Fresh & Citrus

Citrus

The bright, sharp lift of citrus peel

citrus 167 notes 387 materials 10 anchors

What it smells like

Lemon, bergamot, grapefruit, mandarin. This is the zest rather than the juice. It is the oil that sprays out when a peel is bent, and it reads as sharp, clean and faintly bitter before it reads as sweet. It is among the fastest-moving facets in perfumery. It is usually the first thing you smell and the first thing to go.

Where it stops

Citrus is not Fruity. Orange peel is citrus. Orange flesh is fruity. The dividing line is bitterness: peel carries terpenes that pucker, flesh carries sugar that rounds.

Smells most like

lemon - and in the same register, lime, limonene.

Notes that load on it

Notes from our catalogue whose position on this facet is 0.40 or higher, strongest first. A note is not filed under one facet: it carries a value on all 34 at once, and these are the ones where this axis is doing real work.

Materials that carry it

Real substances, each keyed by its CAS registry number, that an external perfumery vocabulary publishes with a term meaning this facet outright. This is the layer that makes a facet checkable against something outside our own database.

Materials carrying this facet, with registry number, source terms and regulatory status
Material CAS Terms Status
citronellol CAS 141-25-3 citrus, lemon, lime, mandarin IFRA
neral CAS 106-26-3 citrus, lemon, lemon peel Declarable IFRA
decanal CAS 112-31-2 citrus, orange, orange peel
nonanal CAS 124-19-6 citrus, lemon peel, orange peel
octanal CAS 124-13-0 citrus, orange, orange peel
ocimenol CAS 5986-38-9 citrus, lemon, lime
nootkatone CAS 4674-50-4 citrus, grapefruit, orange IFRA
alpha-sinensal CAS 17909-77-2 citrus, mandarin, orange
perillaldehyde CAS 2111-75-3 citrus, lime, orange IFRA
gamma-terpinene CAS 99-85-4 citrus, lemon, lime
terpinyl acetate CAS 80-26-2 bergamot, citrus, lime
nonyl anthranilate CAS 72724-82-4 citrus, mandarin, orange
citronellyl formate CAS 105-85-1 bergamot, citrus, mandarin
trimethyl cyclohexene CAS 68555-95-3 citrus, lemon, lime
citral propylene glycol acetal CAS 10444-50-5 citrus, lemon, orange
2-adodecenal CAS 4826-62-4 citrus, mandarin, orange
3-octyl acetate CAS 4864-61-3 bergamot, citrus, grapefruit
trans-2-dodecenal CAS 20407-84-5 citrus, mandarin, orange
4-epi-eremophilene CAS 4630-07-3 citrus, grapefruit, orange
trans-4-decen-1-al CAS 65405-70-1 citrus, mandarin, orange
(2E,4E)-dodeca-2,4-dienal CAS 21662-16-8 citrus, grapefruit, orange IFRA
4,8-dimethylnon-7-en-2-ol CAS 40596-76-7 citrus, grapefruit, lemon
2-trans-6-cis-dodecadienal CAS 21662-13-5 citrus, mandarin, orange
1-methyl-1,3-cyclohexadiene CAS 30640-46-1 citrus, lemon, lime
6-octenal, 3,7-dimethyl-, oxime CAS 22457-25-6 bergamot, citrus, lime
2,6-dimethyloct-7-en-2-yl acetate CAS 53767-93-4 bergamot, citrus, lime
4-(2-methoxypropan-2-yl)-1-methylcyclohexene CAS 14576-08-0 bergamot, citrus, grapefruit
2,6-dimethyl-3-(2-methylprop-2-enylsulfanyl)heptan-4-one citrus, grapefruit, orange
citral CAS 141-27-5 citrus, lemon Declarable IFRA
claritone CAS 74338-72-0 bergamot, citrus IFRA

Showing 30 of 387. The full set ships with the published standard rather than being paginated here.

Reading the two flags

Declarable means the substance appears in Annex III of the EU Cosmetics Regulation, so it has to be named on the ingredient list once it passes a concentration threshold. IFRA means an IFRA Standard restricts or prohibits its use. Both are facts about the substance, not about any fragrance: a perfume can contain a declarable material below the threshold and never print it, and a restricted material used within its limit is used correctly.

The source also supplies no common name for a large share of materials, so those display as a bare registry number and are ranked last. They are kept because they are real evidence: dropping them would make the vocabulary look better described than it is.

Anchor terms

A facet on its own is just a word we chose. An anchor is what makes it checkable: a term in an external, independently maintained vocabulary of odour descriptions, built for perfumery materials rather than for us. The material list above is drawn from the direct terms only, because a partial term corroborates too weakly to stand as evidence on its own.

Direct Terms that mean this facet outright
  • bergamot
  • citrus
  • fruity,citrus
  • grapefruit
  • lemon
  • lemon peel
  • lime
  • mandarin
  • orange
  • orange peel
Partial Terms that lean this way but also load elsewhere

None

The rest of Fresh & Citrus

The other facets in this family. A note can load on any of them at the same time as this one, so they are neighbours rather than alternatives.

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