Narcissus
Sweet green flower petals with hay, honey, and a faintly earthy, animal-like warmth.
You may know it from Daffodils in a spring bouquet
Where it comes from
Made as a flower extract and recreated with aroma chemicals.
About narcissus
The harvest is short. Narcissus flowers for perfumery are picked from late May to mid-June, mostly in France, in the Auvergne and the Alpes-Maritimes, with smaller sources in Spain and Morocco. The classic region is the Aubrac plateau in the Auvergne, where crops were relocated for quality and farmland reasons. The plant may be poisonous if swallowed, but perfumery uses the flower extract, not the bulb.
The flowers are extracted with hexane in three successive macerations, which gives a concrete, and the concrete is turned into the absolute. Steam distillation is avoided. One glossary says heat destroys the delicate ester and indole fractions that define narcissus. Yields are small, and the sources that give figures disagree on the exact amount.
Analysis of a Narcissus poeticus extract finds benzyl benzoate at roughly 9 to 10 percent, along with benzyl alcohol and alpha-terpineol, plus limonene and lactones. Scentree places the smell in the white flowers, grassy and honeyed. A second description opens on wet stems and crushed leaves before the heavy sweet floral arrives.
Because the absolute is costly, many commercial narcissus accords are built from aroma chemicals such as benzyl acetate, phenylacetaldehyde and indole. Jean-Claude Ellena is quoted describing the material as a beautiful wild animal to be tamed, which is how he put the problem of dosage.
Caron's Narcisse Noir, launched in 1911 by Ernest Daltroff, lists jonquil and Persian black narcissus among its notes and was Caron's first famous perfume. Perfumer Guy Robert is quoted calling it an immediate success in France and a sensation in the States. The title of the 1947 film Black Narcissus refers to that perfume.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Narcissus in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Narcissus most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Narcissus
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 Narcissus.