Material guide: hexyl salicylate — the strength field says low, and the median dose in formulas is 7%

Short version: cheap, not much character on its own, and used in quantity. You buy it not to smell it but to give everything else somewhere to sit. If you pick materials by whether they are interesting to smell, you will never buy this kind of thing.

The fields

Field	Value
CAS	6259-76-3
Formula	C13H18O3, MW 222.28
Odour type	Herbal
Odour	Fresh, herbal, orchid, green
Odour strength	Low (strength rank 1, the bottom rank)
Substantivity	40 hours at 100%
Natural occurrence	Osmanthus absolute @ 0.007%
Boiling point	290 °C @ 760 mmHg
logP	5.70 (est)
Water solubility	9 mg/L @ 20 °C (exp)
Suppliers	42
Regulatory	CoE 10695, FLAVIS 09.581

Reading "low strength" together with "40 hours" tells you the job. It is quiet, and it stays. The high-strength materials this series has covered — indole, dimethyl sulfide — are the opposite: deafening in trace amounts.

First, the thing that is easy to get wrong

The database holds three records with closely similar names. They are three different molecules.

Name	CAS	What it is
Hexyl salicylate	6259-76-3	This article. Fragrance material. 40 hours substantivity
Cyclohexyl salicylate	25485-88-5	Fragrance material, but 400 hours substantivity and medium strength
2-ethyl hexyl salicylate	118-60-5	A sunscreen ingredient. Its cosmetic uses field reads "uv absorbers; uv filters"

The third is the troublesome one. Its other name is octyl salicylate, a UVB absorber with a CosIng entry. Its odour field reads orchid, sweet, balsamic, with 48 hours substantivity — on the odour field alone you cannot tell it apart from the subject of this article.

And in 2007 RIFM published safety reviews of the two of them four pages apart in the same supplement: hexyl salicylate at S410–417, ethyl hexyl salicylate at S393–396, with nearly the same author list.

They were reviewed separately because they are different things. This series has fallen into the same hole before (with amyl cinnamaldehyde it was three molecules), so the rule is already settled: check the CAS, not the name.

One note about those two RIFM reviews. On PubMed they carry a one-sentence abstract each ("A toxicologic and dermatologic review of [the material] when used as a fragrance ingredient is presented"), with no data. So what is cited here is that they exist, and that they treat the two molecules separately. No conclusions are drawn from them. Anyone who needs the numbers has to go to the papers themselves.

What it does in the corpus

It appears in 57 of 954 formulas (6.0%).

Dose:

	Value
Median	7.05%
Interquartile	3.75%–15.00%
Maximum	84.3%
Below 1%	5 formulas
Above 5%	40 formulas

A median of seven per cent puts it among the highest doses of the 80 materials this series has covered. For contrast: cis-3-hexenol appears in 100 formulas at a median 0.54%. It shows up nearly twice as often and is used at under a fourteenth of the amount.

That is why "which materials appear most often" and "which materials carry a formula" are two different lists.

Most frequent companions:

Appears with	Formulas	Of its 57
Benzyl acetate	28	49%
Citronellol	22	39%
Dihydromyrcenol	22	39%
Hedione	20	35%
Linalool	19	33%
Lilial	19	33%
α-hexyl cinnamaldehyde	17	30%
γ-undecalactone	13	23%

A standard white-floral/detergent skeleton. Benzyl acetate plus citronellol plus lilial plus hexyl cinnamaldehyde is the basic jasmine-muguet construction, and hexyl salicylate supplies the bulk inside it.

Genre spread: fruity at 2.3× baseline

752 of the 954 formulas can be labelled by genre from their titles. Using those as the baseline:

Genre	Of its 57	Corpus baseline	Ratio
Floral	52.6%	35.6%	1.5×
Fruity	29.8%	12.8%	2.3×
Green	12.3%	10.4%	1.2×
Citrus	12.3%	14.4%	0.9×
Powdery	8.8%	4.2%	2.1×

Floral above baseline is no surprise. The fruity row at 2.3× is where the information is, because the database's odour field — fresh, herbal, orchid, green — contains no fruit word at all.

Read further down the same record and the answer sits in the small print. Among the odour notes collected from suppliers:

• "A dry haylike waxy floral odor"
• "pleasant natural, floral-spicy (azalea, clove, remote ylang ylang), tangy, fresh-green"
• "Floral, Green, Fruity. Hexyl Salicylate has a floral fruity character, with a mild, sweet herbaceous slant. It is a very useful modifier of floral fragrances especially with amyl salicylate"

And since it is also a flavour material (FLAVIS 09.581), its taste field reads: herbal, green, metallic, floral, algae, tomato leaf, asparagus.

So fruity is present in this record — just not in the top field. When the summary field and the fine print disagree, the corpus sided with the fine print.

This is not a data error; it is a resolution problem in the field. The odour field has room for four words, which cannot hold a material that behaves differently at different concentrations. This series met the same thing in the octyl acetate entry.

What that 84.3% is

The highest formula puts it at 84.3%. That number deserves a pause, because it does not look like a perfume formula.

A single material at 84% is less a perfume than the base of something, or a demonstration formula stripped down. Extremes like this in the corpus usually come from one of two places: a teaching skeleton with three or four materials in it, or a simplified table for a functional product such as a detergent fragrance. There is no way to go back through the corpus and confirm which. The 84.3% is listed here to represent the distribution honestly, not as something to copy. The interquartile range of 3.75%–15.00% is the representative band.

The 0.007% in osmanthus

The natural occurrence field lists exactly one source: osmanthus absolute, at 0.007%.

Seven parts in a hundred thousand. What that number means is that you cannot obtain a useful quantity of hexyl salicylate from osmanthus absolute, and you should not treat this synthetic as "the smell of osmanthus". It is essentially absent from nature — clearest when set beside its two near-neighbours, whose records read "not found in nature" — and it is an industrial product.

This series keeps meeting this field. A material occurs in trace amounts in some natural, and the record classifies it as natural. Occurring at 0.007% and being naturally sourced are different claims.

Whether to buy it

If you are assembling a first set, this one is worth considering, and not because it smells good:

• Forty-two suppliers. It is a commodity, so price is unlikely to be the obstacle.
• Median dose 7%. For the same bottle, it stretches across more formulas than the materials where one drop is plenty.
• Its companions — benzyl acetate, citronellol, dihydromyrcenol, linalool — are all fixtures of beginner lists, so it will not sit there unused.

The reasons against, stated plainly:

• Smelling it alone will disappoint you. Strength rank 1; it will read as nothing much.
• It will not make your formula smell better. It gives your formula weight. Beginners find those two hard to feel apart, and it usually takes making a few things that are interesting and thin before the difference lands.

What this doesn't establish

• Both RIFM reviews carry no abstract content on PubMed. What is cited is their existence and the fact that they treat the two molecules separately. Every safety conclusion requires the papers themselves.
• Fifty-seven formulas is a small sample. The 2.3× fruity ratio rests on 17 formulas and would carry a wide interval. I did not compute one.
• Genre labels are applied from title keywords, not from smelling. A genre not named in a title is not counted.
• Doses are weight shares within the formula, not concentrations in a finished product. Comparing to any regulatory limit requires multiplying by the fragrance load first.
• "Low strength" is the database's own rating, not my measurement. The record does not explain how the strength ranks were assigned.