Sweet & Gourmand

Coffee & Cacao

Roasted, bitter, dark gourmand

coffee_cacao 43 notes 152 materials 3 anchors

What it smells like

Coffee, cocoa, dark chocolate. Roasting produces pyrazines, which are bitter, nutty and faintly burnt. This facet therefore always carries an edge that plain sweetness does not.

Where it stops

Coffee borders Smoky through roasting and Nutty through pyrazines. Bitterness is the test: cocoa is bitter, praline is not.

Smells most like

coffee - and in the same register, chocolate, dark chocolate.

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
2,6-dimethylpyrazine CAS 108-50-9 chocolate, cocoa, coffee
2-methylbutyraldehyde CAS 96-17-3 chocolate, cocoa, coffee
2,4,5-trimethylthiazole CAS 13623-11-5 chocolate, cocoa, coffee
2,3,5,6-tetramethylpyrazine CAS 1124-11-4 chocolate, cocoa, coffee
butyraldehyde CAS 123-72-8 chocolate, cocoa
acetylpyrazine CAS 22047-25-2 chocolate, coffee
difurfuryl sulfide CAS 13678-67-6 cocoa, coffee
phenylacetaldehyde CAS 122-78-1 chocolate, cocoa IFRA
butyl phenylacetate CAS 122-43-0 chocolate, cocoa
isoamyl phenylacetate CAS 102-19-2 chocolate, cocoa
isobutyl phenylacetate CAS 102-13-6 chocolate, cocoa
pyrazine, methoxymethyl- CAS 63450-30-6 chocolate, cocoa
zinc4802659 CAS 40789-98-8 chocolate, coffee
2-ethylfuran CAS 3208-16-0 cocoa, coffee
2-acetylfuran CAS 1192-62-7 cocoa, coffee
2-ethylpyrazine CAS 13925-00-3 cocoa, coffee
2-methylpyrazine CAS 109-08-0 chocolate, cocoa
2-methoxypyrazine CAS 3149-28-8 chocolate, cocoa
(s)-2-methylbutanal CAS 1730-97-8 cocoa, coffee
2,3-dimethylpyrazine CAS 5910-89-4 cocoa, coffee
2,5-dimethylpyrazine CAS 123-32-0 chocolate, cocoa
(r)-2-methylbutyraldehyde CAS 33204-48-7 cocoa, coffee
5-methyl-2-phenyl-2-hexenal CAS 188829-73-4 chocolate, cocoa
2-ethyl-3,5-dimethylpyrazine CAS 13925-07-0 cocoa, coffee
4-methyl-2-phenyl-2-pentenal CAS 26643-91-4 chocolate, cocoa
1-(6-methylpyrazin-2-yl)ethanone CAS 22047-26-3 cocoa, coffee
2,4,6-triisobutyl-1,3,5-trioxane CAS 68165-40-2 chocolate, cocoa
2-(methyldithio)isobutyraldehyde CAS 67952-60-7 chocolate, cocoa
4-methoxy-2,5-dimethylfuran-3-one CAS 4077-47-8 cocoa, coffee
2-ethyl-4,5-dimethyl-2,5-dihydro-1,3-thiazole CAS 76788-46-0 chocolate, coffee

Showing 30 of 152. 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
  • chocolate
  • cocoa
  • coffee
Partial Terms that lean this way but also load elsewhere
  • roasted

The rest of Sweet & Gourmand

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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