Rhubarb
Sharp, tart green fruit with a juicy, slightly rosy bite.
You may know it from fresh-cut rhubarb stalks
Where it comes from
Usually built from aroma chemicals rather than extracted from edible rhubarb stalks.
Botanical name: Rheum rhabarbarum
Worth knowing
It is usually a constructed scent, not rhubarb stalk extract.
About rhubarb
Rhubarb in a perfume has no stalk behind it. No essential oil, absolute or CO2 extract of rhubarb is commercially produced, and one perfume-industry guide calls its volatiles too reactive and unstable for direct extraction. Every rhubarb note on the shelf is a reconstruction.
The garden plant is Rheum, in the family Polygonaceae, and the part people eat is the fleshy leaf stalk. The large triangular leaves hold high levels of oxalic acid and anthrone glycosides, which makes them poisonous. Forced rhubarb has its home in Yorkshire's Rhubarb Triangle between Wakefield, Leeds and Morley, where the first crop of the year is harvested by candlelight in forcing sheds. In the US, half of commercial production is in Pierce County, Washington. All of that is food rhubarb.
Perfumers assemble the smell from several materials. That same guide names styrallyl acetate as the main building block, tart and metallic-green, and The Good Scents Company lists its odour as green, leafy, gardenia, rhubarb and musty. Firmenich sells rhubarb oxirane as Rhubofix, and the listing describes it as woody, spicy, floral and fruity with a green rhubarb effect. Rhubarb pyran is also used, along with C6 green aldehydes such as (E)-2-hexenal and (Z)-3-hexenal, which are found in freshly cut grass. Commodity Fragrances reports that its own rhubarb reads nutty and grapefruit-like, close to vetiver.
Doses are small, reported as below 1% of a composition and often 0.2 to 0.5%. A perfumer quoted by The Perfume Society values rhubarb as a fruit note because it is less sweet and sticky than mango or strawberry. Hermès Eau de Rhubarbe Écarlate, by Christine Nagel, is cited as a prominent modern example, and Nagel is quoted pairing rhubarb with animalic white musks. Sarah McCartney of 4160Tuesdays found that rhubarb combined with grapefruit smelled exactly like the whiff of cannabis.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Rhubarb in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Rhubarb most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Rhubarb
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 Rhubarb.