Strawberry
Sweet, juicy strawberry candy with a creamy, jammy fruitiness.
You may know it from Strawberry sweets or yoghurt
Where it comes from
Usually built from aroma chemicals; strawberries yield no practical perfume extract.
Botanical name: Fragaria × ananassa
Worth knowing
It usually smells more like candy or jam than fresh fruit.
About strawberry
Over 350 volatile compounds have been characterized in the strawberry fruit, and the garden strawberry, Fragaria x ananassa, is a recent fruit as these things go, first bred in Brittany in the 1750s from a cross of two American species. The aroma sorts into esters, lactones, furanones, sulfur compounds and terpenoids. A perfume version gets by on far less. Olfastory says a strawberry note will certainly be built from four or five different raw materials.
Two of those materials occur in the fruit itself. Furaneol is found in strawberries and pineapple, and it smells of sweet strawberry when dilute and of caramel when concentrated. One supplier glossary gives its use level in perfume as 0.001 to 0.05%. Gamma-decalactone, a lactone that smells peachy, makes the greatest contribution to the characteristic fruity aroma of the real fruit.
The best-known synthetic has a misleading name. Ethyl methylphenylglycidate is sold as "strawberry aldehyde" or "aldehyde C-16", although it lacks an aldehyde group. Its odour is listed as sweet, fruity and strawberry-like, with floral and honey sides, and it is made by the Darzens condensation of acetophenone with ethyl chloroacetate. A supplier describes it as high-impact and very long-lasting on a smelling strip, useful for adding nuance to rose notes, with an excess turning sour and green. The FDA classes it as generally recognized as safe as a food additive. A strawberry note on a label does not mean strawberry fruit material went into the bottle.
Olfastory ties the note's popularity to the fruity trend of the 1980s, and credits Cacharel's Anaïs Anaïs, launched in 1978, with opening fruit-and-flower fragrance to young women. Sweet, edible notes became a family of their own later. Thierry Mugler's Angel, launched in 1992, is credited as the first modern gourmand scent.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Strawberry in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Strawberry most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Strawberry
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 Strawberry.