Cypress
Dry, green, resinous conifer needles with a cool, slightly smoky woody scent.
You may know it from Crushed cypress hedge or evergreen branches
Where it comes from
Usually steam-distilled from the leaves, twigs, and cones of cypress trees.
About cypress
Cypress oil comes from the Mediterranean cypress, Cupressus sempervirens, a conifer native to the eastern Mediterranean and Iran. People have planted the tree as an ornamental for millennia outside that range. Its resin content is low.
The usual oil is steam-distilled from the leaves and young twigs. Some suppliers also sell a separate wood oil, made from the wood and bark and listed under its own registry number. A distillery in Provence works from branches of cypress hedges collected as prunings, giving them what it calls a second life. Sources disagree about where most commercial oil comes from: one names Crete and Greece, another southern France, Spain and Morocco, a third Provence, Tuscany and Greece.
The smell changes as it dries. The oil opens fresh, terpenic and slightly camphoraceous, then settles into dry woody and light herbaceous tones. Descriptions of it include a pine-like freshness and a dry, woody-green character with a smoky, almost mineral edge. The Good Scents Company lists supplier descriptions that run from fresh pine and cedar to dry and spicy.
Perfumery sources place it in citrus colognes, fougères, chypres and aldehydic bases, where it works as a modifier rather than a dominant note. The Greeks saw the tree as a symbol of eternal life, according to one perfume-materials site. Another source observes that perfumes built with cypress skew male-classified, 73% in aggregate, and says that reflects how whole perfumes are perceived and says little about the material itself.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Cypress in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Cypress most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Cypress
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 Cypress.