A “tobacco” perfume does not smell of cigarette smoke. The tobacco note in perfumery is the smell of cured, aged leaf before it is lit: sweet, honeyed, like hay, a little like dried fruit, with a warm earthy layer underneath. Anyone who has opened a pack of Vietnamese thuốc lào or a tin of pipe tobacco knows this smell, and knows how far it is from smoke.
This article explains where that smell comes from, why fresh tobacco leaf does not have it, and what perfumers rebuild it with.
Fresh leaf does not smell of tobacco
A freshly picked tobacco leaf smells green and slightly bitter, much like many other leaves. The familiar tobacco smell appears only after curing and ageing that last weeks to months. Two things happen at once during that time:
- The leaf’s pigments break down. Green leaves contain carotenoids, the yellow-orange pigments. As the leaf cures, carotenoids split into smaller fragments called norisoprenoids. Among them are β-damascenone, which smells of ripe plum and honey, and the megastigmatrienones, regarded as carrying the most characteristic tobacco note.
- Sugars and amino acids react. This is the Maillard reaction, the same reaction that browns bread crust and makes it smell good. It produces pyrazines, furans and many roasted, caramel-like odorants.
The thuốc lào entry in the scent dictionary describes exactly this process in a leaf familiar to Vietnamese readers: unlit, it is sweet and like aged hay; lit, the sweetness is buried under smoke.
The natural material: tobacco leaf absolute
Cured leaf can be solvent-extracted to give tobacco leaf absolute. It is a thick, dark brown material that smells very close to the leaf in the tin. It is expensive, intense and not always easy to use, so many perfumes use only a little of it, or none.
What a tobacco accord is built from
Most tobacco notes in perfume are accords, assembled from pieces that cured leaf also contains:
| Piece of the smell | Materials often used |
|---|---|
| Hay, sweet | Coumarin, tonka bean, hay absolute |
| Honey, dried fruit | Beeswax absolute, davana, β-damascenone |
| Warm resin | Labdanum, vanilla, benzoin, the core of the amber accord |
| Tobacco leaf | Synthetic megastigmatrienone |
| Wood, earth | Cedarwood, vetiver |
Coumarin is the backbone of almost every tobacco accord. It gives a sweet, hay-like, slightly vanilla smell, and is abundant in tonka beans. In some grasses, such as sweet vernal grass (Anthoxanthum odoratum), coumarin is released as the leaves wilt, which is why drying grass smells sweet when fresh grass does not. That is why hay and cured tobacco smell so close: both are leaves that have dried and changed their smell.
Coumarin is on the EU list of fragrance allergens. Above the threshold set in the regulation, it must be named on the label.
Tobacco and smoke
Some perfumes place a tobacco note beside a smoke note, but they are two different parts. The smoke comes from phenols such as guaiacol and creosol, formed when wood and leaves burn with too little oxygen. The straw smoke entry describes this group. When a note list says “tobacco” but not “smoke”, it almost certainly means unlit leaf.
Smelling it yourself
A small exercise, if you have a tonka bean or a diluted bottle of coumarin:
- Smell a pinch of unlit thuốc lào or pipe tobacco. Write down three words.
- Smell a scraped tonka bean, or a strip dipped in coumarin.
- Smell the tobacco again. Most people now notice a sweet hay note they could not name the first time.
What the exercise shows is that the tobacco note in perfume does not imitate the leaf. It picks out the sweet, hay-like and honeyed parts of cured leaf, and leaves out the harsh ones.
Sources
- Ohloff G., Pickenhagen W., Kraft P. (2012). Scent and Chemistry: The Molecular World of Odors. Verlag Helvetica Chimica Acta, Wiley-VCH.
- Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 on cosmetic products, Annex III: coumarin among the allergens that must be labelled above the threshold.