Real strawberries lose their smell almost as soon as you pick them, so there is no strawberry oil to buy. The note has to be built from a short list of aroma chemicals instead.
Two of them do most of the work. The first is furaneol, full name 4-hydroxy-2,5-dimethyl-3(2H)-furanone. It is a genuine strawberry molecule, one the fruit makes for itself, and pineapple makes it too. Neat, it smells of burnt sugar. Drop it to a whisper and it turns into sweet, jammy strawberry. It is potent enough that a hundredth of a per cent in a formula already counts as a heavy hand.
The second is ethyl methylphenylglycidate, sold as strawberry aldehyde or aldehyde C-16. As with apricot's C-14, the name lies: it is a glycidic ester, not an aldehyde. It smells of ripe strawberry with a honeyed, slightly floral edge, and a trace of it carries all the way through a scent, from the first spray to the dry-down. Perfumers often set it against rose or violet, where it reads sweeter still.
Put those two together and your nose fills in the rest. That is the quiet mechanism behind most fruit notes. A couple of loud molecules set the direction and memory supplies the detail. Nobody has ever smelled a real perfume strawberry, because one has never been made, and nobody has needed one.
For that note turned all the way up, Sugar Rush is our take on Born to Stand Out Sugar Addict, strawberry and raspberry over marshmallow and vanilla, UK-made at 35% Extrait. See the rest of the Born to Stand Out collection.
