Mimosa
Soft, fluffy yellow flowers with a sweet, powdery scent, like warm pollen and clean skin.
You may know it from Mimosa flowers in a spring bouquet
Where it comes from
Steam-distilled or solvent-extracted from the blossoms of acacia trees.
Worth knowing
Perfumery mimosa usually comes from acacia, not the touch-sensitive Mimosa pudica.
About mimosa
Mimosa absolute is a yellow-brown semi-solid. It is waxy enough to set hard at room temperature, which makes it awkward to handle. In older texts the flower's essence goes by the name cassie. One critics' site sets the two side by side, with mimosa soft, sweet and powdery, with a violet aspect and wood tones, and cassie more complex, a bit spicy and balsamic, even leathery.
The flowers are extracted with hexane to give a waxy concrete, and treating that with alcohol removes the waxes and leaves the absolute. Yield is tiny. dsm-firmenich states about 450 kg of plant material for 1 kg of absolute, and ScenTree puts the yield at 2 per mille. Picking is by hand, at roughly 200 to 250 kg of branches and flowers per person per day. ScenTree places the absolute in its top price tier.
The tree is endemic to south-eastern mainland Australia and now grows around the Mediterranean. Sources differ on how and when it reached the French Riviera, and they differ on the species too: ScenTree names Acacia dealbata for Grasse mimosa absolute, while dsm-firmenich lists Acacia decurrens. That supplier sources from the Alpes-Maritimes, Var and Alpes de Haute Provence, under the Absolue Pays de Grasse geographical indication. The season is winter. ScenTree gives November through March, and Mandelieu's tourism material says the flowering runs from late December to early March. Wild trees are cut in full bloom for perfumery. The same plant-focused site reports that much more concrete is now made in India than in France, up to ten times the French amount, and that some of it is imported to Grasse for processing.
Descriptions of the smell vary with the supplier. dsm-firmenich calls it green, floral, powdery and slightly fruity, with a slight woody, almond-like note. Supplier listings on The Good Scents Company run from honeyed acacia over a fruity, caramel, amber base to green, waxy and hay-like. ScenTree calls it a heart note with a soft, fluffy effect that supports rose, tuberose or carnation.
Every February Mandelieu-la-Napoule holds a mimosa festival with parades and a flower corso that uses about 8 tonnes of mimosa.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Mimosa in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Mimosa most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Mimosa
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 Mimosa.