“Aldehyde C16”

Description and usage notes:

So called Aldehyde C16, more accurately Strawberry Glycidate was once a proprietary chemical deliberately mis-named to throw researchers trying to replicate it off the scent.  The name has stuck and even though this isn’t an aldehyde at all it’s still most often recognised by that name.

Besides the obvious use in strawberry and apple accords this is useful in floral compositions such as jasmine and rose, where it can add gentle fruity tones. It can also add sweetness and warmth to a fragrance, reinforcing top notes and blends particularly well with ionones, hydroxycitronellal, woody notes, aliphatic aldehydes and the various fruity esters and lactones.

Here’s Arctander: “This ester is used in perfume compositions not only for its fruity note which is utilized in lipstick perfumes with Ionones and fruity Lactones, but also as a sweetener in floral complexes for use in fragrance types other than the typical floral ones, e.g. Chypre, Oriental, etc. It blends well with the aliphatic aldehydes for sweet and powerful topnote base complexes, with Hydroxycitronellal, Ionones, Nonanolide and Undecanolide, etc. in floral or sweet-woody or woody-aldehydic bases, and it is a classical item in Rose compositions.” 

Interestingly, Jean Claude Elena, in his book Diary of a Nose, suggests that Fructone in combination with Ethyl Maltol and, optionally, methyl anthranilate, can create the illusion of the smell of strawberries.

He says “As an apprentice perfumer, I learned that the smell of strawberries could be made with C-16 aldehyde, which is known as ‘strawberry’ – both terms are misnomers because chemically it is in fact acetone[*], and it smells mainly of apples.  I would suggest another combination:

• fructone
• ethyl maltol

And for wild strawberries:

• fructone
• ethyl maltol
• methyl anthranilate” 

* – presumably this is a misprint, as clearly strawberry glycidate isn’t acetone any more than it is an aldehyde.