Gardenia
Creamy white petals with a sweet, sunny richness and a faint mushroom-like undertone.
You may know it from A fresh gardenia blossom
Where it comes from
Gardenia scent is reconstructed from aroma materials; the flowers yield no practical perfume extract.
Worth knowing
Gardenia perfume is usually not made by extracting gardenia flowers.
About gardenia
Gardenia is a shrub, Gardenia jasminoides, a relative of coffee, and its white flowers rank among the most strongly fragrant of all flowers. In China the petals also scent tea. Perfumers get little from them directly. Gardenias notoriously do not release a natural oil, and a Perfume Shrine reviewer notes that no essence could be rendered until very recently, and then only in extremely limited niche distribution.
A specialty botanicals supplier sells an extract made by modernised enfleurage with vegetable oils and sugarcane alcohol, without heat. It says about 5000 kilos of flowers go into 1 kilo of absolute, and adds that most commercial gardenia products are synthetic.
So the gardenia in most bottles is a re-creation. Perfume Shrine names jasmine lactones for the creamy effect and styrallyl acetate for the green, budding quality. Styrallyl acetate is described as green, leafy and rhubarb-like, and Good Scents says it mellows in a composition very perceptibly after 24 hours, so a first sniff can mislead.
Chanel Gardénia, composed by Ernest Beaux in 1925, shows how loose the link to the flower can be. Perfume Shrine says it was not conceived as a gardenia soliflore. It was built on a narcissus base with a green accent of styrallyl acetate, and the flower was picked for its optical resemblance to Chanel's favourite, the scentless camellia. Chanel revived the name in 2007 in Les Exclusifs, reworked by Jacques Polge, and Perfume Shrine finds that version much thinner than the vintage.
Tiare is called the Tahitian gardenia, though it is another species, Gardenia taitensis, and the national flower of French Polynesia and the Cook Islands. It is neither native nor naturalized in Tahiti. Its flowers are infused in coconut oil to make monoi, which requires at least ten flowers per litre of refined oil.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Gardenia in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Gardenia most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Gardenia
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 Gardenia.