Methyl Phenylacetate
Synthetic Ingredient For Perfumery
Methyl Phenylacetate is a colorless, organic ester with a structural formula of C6H5CH2COOCH3, known for its powerful and diffusive honey-like odor. This ingredient is prevalent in various natural sources such as brandy, capsicum, and honey, and offers a sweet, floral aroma with traces of jasmine. Its versatility extends to creating lasting sweet undertones in perfumes, particularly when paired with musks or used to enhance oriental tobacco flavors.
Synthetic Ingredient For Perfumery
Methyl Phenylacetate is a colorless, organic ester with a structural formula of C6H5CH2COOCH3, known for its powerful and diffusive honey-like odor. This ingredient is prevalent in various natural sources such as brandy, capsicum, and honey, and offers a sweet, floral aroma with traces of jasmine. Its versatility extends to creating lasting sweet undertones in perfumes, particularly when paired with musks or used to enhance oriental tobacco flavors.
Synthetic Ingredient For Perfumery
Methyl Phenylacetate is a colorless, organic ester with a structural formula of C6H5CH2COOCH3, known for its powerful and diffusive honey-like odor. This ingredient is prevalent in various natural sources such as brandy, capsicum, and honey, and offers a sweet, floral aroma with traces of jasmine. Its versatility extends to creating lasting sweet undertones in perfumes, particularly when paired with musks or used to enhance oriental tobacco flavors.
Methyl Phenylacetate is a colorless liquid that is only slightly soluble in water but very soluble in most organic solvents. It is an organic compound that is the ester formed from methanol and phenylacetic acid, with the structural formula C6H5CH2COOCH3. Methyl phenylacetate has a powerful and quite diffusive odor similar to honey. The odor is so strong that recommended smelling is of a solution with 10% or less. It has a honey-musky odor with traces of jasmin-floral notes and moderate to poor tenacity. In dilutions below 50 ppm, it has a fruity-honey-like, very sweet taste.
Profile:
📂 CAS N° 101-41-7
⚖️ MW — 150.17 g/mol
📝 Odor Type — Honey
📈 Odor Strength — high
👃🏼 Odor Profile — Sweet, floral, fruity, honey and spice like.
👅 Flavor Profile — Floral, honey, spice, waxy and sweet [Mosciano, Gerard P&F 15, No. 3, 51, (1990)]
⚗️ Uses — Methyl phenylacetate is used in the flavor industry and in perfumes to impart honey scents. This ester is widely used in perfume compositions, partly on account of its power and very low cost, partly because of its versatility in combining with floral and nonfloral particularly oriental type fragrance materials.
Natural Occurrence
Methyl phenylacetate also naturally occurs in: brandy, capsicum, cocoa, coffee, honey, hop oil, peanut, pepper, and wine.
Usage in Perfumery
Although mainly a top note material, methyl phenylacetate can be easily withheld by fixatives, particularly musks, to produce intensely sweet undertones of lasting effect. However, if it contains more than minute traces of phenylacetic acid, the material may surprise the perfumer with an exceptionally tenacious and not always desirable animal, rather unclean undertone.
The ester finds use in inexpensive types of rose, a classic ingredient in the “rose Eglantine” type, particularly for detergent perfumes and household odors. It has an excellent masking effect upon the solvents used in floor waxes and furniture waxes, and its honey-like odor fits well into wax products. Used with extreme discretion in combination with indole, it can give suitable civet-like effects for jasmine and rose fragrances, or for oriental notes.
Usage in Flavoring
In flavors, methyl phenylacetate has found a major field of application in tobacco flavoring, especially for the “Oriental” type of tobacco. Traces are used in imitation strawberry, peach, and chocolate, while it may be a larger ingredient in honey flavors. The concentration used may vary from 0.1 to 35 ppm in the finished product.
Other methods of Methyl Phenylacetate production:
Methyl phenylacetate can also be produced from benzyl cyanide by acid hydrolysis in presence of Methanol. Benzyl cyanide (the Nitrile of Phenylacetic acid) is derived from Benzyl chloride, an industrial chemical.
Source:
National Center for Biotechnology Information (2020). PubChem Compound Summary for CID 7559, Methyl phenylacetate. Retrieved November 25, 2020 from https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Methyl-phenylacetate.
