Birch
Dry smoke, charred wood, leather and a faint wintergreen-like sharpness.
You may know it from birch tar soap
Where it comes from
Usually distilled from birch bark to make smoky birch tar.
Botanical name: Betula
Worth knowing
It smells smoky and leathery, not like fresh birch leaves or wood.
About birch
When a perfume lists birch, it almost always means birch tar oil. The material is smoky and comes from heating the wood, and one glossary stresses that it is not an essential oil. It is obtained by dry distillation, meaning pyrolysis. Neanderthals are reported to have made birch tar this way as early as 200,000 years ago.
Fresh from the still, the raw tar opens with a harsh phenolic blast, tarry and acrid, with creosote and smoke in it. The same glossary points to phenolic compounds such as guaiacol, cresols, catechol and pyrogallol behind the smokiness, and says they are tenacious and extend sillage. The tar itself is rich in lupane-type triterpenoids, and betulin and lupeol, carried over from the bark, are its characteristic markers.
Russian leather was oiled with birch bark oil after tanning, and around 1900 perfumers took the tar up as a base note for leathery, smoky effects, especially in leather and tobacco perfumes. Chanel's Cuir de Russie, composed by Ernest Beaux, is described as evoking boots tanned with birch bark. ScenTree places rectified birch tar in the burnt leather family and says it goes into leather, animalic, oud and chypre notes, often in very low dosage.
Crude birch pyrolysates are forbidden by IFRA as fragrance ingredients. Only rectified oils that meet limits on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are allowed, with benzopyrene and 1,2-benzanthracene as markers capped at 1 ppb in the finished product. Modern formulas often lean on synthetic phenols such as guaiacol and isobutyl quinoline, or on natural cade oil for a drier campfire effect, in place of the tar or alongside it.
Sweet birch, Betula lenta, gives a different material. Its bark is air-dried and fermented in water before distillation, with no pyrolysis involved. In a study of 27 commercial oils sold as sweet birch, none contained any of the identified birch markers.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Birch in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Birch most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Birch
Fragrances that list it in their notes, most-rated first.
Houses that use it most
Ranked by how many of their well-known fragrances list Birch.