Hot Chocolate

Note Profile

Prepared

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About

Hot chocolate is the drink, not the bar and not the bean. It is a harder target than plain chocolate, because the natural cocoa materials do not smell like it. The note reads as cocoa first, then sugar and vanilla, then a dry powdery dustiness like opening a tin of drinking cocoa. It is sweeter and milkier than the published chocolate note and it drops that note's bitter, animalic side.

Scent Profile

Hot Chocolate reads as cocoa first, then sugar and vanilla, sweeter and milkier than a bar of chocolate. A creamy milk note runs under the cocoa, closer to a cup than a slab. It finishes with a dry, powdery dustiness, like opening a tin of drinking cocoa. It drops the bitter, animal edge that plain chocolate carries and stays smooth and sweet throughout.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeBase · ~14h lasting

Family Sweet & Gourmand

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

WorldSee it in Note Island

ScentArt

What is ScentArt?

Origin

There is no hot chocolate extract. Histoires de Parfums is blunt about why the naturals do not serve: cocoa absolutes and CO2 extracts 'come nowhere close to... the cup of hot chocolate one drank as a child', because cocoa absolute has 'a dense, deep, balsamic profile, often so animalic that it can easily be mistaken for an aged Castoreum'. The same piece gives Jean-Claude Ellena's minimal formula for chocolate as isobutyl phenylacetate plus vanillin, 'only a framework to be enriched according to whether one wants a sweet or bitter, white or milk, hot or slightly buttery chocolate'. In practice perfumers reach for Givaudan's Chocovan, which Histoires de Parfums says 'inevitably evokes the addictive smell of cocoa drinks from all over the world'.

Usage in Perfumery

A gourmand beverage note with 4 Fragrantica placements and no Parfumo attestation. Fragrantica files it under Beverages. Its job is to give a cocoa reading that stays comfortable and sweet, where the published chocolate note would bring bitterness and a castoreum-like edge.