Laurel Blossom

Note Profile

Botanical

About

The flower of the bay laurel tree, Laurus nobilis. It reads as the herbal, faintly cooling character of the bay leaf with the volume turned down and a light clean florality laid over it.

Scent Profile

Aromatic_herbal leads because both the trade source and the chemistry point the same way. Premiere Peau opens with 'aromatic, green-herbal, and gently floral' and its drydown line is 'warm, herbal, bay-like depth'. It sits below the published bay-leaf note's 0.65 and only just, because the source's claim is one of degree: the flower shares the leaf's compounds 'but in lower concentrations'. Floral is the facet that earns this note a row of its own. Both sources support it independently - 'the flowers add a light, clean florality' from the trade page, and linalool and (E)-isoeugenol among the highest flavour-dilution odorants in the paper, both logged as flowery. It is held to 0.45 and not higher because every description calls the florality light or gentle. Green comes from 'green-herbal' and 'spring-like freshness', with (Z)-3-hexenal ranked fresh green in the AEDA list. Cooling_mentholic is 1,8-cineole, which the paper names as a main component of the flowers as well as the leaves. It is well under the leaf note's 0.50 because the flower's own leading components are alpha-eudesmol, beta-elemene and beta-caryophyllene instead, not the cineole-and-pinene profile that defines the leaf. Below: warm_spice for eugenol, which the paper detects but ranks among the leaf's top odorants rather than the flower's, so it is a trace here and not the clove note that West Indian bay is. Fresh_spice and dry_woody are beta-caryophyllene and alpha-eudesmol, the peppery and woody sesquiterpenes the paper puts at the top of the flower's own list. White_floral, honeyed and powdery sit as traces for the creamy petal.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic, Floral

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

Origin

A botanical referent with no commercial extract. Bay laurel flowers in Mediterranean spring, in small creamy-yellow clusters. Premiere Peau states that the flowers are not commercially extracted and that the note is a fantasy accord, built from diluted bay leaf oil, light green-floral materials and a clean aromatic-herbal thread. Kilic and colleagues (J. Agric. Food Chem. 2004, 52:1601-6) ran GC-MS and GC-olfactometry on fresh leaves, buds, flowers and fruit of the same tree, which is the only measurement of the flower itself found for this note.