Heliotrope

Powdery, sweet and almond-like, with hints of vanilla and a touch of cherry pie.

Heliotrope, Heliotropium arborescens, is a shrub from the Andes of South America, native to Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In its homeland it grows to roughly head height and bears dense clusters of small, mostly purple, sometimes white or lavender flowers with an intense, vanilla-like fragrance. Botanically it belongs to the borage family; more recent classifications place the genus in a family of its own, Heliotropiaceae. As it cannot tolerate frost, it is usually grown as an annual balcony and bedding plant in Central Europe.

There is practically no heliotrope flower material in common perfumery use – natural extracts are rare exceptions with a very low yield. The note is therefore built as an accord. At its heart is heliotropin, chemically piperonal: an aromatic aldehyde with a powdery, almond-vanilla scent, produced industrially mainly by oxidising isosafrole. Vanillin makes the accord creamier, coumarin adds a sweet, hay-like softness, and anisaldehyde and benzaldehyde reinforce the floral, almond facet.

Heliotrope usually sits in the heart of a fragrance, with its powdery, vanilla facets reaching into the base. It feels soft, nostalgic and slightly gourmand, links floral notes such as iris or violet with vanilla, tonka and musk, and gives a composition a velvety, powdery glow. In our range, heliotrope appears in 50 fragrances, 36 of them in the heart.

Floral · Powdery · Gourmand · Heart note

Heliotrope flowers from late spring right through summer into autumn; as it cannot tolerate frost, flowering outdoors ends with the first cold nights. The heliotrope accord in perfume is independent of this: its molecules are produced synthetically and are available all year round.

In our fragrances, it often appears alongside Vanille, Jasmin, Bergamotte, Sandelholz, Moschus, Patschuli, Rose.

Heliotrope reached Europe in the 18th century: the French botanist Joseph de Jussieu, who had set out for South America with La Condamine's expedition in 1735, sent seeds from Peru to the royal garden in Paris. In the 19th century the fragrant shrub became a popular bedding and container plant. The name goes back to the Greek hēliotropion, meaning “sun-turning”. The aroma chemical heliotropin is named for its resemblance to the scent of the flower.

• The name comes from the Greek “hēlios” (sun) and “trepein” (to turn) – people believed the flowers turned to follow the sun.
• Heliotropin is on the international list of monitored drug precursors (Table I of the 1988 UN Convention): because it can be misused for the illicit manufacture of synthetic drugs, trading and acquiring it in the EU requires a licence.
• The chemical name piperonal points to pepper (Piper): the substance occurs in traces in black pepper.

The aroma chemical heliotropin (piperonal) bears the flower's name and smells floral with hints of vanilla and cherry. Chemically it is an aromatic aldehyde with a methylenedioxy ring (1,3-benzodioxole-5-carbaldehyde, C₈H₆O₃, PubChem CID 8438, molar mass around 150 g/mol); it forms colourless crystals that melt at about 37 °C. In nature, piperonal occurs only in traces, for example in black pepper and vanilla. Whether and to what extent it contributes to the scent of the heliotrope flower is not clearly established – its name describes a resemblance in scent, not an origin. In the accord it is complemented by vanillin (C₈H₈O₃, CID 1183), anisaldehyde (C₈H₈O₂, CID 31244) and coumarin (C₉H₆O₂).