Cinnamon in Perfumery

yuletide yikes?

Cinnamon in desserts - tasty

Cinnamon in savory food – tasty

Cinnamon in holiday schlock - overused

(over the years “they’ve” quadrupled the strength of cinnamon holiday candles, pine cones, and those awful brooms in every shopping place. You can almost smell the sadness of the after-holiday shelf when the yuletide rejects melt back into landfill oblivion.)

Cinnamon in perfumery – powerful, plagued by familiarity

If someone smells a fine fragrance and remarks “oh, smells like cinnamon,” it’s usually a diss. We love to crush buns, but in our perfume, we don’t want to smell like Big Red. Because of its overuse in cleaning products, we now associate the aroma of big cinn with dank places where air fresheners are blocking unpleasant smells. Yet super small amounts of cinnamon oil can add panache to dank dark woods, ambers, and flowers. And you don’t even know it’s there! That’s my rule for using cinnamon – if you can smell it, I’ve put in too much. But if you don’t know why that deep amber patchouli is so red and magnetic, it might just be my lil’ friend cinndy spreading her spicy stink.

If you study the aroma of flowers, you will find cinnamic molecules all over the place. Cinnamic molecules are there staring the perfumer in the face proudly flaunting Divine Mama’s perfect balance in carnation, rose, gardenia, hyacinth, tree flowers, & more. These molecules are building blocks all throughout the vast world of ambers. Being a bark, cinnamon is welcome in the redder spice of some woods as well.

Here are the cinnamon & cinn-adjacent materials I use. Overuse of any one of them will definitely ruin your perfume and make it smell like the bargain bin at Caldor.

Benzyl Cinnamate

This is a very mild floralizer. It’s like a slight warm red canvas. It behaves almost like a musk with pleasing background music to build ideas upon. I like it to warm up woods, but it’s at home below flowers & ambers. And it’s a great addition to warm skin musks.

Cassia - Cinnamomum cassia

This is the common cinnamon you find in most supermarkets – the firm round sticks as opposed to the soft flaky Ceylon varietal. It has that classic gourmand note you know when crushing desserts. Its deep and spicy with a thick molasses brown tone useful for enlivening ambers & woods. It has a great warmth that is pleasing to many people.

Ceylon cinnamon - Cinnamomum verum

The Ceylon varietal has an overlay of medicinal green tea tree aroma that is much more rustic than cassia. For this you can conjure hot jungles and the spice of underbrush in a tropical environment (and even some temperate ones – as you find this aroma in some decayed woods). It has an almost humid note as well as hay-like coumarin tones. A much safer bet for fancy fuming in my opinion.

Cinnamic Alcohol

Here is the deep red musky aroma of cinnamon oil striped of its wood and terpenes. It occurs naturally in some ambers like styrax & tolu. It has a very cosmetic quality, giving a musky red spice like phenyl ethyl alcohol. It is a great red rose & hyacinth building block. It is also a sensitizer for some people so is highly restricted in perfume usage (Most of the oils here are too).

Cinnamic aldehyde

A strong part of the magic behind cassia. This is the big red of Big Red. It’s so powdery, it’s almost fury. My fourth grade teacher always chewed BR and I can’t smell this without seeing her Marylin Monroe beauty mark. It is more linear than the essential oil which is useful for clarity when blending with woods & flower ideas.

Ethyl Cinnamate

A glassy, fruity floralizer with red spice. Somewhere between plum & pear and useful in tree flowers like hawthorn or apple blossom. A small amount gives an elegant purple tone in yuletide fantasies recalling fireplaces hung with pomanders & bells.

Hexyl Cinnamal Aldehyde

A very strange oil: dark toasted oily spice that you find in white lilies and dank yellow chamomile. It is only vaguely cinnamon, giving soft floral puffs conjuring meadows or dusty corners of wood houses by the radiator.

Sugandha Kokila berry – Cinnamomum polyandrum

I love this oil. It is dank leathery and you find it in my favorite incense from Tibet. It grows high in the Himalayas & you can tell from how unique it is. The spicy aroma is covered by a deep green medicinal pungency that opens the sinuses. It definitely smells of a faraway place I want to be. It’s just one of those oils with a spirit behind it - a gift from nature. There is a redistilled & purified version that takes away some of the more aggressive notes, leaving you with a frostier pink floralcy like a camphorous champaca.

There you go. Cinnamon in perfume. Who knew? (I did (:}).