Isocyclocitral

Description and usage notes:

Description from IFF: “Odor: Sharp leafy note. Useful in Fougère bouquets and in hyacinth/sweet pea.”

Arctander is more evocative: “Powerful, and diffusive, foliage-green, ‘dark’ -weedy and dry odor, sometimes described as ’Flower-shop odor’. The earthy and wet-green notes are quite natural in high dilution and resemble the odor of stems from plants and flowers fresh from the soil.

Finds use in perfume compositions where it blends excellently with Oakmoss products (compensates for sweetness and lifts the top-note), with Ionones (freshness), Geranium and Galbanum (enhances the green and ‘vegetable’ notes), etc.”  

Arcadi Boix Camps is also enthusiastic about this material, writing in 1985, he says of Triplal and Isocyclocitral “These two products have become classic aromatics because of their amazing effects, which combine natural grassy notes with marine notes.  The use of these aromatics is massive both in high-class perfumery and industrial perfumery, where they have contributed to the modernisation of the classic pine notes, which for a whole generation formed the typical perfumes of bath gels.” 

Bedoukian, writing around the same time, says “This cyclic aldehyde, isomeric with cyclocitral, possesses an intensely powerful, fresh green odor particularly suitable as a top note in rose compositions and other floral fragrances.  The unusual effects obtained by small quantities of this aldehyde cannot be achieved with other known perfumery synthetics”