Spinach

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Spinach is the raw leaf of Spinacia oleracea. As a note it is a dark, damp green with a metallic edge that plainer leaf greens do not have.

Scent Profile

Green is nearly the whole note, and every source says so: Premiere Peau calls it green and vegetal with a damp, chlorophyll-rich quality, and Sunrise Botanics calls its absolute a very strong, leafy green. Mineral is the facet that makes spinach worth a separate row. Premiere Peau attributes it to the leaf's iron, calls it a faint iron-metallic edge with a slight blood-like quality, and uses it to separate spinach from lettuce and from grass, both plainer greens. Nutty comes from Nature In Bottle, which describes its spinach leaf absolute as a combination of fruity and nutty tones. Fruity is the other half of that same claim and is held lower because only one supplier makes it. Aquatic_ozonic is the word 'damp', kept below published lettuce (0.55) because Premiere Peau says spinach is darker and heavier than lettuce. Sulphurous is a trace only. Cooked spinach is explicitly sulphurous and cabbage-like, but the perfumery note is the raw leaf, so the facet is present as a hint of what the vegetable can become rather than as a description of what it smells like. Earthy, aromatic_herbal and cooling_mentholic finish it.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeTop · ~2h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic, Elemental

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

What this is made of

Spinach absolute

A natural extract

CAS 68917-48-6

Spinacia oleracea absolute (IFRA NCS E2.1, leaf/herb). The note is the raw leaf.

How the layers join

Origin

Spinach is a leaf vegetable grown worldwide. The note is the raw leaf, not the cooked one. Its green comes from cis-3-hexenal and other leaf aldehydes plus chlorophyll breakdown products, and the Premiere Peau glossary credits the leaf's iron content with the metallic edge. Cooking changes the smell completely, to something sulphurous and cabbage-like from sulphur amino acids breaking down. Whether a real spinach extract exists is disputed. Premiere Peau states there is no commercial spinach essential oil or absolute, and that the effect is built from leaf-green synthetics and metallic-green modifiers. Sunrise Botanics and Nature In Bottle both sell a product labelled Spinach Leaf Absolute and describe its smell directly. This dossier could not settle which is right.

Usage in Perfumery

Spinach appears in 3 Fragrantica perfumes and 2 Parfumo perfumes, all as a green top accent. Fragrantica files it under greens, herbs and fougeres. Perfumers use it for a darker, more mineral green than a standard leaf-green chemical gives, usually in the opening and usually in small amounts. It works against galbanum, violet leaf, cucumber and tomato leaf, and gives a vegetal accord a damp, edible-leaf reading rather than a stem or sap one.