Woody & Earthy

Phenolic

Tar, carbolic and the medicinal register: the character of the phenol class

phenolic 27 notes 169 materials 6 anchors

What it smells like

The odour of the phenol compound class - phenol itself, the cresols, guaiacol, creosote. It is the smell trade copy calls medicinal, tarry, carbolic, band-aid or leathery-smoky when no leather and no smoke is present: clove's eugenol backbone, peated whisky's iodine edge, the disinfectant corridor, birch tar's cresols. Admitted 2026-08-31 on the same two-sided test as waxy_fatty: 78 dossiers reported it inexpressible while the held smelling sources use it constantly - 161 dravnieks panel rows (medicinal 70, disinfectant-carbolic 51, tar 21, creosote 19), 192 tgsc, 115 leffingwell. That beats mineral's admission numbers on every column and sulphurous's on the human panel.

Where it stops

Smoky is combustion - the record of something having burned. Phenolic is a compound class, present whether or not anything ever burned. They co-occur in birch tar and lapsang souchong and neither implies the other: a hospital corridor is phenolic with no smoke; a beeswax candle's smoke is smoky with no phenol. Before this facet existed the crosswalk routed both 'phenolic' and 'medicinal' into smoky at half weight, which is how ash and antiseptic came to share a number. Eugenol stays in warm_spice - clove is scored as spice, and this facet takes only the medicinal-tar remainder a dossier actually names.

Smells most like

birch tar - and in the same register, guaiacol, coal tar.

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
thymol CAS 89-83-8 medicinal, phenolic
guaiacol CAS 90-05-1 medicinal, phenolic
m-cresol CAS 108-39-4 medicinal, phenolic
o-cresol CAS 95-48-7 medicinal, phenolic
safranal CAS 116-26-7 medicinal, phenolic IFRA
d-camphor CAS 464-49-3 medicinal, phenolic Declarable
phenyl acetate CAS 122-79-2 medicinal, phenolic
phenyl benzoate CAS 93-99-2 phenolic, tar IFRA
o-tolyl isobutyrate CAS 36438-54-7 medicinal, phenolic
3-carene CAS 13466-78-9 medicinal, phenolic
4-allylphenol CAS 501-92-8 medicinal, phenolic
4-vinylphenol CAS 2628-17-3 medicinal, phenolic
2-propylphenol CAS 644-35-9 medicinal, phenolic
4-propylphenol CAS 645-56-7 medicinal, phenolic
2-isopropylphenol CAS 88-69-7 medicinal, phenolic
cis-2-penten-1-ol CAS 1576-95-0 medicinal, phenolic
2,6-dimethylphenol CAS 576-26-1 medicinal, phenolic
2,6-dimethoxyphenol CAS 91-10-1 medicinal, phenolic
4-methoxybenzoic acid CAS 100-09-4 medicinal, phenolic
4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol CAS 2785-89-9 medicinal, phenolic
2-methoxy-4-methylphenol CAS 93-51-6 medicinal, phenolic IFRA
2-tert-butyl-6-methylphenol CAS 2219-82-1 medicinal, phenolic
2,6-dimethoxy-4-methylphenol CAS 6638-05-7 medicinal, phenolic
nerone CAS 31375-17-4 phenolic
phenol CAS 108-95-2 phenolic
anisole CAS 100-66-3 phenolic
benzoin CAS 119-53-9 medicinal
ethanol CAS 64-17-5 medicinal
eugenol CAS 97-53-0 phenolic Declarable IFRA
anethole CAS 104-46-1 medicinal Declarable

Showing 30 of 169. 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
  • creosote
  • cresol
  • disinfectant, carbolic
  • medicinal
  • phenolic
  • tar
Partial Terms that lean this way but also load elsewhere

None

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