Dark Chocolate
Bitter cocoa, roasted coffee-like darkness, dry wood, and faint sweetness like a high-cocoa chocolate bar.
You may know it from A square of high-cocoa dark chocolate.
Where it comes from
Usually reconstructed as a chocolate accord, often supported by cocoa-derived materials.
Worth knowing
Usually an accord, not actual melted dark chocolate.
About dark chocolate
Dark chocolate is a food before it is a perfume note. It is made from chocolate liquor, cocoa butter and sugar, and it carries more cocoa than milk or white chocolate does. The label tells you little about the taste, because products sold as dark chocolate run from 40% to 100% total cocoa solids. What they share is a more bitter, more intense flavour than milk chocolate.
A bottle cannot hold that bar. One perfumery glossary calls chocolate a constructed accord rather than a single material, and says the real thing in perfumery smells nothing like a candy bar. The dark, dry version it describes is built around cocoa absolute plus supporting materials, with bitter, roasted and animalic notes, tobacco and leather facets and a thick balsamic body.
The absolute itself is awkward to handle. A supplier whose beans come from Brazil and are extracted in France describes it as thick and not mobile, so it has to be diluted first. It dissolves in alcohol but not in fixed oils. Cocoa can also be taken as a supercritical CO2 extract, light brown and solid at room temperature. Sources disagree about which side of chocolate each extract gives. The glossary puts the darkness in the absolute, while the supplier calls its absolute a rich and beautiful chocolate note.
Perfume-note sites list cocoa in Tom Ford Noir Extreme and Guerlain Tonka Impériale, usually beside vanilla, tonka, spices or woods.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Dark Chocolate in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Dark Chocolate most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Dark Chocolate
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 Dark Chocolate.