Orris
Soft, dry and powdery, with a cool earthy scent like violet-scented face powder.
You may know it from Violet-scented face powder
Where it comes from
From aged iris rhizomes or made with synthetic iris-smelling molecules.
Worth knowing
Orris comes from iris roots, not the flower petals.
About orris
Orris is the perfumer's word for the part of the plant that the iris note is really about. It names the dried rhizome of Iris pallida and Iris germanica, the underground stem, and the scent lives there rather than in the flower. Iris and orris are often confused for exactly that reason, and on an ingredient list the two words can stand for the same thing.
What sits behind the name can still differ. Orris can mean the natural extract, made from rhizomes that have been aged and steam-distilled into a waxy mass called orris concrete, also sold as orris butter, with a solvent-washed absolute as the rarer form. It can also mean a synthetic built to smell of it. The Good Scents Company describes orris concrete as powdery, floral and green-woody, reminiscent of a violet flower, and that violet side is the part the synthetics go after.
Ionones and methyl ionones imitate the powdery-violet character at a much lower cost and are common in mass-market fragrances. One supplier describes Methyl Ionone Gamma A as violet-orris, with pronounced powdery iris-orris facets and creamy-cosmetic top notes. Fragrance houses also sell iris-type bases and molecules under their own names, among them dsm-firmenich Iris Concrete Synth, Symrise Irisnitrile and Givaudan Irisone Pure.
So a perfume that lists orris may hold the root extract, one of these built materials, or a mix, and the notes list alone does not say which.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Orris in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Orris most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Orris
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 Orris.