Dry Wood

What it smells like

The sharp, splintery, faintly dusty side of wood. Cedarwood lives here, along with the woody amber synthetics that dominate modern perfumery. Those synthetics are linear, powerful, and dry enough to feel abrasive.

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.

• Paper Powdery Smoky Vanilla Heart · ~8h Prepared 17
• Himalayan Cedar Base · ~16h Botanical 2
• Muhuhu Smoky Earthy Base · ~16h Botanical
• Teak Leather Base · ~12h Botanical 95
• Vetiver Earthy Smoky Base · ~36h Botanical 5,356
• Oak Lactonic Vanilla Boozy Base · ~48h Botanical 285
• Ebony Smoky Amber Base · ~48h Botanical 109
• Hinoki Wood Citrus Heart · ~8h Botanical 71
• Wolfwood Amber Leather Base · ~48h Molecule 5
• Ironwood Mineral Amber Base · ~30h Botanical
• Sawdust Base · ~12h Botanical
• Karanal Amber Base · ~48h Molecule
• Sycamore Mineral Base · ~18h Botanical 4
• Norlimbanol Amber Base · ~48h Molecule 3
• Cuban Cedar Base · ~18h Botanical
• Hiba Smoky Base · ~14h Botanical
• Malaysian Oud Fruity Green Honey Base · ~16h Botanical
• Roasted Oak Lactonic Vanilla Base · ~48h Prepared 1
• Cryptomeria Base · ~16h Botanical
• Healingwood Earthy Cooling Mossy Base · ~24h Molecule

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.

Showing 30 of 619. The full set ships with the published standard rather than being paginated here.

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.

The rest of Woody & Earthy

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.

Keep going

• Woody & Earthy The family this facet belongs to, and the others in it
• The 34 facets What each one covers, where it stops, and the substances that carry it
• What we have measured The numbers behind the model, and what they do not prove