Rice Flour

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Raw rice ground to a fine starch. The husk is removed and the grain is milled dry, or soaked and wet-milled. It is not cooked, so it carries none of the warm steam character of the rice note. It smells faint, dry and chalky, closer to a bag of plain starch than to a bowl of food.

Scent Profile

Powdery leads and nothing competes with it. Every source that touches milled grain describes powder first, and the material is physically a fine dry starch. It sits above the wheat flour note at 0.78 because rice flour mills finer, and below rice powder at 0.92 because rice powder is not this material at all. Premiere Peau says so directly: rice powder in perfumery is 'not the grain ground fine', it is a compounded cosmetic accord with ionone and lactone gloss on it. Strip that gloss and the remainder is what rice flour is. Mineral is the chalky, dry, faintly stone-like quality of raw starch, set above wheat flour's 0.20 because rice flour is the more neutral of the two and the chalk is what is left when the wheat character goes. Nutty is a faint raw cereal edge, set well below wheat flour's 0.35 because rice flour is gluten-free and has no bready wheat-germ depth. Clean_musk and sweet_vanillic are both quiet. They are held non-zero rather than zeroed because no source says the material lacks them, and zeroing a facet no source discussed would manufacture a difference from the flour note that nobody claimed.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~14h lasting

Family Floral

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

Origin

Oryza sativa grain, husked and milled. Wikipedia gives the two routes: dry-milled from dry grains, or wet-milled from grains soaked first. There is no rice flour essential oil, absolute or commercial extract. Premiere Peau states plainly that actual rice powder, meaning Oryza sativa starch, has minimal fragrance, and that no commercial rice essential oil or absolute is used in perfumery at all. A perfumer listing this note is building an accord from powdery materials, not dosing a milled grain.

Usage in Perfumery

Attested on 5 Parfumo entries across 3 brands, none on Fragrantica. A texture note, never a subject. It is the dry matte surface a formula reaches for when a musk or a soft floral needs to read as starch rather than as sugar. Premiere Peau's page for the neighbouring rice powder describes that job well: the matte, skin-like quality of pressed face powder. Rice flour is the same job done colder and without the cosmetic gloss.