Mirabilis

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Mirabilis, the four o'clock flower or marvel of Peru, is a fantasy floral. No extract of the plant exists, so every mirabilis note in a bottle is built from powdery florals, soft musks and a warm-spicy modifier. What perfumers reconstruct is a sweet, powdery evening flower, jasmine-adjacent but softer and much less indolic.

Scent Profile

Powdery before anything else, and still powdery at the end - the heliotrope and face-powder kind, not the rooty iris kind. Under the powder sits a soft general floralcy and a plain sweetness, closer to sugared vanilla than to fruit. A white-floral thread runs through it that the one descriptive source calls powdered jasmine, held at a distance and much less indolic than the real flower. A faint warm spice rides on the sweetness. Over a few hours the flower thins out and a clean musk carries the powder to the end. Behind all of it there is a dry tobacco-leaf sweetness, a little tropical warmth and a light balsamic resin.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~12h lasting

Family Floral, Sweet & Gourmand

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

Origin

Mirabilis jalapa, Nyctaginaceae, native to tropical South America and now grown as an ornamental across warm climates. The trumpet flowers open in the late afternoon and stay open until morning, giving off a strong sweet scent overnight to draw hawkmoths. There is no commercial extraction: Premiere Peau's ingredient glossary states the flowers' volatile content is too low to be viable, and that any perfumery mirabilis note is reconstructed from synthetics. Heliotropin and benzyl benzoate are named as the powdery-balsamic core, with soft musks and warm-spicy modifiers around them. Headspace work on the living flower exists in the botanical literature but was not reached for this scoring.

Usage in Perfumery

An evening-floral accent, not a soliflore. Attested on 18 Fragrantica entries and on nothing in Parfumo, so the term is carried by one catalogue and used sparingly. It sits with heliotrope, violet, tobacco blossom and soft musk, and reads as old-fashioned and garden-at-dusk rather than tropical or green.