Hoya Carnosa Wax Plant
Note Profile
About
Hoya carnosa is the wax plant or porcelain flower. It smells of honey at night. The flowers are pale, star-shaped and waxy, they open in the evening and they run with nectar. There is no extract. What perfumery calls hoya is a reconstruction, and the two sources found disagree about what the sweetness resembles - one says honey-floral, the other says chocolate. That disagreement is left in the vector rather than smoothed out, and it is why the confidence here is low.
Scent Profile
Honeyed is the spine and both sources lead with it: 'honey dripping from pale, star-shaped blooms at midnight', 'sweet, honeyed, faintly nocturnal', 'heavy honey'. Garden Betty independently reports nectar visibly running from the flowers, which is the same claim from the plant rather than from perfumery. It is held below the published honey note (0.85) because this is a flower carrying honey, not honey itself. White_floral comes from the reconstruction rather than from a nose: methyl benzoate is named 'for the white-floral body', and the accord is placed 'distinct from but adjacent to gardenia and tuberose'. Floral is the hydroxycitronellal muguet lift, named once. Waxy_fatty now takes the waxy quality that lactonic was holding for it: Premiere Peau leads its summary line with 'Waxy, sweet, nocturnal' and builds the accord with gamma-undecalactone 'for waxy substance'. It is secondary rather than dominant because the common name is about how the petals look and feel, not how they smell, and only one source treats waxy as an odour at all. Lactonic drops, which is the peach-creamy residue of that same gamma-undecalactone and nothing more. Tropical covers 'tropical darkness' and the plant's origin, and it is deliberately low because no source names a specific tropical fruit or coconut. Coffee_cacao with a spread is the unresolved disagreement: Garden Betty says the flowers 'smell divinely sweet (oftentimes like chocolate!)', Premiere Peau says honey-floral and never mentions chocolate. A single community source claiming a whole facet earns a small value and the widest spread in the vector, not a zero and not a confident 0.4.
ScentWheel
Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.
Origin
Hoya carnosa (Apocynaceae) is a tropical Asian climbing succulent. Garden Betty describes the flowers as 'soft pink and star-shaped, covered in a very fine layer of fuzz', producing 'so much nectar that you can sometimes see drops oozing and falling from the flower cores'. Scent and nectar are both strongest at night, which attracts moths - Garden Betty cites Altenburger and Matile, 'Circadian rhythmicity of fragrance emission in flowers of Hoya carnosa', Planta 174(2), 1988. Premiere Peau states plainly that the plant 'yields nothing to commercial extraction' and that the perfumery note is 'a conceptual reconstruction' built from honey absolute or phenylacetic acid esters, hydroxycitronellal for a muguet lift, methyl benzoate for white-floral body and gamma-undecalactone for waxy substance.
Usage in Perfumery
A floral note with 4 Fragrantica placements and no Parfumo attestation. Fragrantica files it under Flowers and warns that the scent varies by species, 'from vanilla, sweet to fresh citrusy'. Its job is a honeyed night-flower that is not gardenia and not tuberose.
Similar Notes
Perfumes featuring Hoya Carnosa Wax Plant
A selection of reviewed perfumes where Hoya Carnosa Wax Plant appears prominently.
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