Sesame is one of the few gourmand notes with almost nothing written about it. Search for what vanilla or pistachio smells like in perfume and you will find a dozen brand explainers. Search for sesame and you get a database entry and a forum thread from 2012.
That gap is not because the note is obscure. It is because sesame has only recently become useful, as the sweet end of gourmand fragrance has started giving way to the savoury end. Here is what sesame actually smells like in perfume, what it does in a composition, and why it is turning up now.
What does sesame smell like?
Toasted sesame smells nutty, warm, faintly milky and slightly burnt at the edge. It is closer to halva or tahini than to anything floral. There is an oiliness to it that reads on skin as softness rather than as richness.
Raw sesame barely smells of anything. Almost everything people recognise as the sesame smell appears during toasting, which is why perfumery treats it as a roasted note and sits it alongside coffee, hazelnut and burnt sugar rather than alongside seeds and grains.
Three things separate it from the nutty notes it gets grouped with:
- It is not sweet. Hazelnut, praline and pistachio all carry sugar. Sesame does not. It is the nutty note you can use when you want warmth without dessert.
- It reads as skin. The milky, slightly fatty quality of sesame sits very close to how warm skin smells, which is why it disappears into the wearer instead of sitting on top of them.
- It has a savoury edge. There is something almost bread-like in it. In small amounts that edge is what stops a gourmand from becoming cloying.
What sesame does in a composition
Sesame is a base and heart material. It is not volatile enough to lead, and it is too quiet to carry a fragrance on its own.
What it is very good at is being underneath. A sesame accord gives a composition a warm, low, slightly oily floor that other materials can stand on. Put saffron over it and the saffron reads as spiced rather than as medicinal. Put caramel over it and the caramel stops being candy.
It is usually built rather than extracted. There is no conventional sesame essential oil used in fine fragrance at meaningful scale, so perfumers construct the impression from other materials: lactones for the milkiness, pyrazines for the toasted edge, a little iris or orris for the powdery, slightly cool quality that keeps it from going greasy. That is why two sesame fragrances can smell quite different from each other.
What it is usually paired with
Sesame is almost always supported. The usual companions:
- Cardamom, for lift. Green cardamom is bright and slightly camphorous and stops a sesame accord from sitting heavy.
- Iris, for the powdery cool that keeps it from reading as cooking oil.
- Sandalwood, which shares sesame's creamy quality and extends it into the dry down.
- White musk, for the skin-like finish.
- Saffron, honey, tobacco and burnt sugar, when it is being used as a base for something louder.
That first group is more or less the structure of № 03 Sesame Skin: green cardamom over toasted sesame and iris, finishing in white musk and sandalwood. We built it as a base layer rather than as a solo fragrance, which is an unusual thing to do and worth being upfront about.
Is sesame a gourmand note?
Yes, but at the savoury end of the family rather than the dessert end.
Gourmand covers anything edible, and for most of the last twenty years that has meant sugar: vanilla, caramel, chocolate, praline. The direction the category has been moving is towards the things you eat that are not puddings. Toasted grain, coffee, nuts without sugar, salt, bread, olive oil. Sesame sits squarely in that group.
We wrote about that shift in more detail in savoury gourmand, and what is replacing the sugar bomb.
Does it smell like food?
Less than you would expect, and this is the most common worry about the note.
The reason is concentration. A sesame accord at fragrance strength is nothing like a kitchen. What survives is the warm, nutty, slightly milky impression, not the smell of a hot pan. On skin it usually reads as a quality of the wearer rather than as a thing they have applied, which is the same effect people describe when they talk about a skin scent.
Where it does go wrong is quantity. Too much of a sesame-heavy fragrance can tip from warm into oily. One pass of a roll on is enough.
Who it suits
Sesame is genuinely genderless in a way a lot of notes marketed as unisex are not. There is no floral in it and no conventional masculine woodiness either. It is warm, dry and quiet.
It suits anyone who has tried gourmands and found them too sweet, anyone who wants a fragrance that works at close range rather than across a room, and anyone who layers, because a good sesame accord is one of the most useful things you can put underneath another fragrance.
If you want to try it, it is in the Discovery Trio alongside the other two at 2 ml each. The trio is eighteen euros and the whole eighteen comes off your first full size order, which makes testing a note this unfamiliar cost nothing but the time it takes to decide.
Put it on first. Give it a minute. Then put something over the top of it, and see what the sesame does to it.