Pinwheel Flower

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Pinwheel flower is Tabernaemontana divaricata, the shrub also called crepe jasmine, Ceylon jasmine, East India rosebay and Nero's crown. It is not a true jasmine. The white pinwheel-shaped flowers open in the evening and give a heavy, creamy, indolic sweetness that carries in warm night air.

Scent Profile

White_floral leads and the source states it four times in four different sentences: 'heavy, sweet, and jasmine-like', 'a thick, indolic, creamy sweetness', 'the scent is heavy, creamy-white, and sweetly floral with a jasmine-like indolic quality', and 'functions as a jasmine-adjacent, night-blooming floral'. When a single source repeats one claim that consistently, the claim is what the source is for. Floral is the general register under it. Sweet_vanillic carries 'more purely sweet', which is the exact phrase the source uses to separate this flower from jasmine. Lactonic is 'creamy' and 'creamy-white', a word the source uses three times, and it is the closest thing here to a second distinct fact rather than a restatement of the first. Animalic is 'indolic', stated twice, and it is held at 0.30 rather than higher because the source also says the quality only 'deepens' after dark, which describes a change and not a peak. Below the line, honeyed is a reading of 'thick sweetness' and not a claim anyone made. Green is deliberately not zero: the source says 'less green than jasmine', which is a comparison, and a comparison is not a statement of absence. Powdery and tropical are held low for the same reason - nobody named them, and nobody ruled them out.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~7h lasting

Family Floral, Sweet & Gourmand

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

Origin

Natural, from the flowers of Tabernaemontana divaricata (Apocynaceae), an evergreen shrub of South Asia, Southeast Asia and China, widely planted as an ornamental and grown indoors. The stem exudes a milky latex when broken, which is where the alternative name milk flower comes from. No commercial absolute or essential oil trade for the species was found, so perfumery use is reconstruction rather than extraction.

Usage in Perfumery

Rare. One Fragrantica placement and none in the second vocabulary. Used as a jasmine-adjacent night-blooming white floral, chosen where the composition wants indolic creaminess without jasmine's green top.