May Rose
A rich, fresh rose scent with soft honey, fruit and a faint spicy warmth.
You may know it from A freshly opened garden rose
Where it comes from
Steam-distilled or solvent-extracted from Damask roses, especially Rosa centifolia.
Worth knowing
May rose usually means a rose variety, not roses blooming only in May.
About may rose
The botanical name, Rosa x centifolia, means hundred-leaved. The flowers are round and globular, packed with thin overlapping petals that carry a strong scent. No unmistakable reference to the plant can be traced earlier than about 1580, and its exact ancestry is undocumented.
Grasse is the classic home of May rose, and one Grasse absolute even holds a geographical indication, Absolue Pays de Grasse. Its supplier, dsm-firmenich, lists the smell as floral, green, spicy, fruity, sweet and honey-like, and calls it sweeter than damask rose. The Good Scents Company describes the concrete as warm floral, woody, sweet, spicy and honey.
Turning flowers into absolute takes a lot of them, and the sources do not agree on how many. dsm-firmenich gives about 600 kg of flowers per kilogram of absolute, a perfumery blog puts it at about a tonne, and Bon Parfumeur says 12 tons of petals. On the Chanel side, Tatler reports that 1 kg of concrete is washed in alcohol for three days and yields about 600 g of absolute.
May rose is among the floral notes of Chanel No. 5, which Ernest Beaux created in 1921.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing May Rose in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to May Rose most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with May Rose
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 May Rose.