Oysters

Note Profile

Animal 3 perfumes

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About

Oysters is a marine note built on brine and wet mineral. The perfumery trade reads it clean: marine, mineralic, salty, with a metallic tang. Food science measures something more vegetal than that, with grass, cucumber and melon over a sulphurous canned-corn note from the oyster's own dimethyl sulfide.

Scent Profile

Oysters smells marine and mineral, a briny, salty aroma with a subtle metallic tang, close to the sea itself. A sulphurous, canned-corn edge sets it apart from plain seawater or salt. Underneath runs a green, vegetal note, grassy and cucumber-like rather than purely oceanic.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Fresh & Citrus, Elemental

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

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ScentArt

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Origin

The referent is the live or freshly shucked oyster, not a processed material. Happy Oyster Company, citing food-science work, reports that 'a raw, fresh Eastern Oyster (C. virginica) smells mildly of seawater and the seaside', and that researchers describe its aroma compounds as 'canned corn, grass, green, plant-like, metallic-like, melon-like, cucumber-like, as well as marine, fresh, and flowery (lilac)'. The savoury element is dimethyl sulfide, which is the compound scientists liken to canned corn. Popular Science traces the brininess of oysters and other shellfish to bromophenols, which read sealike and crablike at low concentration and 'a harsh chemical smell, similar to iodine' at high concentration.

Usage in Perfumery

Attested in 12 Fragrantica perfumes and none on Parfumo. Fragrantica files it under musk, amber and animalic smells rather than with the aquatics, which is worth knowing before using it as a clean marine. No supplier names a material as the Oysters note.