Reference point
A lump of clear yellow rosin, snapped in two and smelled at the break.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Piney, dry, slightly sweet, with a papery, dusty note. Lighter than Canarium resin and less zesty.
This is what is left of pine resin after the oil has been distilled off — the non-volatile part. Smelling it means smelling what distillation leaves behind, which is the reverse lesson of every other entry in the dictionary.
At room temperature it is very reserved. It has to be snapped or heated before the smell shows.
How to smell it
Snap a lump of rosin to expose the inside and smell at once. Then smell some fresh pine resin if you have it. The gap between the two is exactly what distillation has taken away.
Why this one is hard
Because it has almost no smell when left alone, so testers easily conclude, wrongly, that it is odourless.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Rosin
Woody & Resinous family
Pine wood still has its volatile part, so it opens bright, with fresh resin; rosin has had all of that removed, leaving only resin acids, so it is almost odourless until burned.
Scientific note
Rosin is what remains after all the volatile part has been distilled out of pine resin. It consists mainly of resin acids such as abietic acid, which are too heavy to evaporate at ordinary temperatures. The smell you get when it burns is not its own smell but that of the molecular fragments formed as it breaks down under heat.
In Vietnamese life
Rosin is the raw material of the pine-resin trade, used on violin bows, in adhesives and as a soldering flux. Vietnam produces rosin on an industrial scale in Quang Ninh and Nghe An.