Immortelle
Warm dried herbs, maple syrup, honey, hay, and a faint curry-like spice.
You may know it from Maple syrup or curry powder
Where it comes from
Steam-distilled from the flowering tops of the immortelle plant.
Worth knowing
Its curry-like smell comes from the flower, not culinary curry.
About immortelle
The immortelle of perfumery is Helichrysum italicum, a plant that grows wild on dry, rocky or sandy ground around the Mediterranean. Its distribution is limited on Sardinia, Corsica, the Iberian Peninsula, the Adriatic islands and the Balkans. It also goes by the name curry plant and is sometimes used as a spice.
Perfumers mainly use the absolute. Dried flower heads are extracted with hexane to a concrete, and the concrete is then washed with alcohol. Distillation gives an oil instead, and the yield is low: according to Perfume Shrine, more than a tonne of blossoms is needed to produce just under a kilo.
ScenTree attributes the characteristic smell to small amounts of a diketone, 3,5-dimethyloctane-4,6-dione. The curry-like note comes from the plant's own diketones. Perfume Shrine and a journal at Electimuss describe burnt sugar or maple syrup, fenugreek or curcuma, dry straw and a curry-like spice, warming on skin to honeyed, waxy tones. Descriptions of the oil differ between sources. The Good Scents Company lists it as sweet, warm, herbal, woody and floral with coumarin and dried fruit, while ScenTree calls it spicy, warm and almondy.
ScenTree classes the absolute as a base note in the balsamic-ambery family and lists hay and tobacco facets. Perfumers reach for it in chypre, fougere, tobacco, tuberose, carnation, floral, amber and leathery compositions. The same source says the material discolours and loses its smell easily, and can have solubility problems in a formula. The Good Scents Company lists an IFRA-based recommendation of up to 0.8% of the oil in the fragrance concentrate.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Immortelle in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Immortelle most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Immortelle
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 Immortelle.