Tussilago Farfara

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Tussilago farfara is coltsfoot, a yellow composite flower that blooms before its leaves appear. It is not a traded perfumery material. The only olfactive record found is a 2025 chemical analysis of the dried flower bud, which reads green and grassy first, with honeyed, winey and fruity-floral threads under it.

Scent Profile

Green leads because the study names the leading compound class and then says what it smells like: aldehydes and alcohols are 'the most abundant and important compounds' and 'typically have a pleasant grassy smell'. The single strongest signal, 2-heptenal, is logged as 'green vegetable fresh fatty'. It is set rather than higher because this is a chemical inventory, not a person sniffing a flower. Honeyed and floral both come from phenylacetaldehyde, whose library term is 'green sweet floral honey cocoa', and from the study's note that ketones and esters 'characterized by floral and fruity aromas' were also detected. Boozy is the one facet the study states as a whole-material property rather than a per-compound label: 2-hexanol is 'the main reason for winey of Farfarae flos as a whole'. Fruity is the other half of that ketone and ester sentence. Below the line: aldehydic for the abundant aldehyde class read as itself, coffee_cacao and nutty from the 'cocoa phenolic coffee nutty malty' term on 2-methyl butanal, sweet_vanillic, clean_musk, sour for the fermented and pungent terms.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic

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

Origin

Dried flower buds of Tussilago farfara, sold as Farfarae flos in Chinese medicine. The evidence is a 2025 HS-GC-IMS study in Food Chemistry Advances, which reports aldehydes and alcohols as the most abundant compounds across four processed forms of the bud. No supplier searched stocks a coltsfoot oil, absolute or extract, so a fragrance listing under this name is most likely evocative rather than built on a material.

Usage in Perfumery

Rare and almost certainly decorative. One Fragrantica placement and none on Parfumo. Treat it as a green spring-flower reference rather than an ingredient a perfumer can order.