Waxy & Fatty

Waxy-Fatty

Candle wax, tallow and warm skin: the character of a lipid

waxy_fatty 60 notes 781 materials 5 anchors

What it smells like

The lipid register - long-chain fatty acids, aldehydes and their esters, the C8-C18 range that reads as substance rather than as scent direction. Added 2026-08-31. It was ranked FIRST of everything measured in the 2026-08-17 evidence round (84 panel rows, 995 TGSC, 802 Leffingwell - the strongest attestation of any facet ever proposed here) and declined on one ground only: no family fit it. The `elemental` family, created in v2 for 'the character of matter rather than of a referent', is that fit.

Where it stops

Waxy-Fatty is the lipid itself. Aldehydic is the volatile top a fatty aldehyde throws - which is why the old crosswalk mapping `waxy -> aldehydic 0.5` looked defensible and was still wrong, mapping a base-note substance onto a top-note sparkle. Lactonic is dairy fat gone sweet; this is fat with no sugar in it. Honeyed is what beeswax smells of BESIDES wax.

Smells most like

beeswax - and in the same register, wool, lipstick.

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
oleic acid CAS 112-80-1 fatty, oily, tallow, waxy
ethyl oleate CAS 111-62-6 fatty, oily, tallow, waxy
trans-2-nonen-1-ol CAS 31502-14-4 fatty, oily, tallow, waxy
amyl laurate CAS 5350-03-8 fatty, oily, waxy
decanenitrile CAS 1975-78-6 fatty, oily, waxy
octanoic acid CAS 124-07-2 fatty, oily, waxy
neryl butyrate CAS 999-40-6 fatty, oily, waxy
isoamyl laurate CAS 6309-51-9 fatty, oily, waxy
sorbitan oleate CAS 1338-43-8 fatty, oily, waxy
heptyl octanoate CAS 4265-97-8 fatty, oily, waxy
methyl palmitate CAS 112-39-0 fatty, oily, waxy
propyl decanoate CAS 30673-60-0 fatty, oily, waxy
gamma-decalactone CAS 706-14-9 fatty, oily, waxy
isopentyl octanoate CAS 2035-99-6 fatty, oily, waxy
delta-tetradecalactone CAS 2721-22-4 fatty, oily, waxy
octyl 2-furoate CAS 39251-88-2 oily, tallow, waxy
trans-2-decenal CAS 3913-81-3 fatty, tallow, waxy
2,4-undecadienal CAS 30361-29-6 fatty, oily, waxy IFRA
cis-2-nonen-1-ol CAS 41453-56-9 fatty, tallow, waxy
pentadecan-2-one CAS 2345-28-0 fatty, oily, waxy
(s)-4-nonanolide CAS 104-61-0 fatty, oily, waxy
2-nonenyl acetate CAS 30418-89-4 fatty, oily, waxy
cis-3-hepten-1-ol CAS 1708-81-2 fatty, oily, waxy
12-methyltridecanal CAS 75853-49-5 fatty, tallow, waxy
1,1-dimethoxyheptane CAS 10032-05-0 fatty, oily, waxy
(e)-oct-2-enyl acetate CAS 3913-80-2 fatty, oily, waxy
(Z)-7,7-diethoxyhept-3-ene CAS 18492-65-4 fatty, oily, waxy
6-[(e)-pent-2-enyl]oxan-2-one CAS 25524-95-2 fatty, oily, waxy
(e,z,z)-trideca-2,4,7-trienal CAS 13552-96-0 fatty, oily, waxy
(e)-3-hexenyldihydro-5-methylfuran-2(3h)-one CAS 70851-61-5 fatty, oily, waxy

Showing 30 of 781. 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
  • fatty
  • oily
  • oily, fatty
  • tallow
  • waxy
Partial Terms that lean this way but also load elsewhere

None

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