The Notes
Oakmoss
Oakmoss is a lichen that grows on the bark of oaks and other trees, and the damp green shadow at the heart of every chypre.
Oakmoss is not a moss at all but a lichen, Evernia prunastri, a pale grey-green growth that clings to the bark of oaks and many other trees. In perfume it is the smell of a wood after rain: green, a little bitter, faintly salty and older than it first seems. It is also the material at the centre of the chypre, and one much changed by modern safety rules.
What it is and where it grows
A lichen is a fungus and an alga living together as a single organism. Evernia prunastri forms soft, branching, strap-like tufts, greenish above and white beneath. It is found across the temperate Northern Hemisphere and is common in Britain and Ireland, on sunny trunks in parkland and hedgerows, on fence-posts and on heath. Despite the name, it grows on many other trees, conifers included.
For perfumery it is gathered by hand, largely in the Balkans and Morocco, then dried. A solvent draws out a thick concrete, which is refined into an absolute. The yield is meagre: something like a hundred kilos of lichen for a single kilo of absolute.
What oakmoss smells like
Dark, damp and green-brown. The first impression is of moisture, almost salty, with undergrowth and a hint of seaweed; beneath it sits something warm, earthy and faintly smoky, like bark that has been wet all winter. Its work is to hold brighter things in place.
Oakmoss and the chypre
Chypre is the French name for Cyprus. In 1917 François Coty released a perfume of that name built on bergamot above, labdanum in the middle and oakmoss beneath, and the accord proved so influential that it became a family of its own. Oakmoss gives every chypre its shade: the cool, mossy floor beneath the citrus.
Why oakmoss was restricted
Oakmoss is often said to have been banned. It was not; the trouble lies with two small molecules, atranol and chloroatranol. They are breakdown products of two of the lichen’s own compounds, atranorin and chloroatranorin, and they are potent skin allergens.
The International Fragrance Association (IFRA) first published a standard on oakmoss extracts in 1991 and tightened it in 2001 and 2008. Today it sets a ceiling on how much extract each kind of product may contain, and asks that atranol and chloroatranol each stay below 100 parts per million in the extract itself.
The European Union went further. Commission Regulation (EU) 2017/1410 added atranol and chloroatranol to the list of substances prohibited in cosmetics, after its scientific committee found them among the fragrance allergens behind the highest numbers of contact allergy cases. Products containing them could not be placed on the market from 23 August 2019, and could not be supplied at all from 23 August 2021. Oakmoss extract itself remains permitted, as a regulated fragrance allergen.
Perfumers adapted. Extract makers developed low-atranol oakmoss, processed to remove most of the two molecules, and a synthetic called Evernyl recreates the dry, mossy side of the material. Many chypres were reformulated; the family survived.
In our fragrances
Oakmoss sits in the base of Racing Green, our green chypre, beside saddle leather and dry cedar. It arrives slowly, after the bitter galbanum at the top and the vetiver at the heart, and gives the cut-grass opening somewhere to settle. For the material beside it, see leather. To try Racing Green with the rest of the House, there is the Discovery Set.