Lotus Seed

Note Profile

Botanical

About

The soft starchy sweetness of cooked lotus seed, the paste inside a mooncake. Powdery and mild, with a faint caramel edge. Nothing aquatic and nothing floral.

Scent Profile

Powdery leads because it is the only direct olfactory word anyone wrote about this note: a wearer of the one documented fragrance calls the lotus seed and the mung bean together 'a soft, slightly powdery touch'. It is set level with rice-cake at 0.55, another soft starch confection, and well below rice-powder at 0.92, which is milled dry powder and nothing else. Sweet_vanillic is the cooked and sweetened form. Lotus seed paste is described as 'rich, sweet, silky with a slight fragrance of caramel', so the sweetness is caramelised rather than vanillic, and 0.45 keeps it under cake at 0.75 and rice-cake at 0.60 because the seed itself carries no sugar until someone adds it. Lactonic is the 'silky' in that same line, the fatty smoothness of the paste. Nutty is the seed as a seed, a cooked starchy nut, and it carries the widest spread in the vector at 0.25 because no source names it. It is not zero, because refusing to score a facet nobody thought to mention is its own kind of error, but it could be anywhere from nothing. Earthy is the same argument at lower weight. Clean_musk is the softness of the texture. Green is the bitter germ that is removed before sale, so it is a trace of what is deliberately taken out. Every number here rests on one product page, one customer review and two encyclopaedia lines.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~6h lasting

Family Floral, Sweet & Gourmand

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

Origin

Lotus seed is the nut of Nelumbo nucifera, the same plant as the lotus flower, but a different organ and a different smell. There is no extract of it for perfumery. The seed is harvested, the bitter germ is pushed out with a hollow needle, and the rest is dried or boiled and sweetened into the paste that fills a mooncake. Parfumo records 5 perfumes with this note, first in 2018 and last in 2026. The one that is documented, d'Annam's Mooncake, builds it into golden syrup, salted egg yolk, mung bean, honey and vanilla.

Usage in Perfumery

Used in Asian dessert gourmands as a soft filler rather than a lead. It supplies starch and powder under sweeter, louder materials. In d'Annam's Mooncake a wearer describes the lotus seed and the mung bean together as 'a soft, slightly powdery touch' under honey and salted egg yolk. It is not interchangeable with the lotus flower note, which is aquatic and belongs in fresh florals.