Plum Leaf

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Plum leaf is the foliage of the plum tree, not the fruit. It smells of crushed green leaf and cut grass, with a soft herbal edge and a thin bitter-almond nuance under it. The fruit is barely there. The one source that describes the smell calls the fruity side a 'minor whisper' and says outright that the leaf is not the fruit note. Evidence is thin and this vector is held loosely.

Scent Profile

Green leads and every source puts it first: 'subtle, fresh, and verdant', 'a lush green quality', 'reminiscent of freshly cut grass'. Premiere Peau names cis-3-hexenol as the compound behind the same fresh-cut-leaf top in its green-plum reconstruction. Aromatic_herbal is the second thing the same sentence says, 'intertwined with slight herbal nuances', and it is scored below the green because 'slight' is the source's own word. Nutty is the bitter-almond benzaldehyde, measured at 5.66% in P. domestica leaf tissue and named by Premiere Peau as the marker every Prunus shares. It carries the widest spread in this vector because no source states it as an odour of the leaf; it is read off the chemistry. Below the line, fruity is kept deliberately small: the one sensory source calls it a 'minor fruity whisper' and 'far less pronounced than the actual fruit'. A small sweet_vanillic covers the 'soft, sweet undertones' in the same sentence. The measured composition is dominated by phytol and by C23-C31 alkanes, which read waxy and fatty rather than sweet, and this vocabulary has no facet for waxy, so nothing is scored for it. No source mentions hay, tannin or dryness for plum leaf the way they do for cherry leaf and blackberry leaf. Tobacco_hay is left at zero rather than borrowed from the siblings, and its spread is set to 0.18 to cover the possibility that it belongs there.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeTop · ~2h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic

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

Origin

Prunus domestica, Rosaceae, the same tree that bears the plum. No supplier reached for this dossier sells a plum leaf absolute or essential oil, so it is not established whether perfumers buy a leaf extract or build the effect from cis-3-hexenol and benzaldehyde. A leaf hydrodistillate analysed by Potenza et al. (2019, Cosenza, Italy) gives the only measured composition: phytol 9.4-25.8%, pentacosane 15.8-16.8%, hexadecanoic acid 6.3-7.7% and benzaldehyde 5.66%, with tricosane, heptacosane and nonacosane also high. That paper tested antioxidant activity and drew no odour conclusions.

Usage in Perfumery

A green top accent. It is used to put leaf and stem around a fruit or a flower rather than to carry a fragrance itself, and its stated pairings are fruity, floral and woody notes. It gives a stone-fruit accord the plant it grew on, so the fruit reads as picked rather than cooked.