Pistachio Leaf

Note Profile

Botanical

About

The leaf of the pistachio tree, Pistacia vera. It is green and terpenic rather than nutty. Nobody has published a description of how this leaf smells. What exists is one measurement of what is in it, and descriptions of two cousin species' leaves, and both point the same way: green, resinous, piney.

Scent Profile

Green leads. Three sources point at it: Premiere Peau says alpha-pinene and terpinolene 'read as green, resinous, almost piney', Eden Botanicals opens its mastic leaf description with 'Earthy, green, radiant', and Wikipedia calls Pistacia aethiopica leaves 'aromatic' and 'glossy bright green'. Aromatic_herbal is the terpene lift, the herbal register both leaf-oil sources reach for. Amber_resinous carries 'resinous' and 'balsamic', which appear in the mastic leaf copy and in the P. aethiopica description alike. Cooling_mentholic is the bornyl acetate, 11.3 per cent of the measured leaf oil and a known camphoraceous, pine-cool material. That is a chemical inference, not a nose report, and its spread says so. Dry_woody is Eden's 'warm, woody tonalities'. Below the line: earthy from Eden's first word, mineral and sour for the bitter astringency Wikipedia calls 'bitter, resinous', nutty kept low because no source finds nut in the leaf, and fresh_spice.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeTop · ~2h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic

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

Origin

Leaves of Pistacia vera, the true pistachio, a small tree of the cashew family grown across Iran, Turkey, Syria and California. Tsokou et al. 2007 in Molecules is the only primary study found of the leaf oil. It measured alpha-pinene at 30.0 per cent, terpinolene at 17.6 per cent and bornyl acetate at 11.3 per cent, a different mix from the unripe fruit oil of the same trees. The leaves yield 0.1 per cent oil by weight, five times less than the fruit.

Usage in Perfumery

A green top note used to put a leaf and a stem under a pistachio gourmand, so the nut does not read as pure confectionery. It has no nut character of its own worth speaking of.