Poinsettia

Note Profile

Botanical

About

The plant is famous and nearly scentless, so the note is a fantasy built to stand for it. What perfumery calls poinsettia is the smell of the broken stem, not the red bract: green, watery and faintly milky from the latex sap. Nothing about it is floral, and the one source found says so outright. Only that one source describes it at all, which is why the confidence is 0.30 and the spreads are wide. Its parent genus is already published as euphorbia.

Scent Profile

Green leads and is the whole note, specifically the cut-stem kind rather than leaf or grass. Aquatic_ozonic is the watery transparency the source names twice, the thin sap rather than sea air. Lactonic is the milky latex, described as neither sweet nor bitter, so it should read as raw sap and not as cream or coconut. A trace of floral stays on file because the note is used in green-floral accords, but the source places poinsettia below geranium leaf for aroma and below lily for sweetness, so nothing floral leads here.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeTop · ~2h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic

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

Origin

Euphorbia pulcherrima, family Euphorbiaceae. Nothing is extracted. Premiere Peau states that 'the actual plant has minimal fragrance: a faint green-vegetal scent from the sap and leaves, nothing floral in the conventional sense', and gives the chemical reason: 'The plant produces minimal volatile compounds; the milky latex sap contains diterpene esters but no usable aromatic oil.' The scent description on the same page is entirely stem and sap: 'Poinsettia smells like sap from a broken stem, vegetal and watery, with a faint latex undertone... A subtle milky-latex quality sits underneath, neither sweet nor bitter.' Botanical extension sources checked for corroboration cover cultivation and toxicity only and carry no scent language.

Usage in Perfumery

Premiere Peau describes it as 'a fantasy modifier used sparingly in green-floral and tropical compositions. It provides a greenhouse-vegetal quality, evoking living plants rather than cut flowers.' Attestation is low and matches that: 2 on Fragrantica, 3 on Parfumo across 3 brands. Read it as a stem note that lends a living-plant quality to a floral accord, not as a flower in its own right.