Cedarwood

Cedar, or cedarwood, is the dry, clean woody note and essential oil distilled from cedar and cedar-like trees, and one of the workhorse ingredients of the woody fragrance family. The name covers true cedars of the genus Cedrus as well as North American junipers sold as cedar. Perfumers use it both as a note and as the raw material for a range of woody molecules.

What does Cedar smell like?

Most people know cedarwood from a freshly sharpened pencil or the inside of a wardrobe: dry, slightly resinous and faintly sweet, with none of the milkiness of sandalwood. Beyond that core, each oil differs. Virginia cedarwood oil is thin, bright and pencil-shaving dry. Texas cedarwood oil is heavier and slightly smoky, closer to a tarred fence post. Atlas and Himalayan cedarwood oils are softer and sweeter, with a honeyed, almost tobacco-like warmth and a faint camphor edge. Chinese cedarwood oil, from a cypress relative, sits between, dry and a little rough, while Thuja cedar leaf oils smell green and camphoraceous rather than woody.

Where Cedar comes from

Cedarwood oils are produced by steam-distilling chipped wood, stumps and sawdust, usually a by-product of the timber, pencil and furniture trades. The crude oil is often fractionated or chemically modified to make derivatives with a cleaner profile.

Also known as: Cedarwood, cedar oil, cedarwood oil
Fragrance family: Woody
Type: Natural and synthetic (natural oils plus derived molecules)
Main origins: USA (Virginia and Texas cedarwood), China, Morocco (Atlas cedar), India and the Himalaya (Himalayan cedar)
How it's obtained: Steam distillation, followed in some cases by fractionation
Key aroma molecules: Cedrol, α-cedrene, thujopsene (juniper cedars); himachalenes and atlantones (true cedars); cedryl acetate and methyl cedryl ketone (derivatives)

Cedar in perfume history

Cedar is one of the oldest aromatic woods in human use: the cedars of Lebanon were prized across the ancient Near East for temples, ships and incense. Plentiful and cheap, its oil became a standard fixative in industrial-era soaps and colognes. Its greater legacy may be chemical: modifying its main components gave cedryl acetate and methyl cedryl ketone, staple building blocks of twentieth-century woody and ambery bases. Cedar later moved from background fixative to star with Serge Lutens Féminité du Bois (1992), built around a sweet Atlas cedar.

Cedar in modern perfumery

Cedarwood oil and its derivatives now appear in a huge share of fine fragrance, shampoos and detergents. Perfumers like the oil because it is stable in almost every product base, keeps costs down and extends more expensive woods such as sandalwood. Sustainability questions mostly concern Atlas cedar, whose wild forests are under pressure, while American cedarwood oil remains largely a by-product of existing industries.

How Cedar wears and what it pairs with

On skin cedarwood is a long-lasting base material with a clear, dry character that stops sweeter accords becoming cloying. It pairs well with lavender, citrus, clary sage, labdanum, musks, vanilla, vetiver and violet leaf.