Sugar
Granulated sugar, caramel syrup, and the warm sweetness of baked desserts.
You may know it from a spoonful of white sugar
Where it comes from
Created with aroma chemicals; sugar itself has little scent.
Worth knowing
It suggests sweetness rather than the smell of actual sugar crystals.
About sugar
Table sugar, sucrose, is odorless and only tastes sweet. A sugar entry in a perfume list therefore points to a perfumer's accord, a sweet impression assembled from aroma chemicals.
The dominant molecule in sugar and cotton-candy accords is ethyl maltol, a flavour compound related to maltol with an ethyl group in place of the methyl. It smells sweet, caramellic and jammy, with strawberry and cotton-candy facets, and it is roughly four to six times stronger than maltol, the weaker relative that smells of caramel. One supplier lists typical amounts of 0.001 to 0.200% in perfume compounds, averaging 0.010%, and gives it an odor life of 200 hours on a strip.
Around that core, accords vary. The Fragrance World describes a brown sugar accord built from ethyl maltol, gamma-decalactone for a peach-coconut creaminess, and vanillin or ethyl vanillin, which reads deeper and rounder than white-sugar versions. A cotton-candy accord, in Caperfume's account, adds furaneol for jammy fruit, maltol, vanillin and sotolon for a maple-syrup shade.
Ethyl maltol was already in food flavouring from the late 1960s when perfumers took it up. Sources differ on which perfume got there first. Thierry Mugler's Angel, by Olivier Cresp and Yves de Chirin, is credited as the first modern gourmand, and Cafleurebon describes it as an overdose of patchouli wrapped in an amber accord based on ethyl maltol; the same source says Angel drew on funfair candy floss and the cakes the creator's grandmother baked. Perfume Shrine, though, says L'Artisan Parfumeur's Vanilia of 1978 introduced ethyl maltol earlier.
The gourmand style has grown steadily in popularity since Angel. Perfume Shrine lists Aquolina Pink Sugar, from 2003, as a cotton-candy fragrance based on ethyl maltol.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Sugar in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Sugar most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Sugar
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 Sugar.