Skunk Cabbage

Note Profile

Botanical 1 perfume

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About

Skunk cabbage is a pungent sulphurous note built on the smell of Symplocarpus foetidus, the swamp plant whose bruised leaves and hooded flower give off a garlic-and-skunk reek. It is not a sweet or musky note. The character is cabbage and mustard sharpened into something animal, with a faecal-floral edge from indole behind it.

Scent Profile

Skunk cabbage smells sulphurous and pungent, a garlic-and-cabbage reek from bruised leaves. It reads as skunk itself, an animal note that one garden writer names again and again without reaching for another word. Underneath is a raw, vegetal green wetness, the cabbage half of the smell rather than a leaf green. A mustard-pungent edge and a faecal-floral hint from indole round it off.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Elemental, Amber · Musk · Leather

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

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Materials That Can Make This Note

Perfumers can build Skunk Cabbage from materials such as:

Dimethyl disulfide cabbage · onion · sulfurous

Smell words come from published sources.

A given perfume with this note may use this material, or something else.

Origin

Symplocarpus foetidus, an eastern North American wetland aroid. Wikipedia's chemistry section names dimethyl disulfide, aliphatic hydrocarbons, carboxylic acids and esters in the plant's scent, with female plants adding aromatic hydrocarbons and indole. Dimethyl disulfide is the same class of sulphur volatile that carries garlic and allium. No perfumery house or aroma-material supplier sells skunk cabbage. Searches of Givaudan, IFF, Firmenich, Symrise, ScenTree and Eden Botanicals turned up nothing, so any perfume carrying this note is using a reconstruction, not an extract.

Usage in Perfumery

Used as a listed note rather than a traded material. It appears in 6 Fragrantica-listed fragrances and in no Parfumo listing at all. A perfumer building it would work from sulphur donors and indole at trace level, because the descriptors that define it are unpleasant at any real dose. Its role is contrast: a sulphurous flash under a green or floral opening that makes the rest read as clean.