Pepper Leaf

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Pepper leaf is the steam-distilled oil of the leaves of the black pepper vine, not the dried berry. It still smells of pepper. The one study that describes it records the odour of all three oils from the plant as pepper, and reports that the berry oil smells more terpenic than the leaf. The leaf is the heavier, drier, woodier end of the same plant: half its oil is beta-caryophyllene, and it carries no oxygenated monoterpene at all. Only one source describes the smell, and in two words, so this vector is held loosely and deliberately wide.

Scent Profile

Fresh_spice leads because the only odour claim anyone makes about this oil is that it smells of pepper, and the study says so of the leaf oil by name. It is scored below the published pepper note's 0.75 because the same study says the berry oil smelled more terpenic than the leaf, and because the leaf oil has no oxygenated monoterpene to give it the berry's sharp lift. Dry_woody sits close behind it and is the facet the chemistry insists on: beta-caryophyllene is 50.50 per cent of this oil, and this repository already publishes beta-caryophyllene as fresh_spice with dry_woody, so a half-caryophyllene oil should read the same way round. Green is the weakest of the three and the one to challenge first. No source calls this oil green. It is here because the referent is a leaf and because delta-3-carene is a fifth of the oil, and its spread of 0.26 is wider than its value on purpose. The study's dark greenish yellow is a bottle colour, not an odour, and was not used as evidence for it. Below, aromatic_herbal carries the terpene-hydrocarbon bulk, amber_resinous and citrus the elemene and the limonene the study measures, mineral the dry edge the berry oil's trade description names, earthy and creamy_woody the sesquiterpene tail.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~10h lasting

Family Spicy, Woody & Earthy

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

Origin

Piper nigrum, Piperaceae, the same vine that yields black pepper. The organ is the leaf, steam-distilled. A comparative GC-MS study in PMC put beta-caryophyllene at 50.50 per cent of the leaf oil, about twice its share of the berry oil and more than three times its share of the stem oil, with delta-3-carene at 19.03 per cent and delta-elemene at 3.73 per cent. The same study states that sesquiterpene hydrocarbons are the major class in the leaf oil and that no oxygenated monoterpene was found in it. Alpha-pinene, myrcene, phellandrene and limonene are all present but at lower levels than in the berry oil.

Usage in Perfumery

No commercial supplier of a dedicated pepper leaf oil or absolute was found. Attested on 9 Parfumo entries across 6 brands and on no Fragrantica entry, so the term reaches perfumery mostly as a listed note rather than as a bottle a perfumer buys. Treat it as the dry, woody-spice half of pepper without the bright terpenic opening the berry oil has.