Straw
Note Profile
About
Dried cereal stalk, sun-bleached and papery. Coumarin-sweet, toasted, drier and blonder than hay.
Scent Profile
Straw smells sun-bleached and papery, a dried cereal stalk rather than fresh grass. A warm, blonde, faintly vanilla-like sweetness runs through it from the coumarin in the dried stalk. There is a toasted, nutty grain undertone, and a papery, powdery dryness like dust in an old hatbox. The dry, woody stalk itself carries the note towards leather but stops short of it.
ScentWheel
Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.
ScentArt
Origin
The dried stalks of cereal grain, wheat (Triticum aestivum) or rye, as woven into hats. There is no straw extract in trade. Premiere Peau's glossary states this plainly: straw in perfumery is 'an accord rather than a single extract', reconstructed from coumarin, hay absolute and related materials. The smell is made by drying, not by the living plant. Coumarin is released by enzymatic breakdown during wilting, and fresh grass carries almost none of it.
Usage in Perfumery
A heart-to-base accord. Premiere Peau places it 'between hay (more green, more coumarin-forward) and leather (drier, more tannic)', so it is the material to reach for when hay reads too green and leather too tannic.
Similar Notes
Perfumes featuring Straw
A selection of reviewed perfumes where Straw appears prominently.
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