Iced Tea

Note Profile

Prepared

About

Iced tea is scored as the flavoured cold drink, not as tea served cold. Both sources lead on added fruit. Wikipedia says it is 'normally mixed with fruit-flavored syrup such as lemon and peach'. The trade journal Perfumer & Flavorist says lemon and peach are 'by far the most popular fruit flavors' in the ready-to-drink category. So the vector is fruit syrup first, tea leaf second, sugar or honey third. That is the opposite emphasis from the published black-tea, ceylon-tea and assam-tea notes, where the leaf carries the note.

Scent Profile

Citrus leads by a small margin and is the lemon of the syrup, not of a peel oil. Both sources name lemon among the two dominant flavours, so it is set well below earl-grey-tea, where the citrus is bergamot essential oil worked into the dry leaf. Fruity sits with it and carries peach plus the long tail the trade journal lists: strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, cherry and blackcurrant. Tobacco_hay is the tea leaf. It is set below black-tea at 0.60 but close to it, because Wikipedia is plain that 'most iced teas get their flavor from tea leaves', and stripping the leaf out on the strength of a flavour-launch table would be reading a sales figure as a smell. Sweet_vanillic is the sugar and syrup Wikipedia names first. Honeyed is separate and sourced: Perfumer & Flavorist reports honey, brown sugar and maple syrup displacing white sugar. Below the level worth naming: aromatic_herbal and cooling_mentholic for the mint and peppermint both sources list, held low because they belong to some regional styles and not to the drink in general; sour for lemon acidity; dry_woody, smoky and leather, and carried from the black tea base at roughly half of black-tea's own values, because the base is diluted and covered rather than absent; and thin green, floral and aquatic_ozonic.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Fresh & Citrus, Fruity, Amber · Musk · Leather

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

Origin

A prepared drink, not a perfumery material. Brewed Camellia sinensis, cooled, sweetened and usually flavoured. Wikipedia notes that herbal infusions served cold are sold under the same name, and that regional styles differ: New England iced tea is moderately sweetened and often contains mint, and Chinese cooling infusions use chrysanthemum and kuding rather than tea leaf. No fragrance house publishes an iced-tea base. Any perfumery use is a reconstruction.

Usage in Perfumery

Measured 2026-08-23: 6 Parfumo placements across 5 brands, and none on Fragrantica. Use it where a tea note is wanted with fruit syrup and sugar on top rather than tannin underneath. The published earl-grey-tea note is the other citrus-over-tea option and it is a different build: bergamot oil infused into the dry leaf, present before brewing. This note's citrus is syrup stirred into a cold glass.