Ingredient Spotlight: Muguet

Muguet—also known as lily of the valley—is one of the most iconic floral notes in perfumery. Its scent is fresh, delicate, uplifting, and immediately recognizable. But despite its popularity, the flower itself cannot be extracted. Every muguet note in fragrance is a perfumer-created reconstitution, crafted from other aromatic materials that mimic the real bloom.

Lily of the valley — the flower that cannot be extracted: every muguet note is built by a perfumer.

Why Can’t Lily of the Valley Be Extracted?

The natural flower’s aroma is extremely fragile. It contains volatile molecules that disappear instantly once picked, and the plant produces no extractable essential oil. Because of this, all lily of the valley in modern perfumery is built entirely through composition—not extraction.

This makes muguet one of the best examples of perfumery as an art and a science: creativity, chemistry, and raw materials must work together to recreate the scent of a flower that cannot be captured naturally.

So How Was the Smell Captured at All?

If the flower cannot be extracted, the obvious question is how anyone knew what to build towards. The answer is a technique that does not touch the flower at all.

In the 1970s the Swiss fragrance chemist Roman Kaiser developed what is now called headspace analysis: seal a glass bell over a living bloom, let the air inside saturate with whatever the flower is giving off, draw that air through a trap and run it through a gas chromatograph. Lily of the valley was one of the flowers the method was worked out on, precisely because there was no other way to read it.

Headspace does not produce a material. You cannot buy it or pour it, and it does not replace the perfumer’s work of building a reconstitution. What it produces is a description — which molecules the living flower is actually emitting, and in what proportion. That turned muguet from a note built out of memory into one built against evidence, and it is why a modern muguet accord can be recognisably closer to the flower than anything made before it.

How Do Perfumers Recreate Muguet?

A muguet “reco” (industry slang for reconstitution) blends several fragrance families to build the illusion of the flower. While formulas vary by perfumer and brand, most muguet accords include three structural elements:

The art is in the balance. Changing the quality or proportion of each piece creates a different style of lily of the valley—cleaner, greener, softer, or more radiant. This is why muguet varies so widely among fragrances, even though the flower itself has only one natural scent profile.

Element	What it contributes	More of it and the accord reads
White floral	The luminous, petal-like core of the note	Richer, rounder, more perfumed
Green	Dewy lift and natural transparency	Fresher and sharper, closer to a cut stem
Rose	Depth and roundness underneath the floral	Softer, warmer, less airy

What Does Muguet Smell Like?

Muguet is known for being:

• Delicate and airy
• Optimistic and uplifting
• Clean, bright, and dewy
• Light rather than dense (unlike tuberose or gardenia)

It’s one of the most versatile florals in perfumery—easy to blend into modern fragrances for home, body, hair, and fine fragrance.

Two Materials That Are No Longer in Your Muguet

If a muguet fragrance you liked ten years ago does not smell the way you remember, this is usually why. Two of the materials that used to carry the note are now prohibited in EU cosmetics.

HICC (hydroxyisohexyl 3-cyclohexene carboxaldehyde, sold as Lyral) was prohibited by Regulation (EU) 2017/1410 on the strength of its contact-allergy record — no longer permitted on products placed on the EU market from 23 August 2019, or made available to consumers from 23 August 2021.

Lilial (butylphenyl methylpropional, BMHCA) followed under Regulation (EU) 2021/1902, prohibited from 1 March 2022 after it was reclassified as a CMR category 1B substance for reproductive toxicity.

Both were workhorses, and both were part of why a muguet accord smelled the way it did. Every muguet on the market has been rebuilt without them. That is worth knowing in two practical situations: when you are trying to match a fragrance you used before a reformulation, and when you are reading an old formula or an old brief that still names them. The restrictions that apply to any of our oils are on that oil’s IFRA 51 Regulatory Data Sheet, posted on the product page under the Documentation tab.

What Is Left Is Restricted Too

It would be comfortable to assume that once HICC and Lilial came out, what remained was unrestricted. It is not. The material that has carried muguet for more than a century is itself an IFRA Restriction, and it was tightened recently rather than long ago.

Hydroxycitronellal is the classic lily-of-the-valley material — sweet, green, watery, with a soft melon edge — and it is both declarable on EU labels and capped by an IFRA Restriction on skin sensitization grounds, in force since 2023. Cyclamen aldehyde, a green-floral aldehyde built alongside it in the same muguet constructions, has carried a Restriction with a Specification since 2020.

Material	CAS	IFRA Standard	In force since
Hydroxycitronellal	107-75-5	Restriction	2023
Cyclamen aldehyde	103-95-7	Restriction and Specification	2020

Rows as published in the Index of IFRA Standards, 51st Amendment. Neither is prohibited; both are capped.

None of this makes muguet difficult to buy or difficult to use. It makes muguet a note that is built to a ceiling, which is why two muguet accords from different houses can smell meaningfully different from one another — they are solving the same problem with different proportions of a restricted palette. The practical consequence for anyone formulating is the same as it is for every note we sell: the limit that binds you is the one on the finished oil’s IFRA 51 Regulatory Data Sheet under the Documentation tab, calculated across the whole formula, not the raw-material entry above. How IFRA limits work sets out how those category ceilings are arrived at.

Which of Our Fragrance Oils Feature Muguet?

Muguet appears as a supporting floral note in many of our professionally designed fragrance oils:

You’ll also find it at the heart of classic soliflore perfumes like Diorissimo (1956), one of the most famous muguet fragrances ever created.

Explore Related Floral Fragrance Collections

Frequently Asked Questions

Is lily of the valley ever natural in fragrance?+

No. The flower cannot be extracted. Every muguet note is built from other natural or synthetic materials through an accord.

Do different muguet accords smell different?+

Yes. Depending on which white floral, green, and rose materials are used—and their quality—muguet can smell cleaner, greener, softer, or more radiant.

Is muguet used only in perfumes?+

Not at all. Muguet is one of the most flexible florals and appears in fragrance oils for skincare, haircare, home fragrance, laundry, and personal care.

Can you develop custom muguet accords?+

Yes. Our Fragrance Design Services team creates custom floral accords—including muguet-forward compositions—for brands of all sizes.

If the flower cannot be extracted, how do perfumers know what it smells like?+

Headspace analysis. A glass bell is sealed over a living flower, the air around it is drawn through a trap and run through a gas chromatograph, and the result is a list of the molecules the flower is actually giving off. Lily of the valley was one of the first flowers the technique was worked out on, in the 1970s, because there was no other way to read it.

Why does an older muguet fragrance smell different now?+

Because two of the materials that used to carry it are prohibited in EU cosmetics. HICC, sold as Lyral, was prohibited by Regulation (EU) 2017/1410, and Lilial by Regulation (EU) 2021/1902 from 1 March 2022. Every muguet accord on the market has been rebuilt without them, which is why matching a pre-reformulation fragrance is its own piece of work.

Is hydroxycitronellal banned like Lilial and Lyral?+

No. Hydroxycitronellal is restricted, not prohibited: it carries an IFRA Restriction in force since 2023 on skin sensitization grounds, and it is one of the fragrance materials that must be declared on an EU label when it is present above the threshold. It is still the backbone of most muguet accords. The difference between a restriction and a prohibition is the difference between a ceiling and a ban.

Related Reading

Have questions about muguet or floral formulation? Contact us—we’re happy to help.