Kadam

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Kadam is the flower of Neolamarckia cadamba, the Indian burflower tree, worked almost entirely as an attar rather than as an isolated oil. It smells sweet, honeyed and powdery over a white floral body, with a green edge and a woody dry-down. Arctander's description records a short-lived minty-borneolic top that no other source reports.

Scent Profile

A sweet white_floral body carries the note, and all three sources lead with sweetness. Honeyed and powdery come next and are what separate kadam from champaca: Premiere Peau calls it 'sweet, powdery, and musky-honeyed' with a 'pollen-dusted' softness, and the Kannauj attar maker names a honeyed nuance independently. sweet_vanillic and floral hold the general sweetness that sits under the white floral. tropical places it with champaca and frangipani, which two sources name as its reference points. creamy_woody is uncertain and marked so: Arctander calls the oil 'woody-floral', but the only explicit creamy sandalwood claim comes from an attar, where the sandalwood is the carrier and not the flower. green is stated twice, as 'sweet yet green' and as a 'soft green nuance'. Below the reported band, a cooling minty-borneolic top is recorded by one source only and contradicted by the other two, which call the opening milky-sweet.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~12h lasting

Family Floral, Sweet & Gourmand

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

Origin

Neolamarckia cadamba (formerly Anthocephalus cadamba), the kadam or burflower tree of India and South-East Asia. The scent comes from the orange-yellow spherical flower heads. Kadam absolute is not a standard commercial product, so the material reaching perfumery is almost always a Kannauj attar, co-distilled from the flowers into sandalwood, or a reconstructed accord.

Usage in Perfumery

Used as a heart-to-base floral in Indian attar work and in compositions reaching for a monsoon or temple-garland image. It sits close to champaca and frangipani and is chosen when a sweeter, more powdery and less indolic tropical floral is wanted. Its tenacity is the reason perfumers reach for it.