Calamus

About

Calamus (sweet flag) smells of warm, spicy, aromatic roots: green and slightly bitter at first, with peppery and gingered facets that settle into dry, woody, leathery and subtly citrus-anisic sweetness, sometimes carrying a faint medicinal or marshy quality that evokes riverbanks, apothecaries and old herbal tinctures. In perfumery it is used primarily as a base note and fixative to lend earthy, spicy warmth and an amber-leather depth to orientals, woods, fougères and chypres, where it is commonly blended with woods, resins, spices and florals; because natural calamus oil is subject to regulatory limits, many compositions rely on synthetics to reproduce its characteristic rooty facets.

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