Sweet & Gourmand

Honey

Beeswax, honey, and their faint animal edge

honeyed 119 notes 110 materials 1 anchor · thin

What it smells like

Honey is never only sweet. Phenylacetic acid, one of its main components, is also present in urine and sweat. That is why honey notes in perfume so often read as slightly dirty, waxy or overripe rather than clean.

Where it stops

Honey is where Sweet touches Animalic. That connection is chemical, not metaphorical.

Smells most like

honey - and in the same register, honeybush, leatherwood.

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
copaene CAS 3856-25-5 honey
t-muurolol CAS 19912-62-0 honey
damascenone CAS 23696-85-7 honey Declarable IFRA
delta-cadinol CAS 19435-97-3 honey
ethyl cinnamate CAS 4192-77-2 honey
heptyl butyrate CAS 5870-93-9 honey
artemisia ketone CAS 546-49-6 honey
isoamyl geranate CAS 68133-73-3 honey
octyl isovalerate CAS 7786-58-5 honey
phenethyl acetate CAS 103-45-7 honey
phenylacetic acid CAS 103-82-2 honey
.beta.-spathulenol CAS 77171-55-2 honey
geranyl propionate CAS 105-90-8 honey
phenethyl benzoate CAS 94-47-3 honey
phenoxyacetic acid CAS 122-59-8 honey
phenylacetaldehyde CAS 122-78-1 honey IFRA
phenylpyruvic acid CAS 156-06-9 honey
prenyl isobutyrate CAS 76649-23-5 honey
allyl phenylacetate CAS 1797-74-6 honey
butyl phenylacetate CAS 122-43-0 honey
ethyl phenylacetate CAS 101-97-3 honey
hexyl phenylacetate CAS 5421-17-0 honey
octyl phenylacetate CAS 122-45-2 honey
allyl phenoxyacetate CAS 7493-74-5 honey IFRA
citronellyl valerate CAS 7540-53-6 honey
ethyl pentadecanoate CAS 41114-00-5 honey
heptyl phenylacetate CAS 39736-25-9 honey
methyl phenylacetate CAS 101-41-7 honey
propyl phenylacetate CAS 4606-15-9 honey
allyl phenethyl ether CAS 14289-65-7 honey

Showing 30 of 110. 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
  • honey
Partial Terms that lean this way but also load elsewhere
  • beeswax
Thinly anchored

This facet rests on 1 direct term, which makes it one of the more likely to move when the crosswalk is revised or a better source is found. It is flagged here rather than presented as equal in weight to a facet held up by nine.

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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