faintly peachy body' that emerges within the first half-hour and the 'faint stone-fruit memory' that is all that survives to hour two. It is held below the sour and the green on purpose, because the source never describes this note in a ripe register. Nutty is benzaldehyde, named as the 'faintly almond-bitter' and 'bitter-almond stone-fruit' signature. Lactonic is gamma-decalactone, credited by the source with the 'peachy-creamy fatty body'.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeTop · ~2h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic, Fruity

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

Origin

A reconstruction, not an extract. Première Peau states plainly that no commercial green plum extract exists and that the note is built molecule by molecule. The referent is the unripe European plum, Prunus domestica, and the Japanese ume, Prunus mume. Three materials carry it: benzaldehyde (CAS 100-52-7) for the bitter-almond stone-fruit signature shared by every Prunus, cis-3-hexenol (CAS 928-96-1) for the sharp fresh-cut-leaf top that supplies the green of the name, and gamma-decalactone (CAS 706-14-9) for the peachy, creamy, fatty body.

Usage in Perfumery

A top-note material. Its own source says green plum lives in the top and lifts citrus and floral openings with a tart-juicy clarity. Use it where a fruit note has to read as bright and unfinished rather than jammy. It will not hold a heart, and on a blotter little is left after the second hour.