Javanol: the supplier says "unprecedented substantivity", and the substantivity field gives it the same number as sandalwood oil

About 5 minutes.

Short version

• Name: sandal cyclopropane / Javanol (Givaudan), CAS 198404-98-7
• Formula C15H26O, MW 222.37; FEMA 4776, JECFA 2254
• Odour: woody type — tropical, woody, fatty, sandalwood, herbal, cologne, floral
• Strength: high (smell in a 10% solution or less), strength rank 3
• Substantivity: 400 hours at 100%; vapour pressure 0.001 mmHg
• Assay: 85.00 to 100.00, sum of isomers
• Origin: the occurrence field says "not found in nature"
• Suppliers: 14 (few)
• All three toxicity fields read "Not determined"

The blurb makes two claims

The odour-description field carries Givaudan's own sentence:

"Javanol is a new-generation sandalwood molecule with unprecedented power and substantivity."

Those are two claims, and the database answers them differently.

Power: checkable, and it holds

Pulling every material whose odor field contains sandalwood with at least 5 suppliers gives 29 records. The strength field splits like this:

Strength field	Count
high	3
medium	21
blank	5

Javanol is one of the three, and the field reads "high, recommend smelling in a 10.00% solution or less".

For contrast: sandalwood oil itself reads medium. So do sandal butenol, sandal pentanol, sandal cyclohexanol and santall.

So on power, the field backs the claim.

Substantivity: not checkable

The field reads 400 hours. That looks long.

But 400 is the ceiling of that column: of 2,027 records carrying a substantivity value, 334 (16.5%) read exactly 400, and only 17 read higher. I took that ceiling apart once in That "400 hours" for Ambroxan — there the point was that the source field carried three qualifiers (greater-than, 10% concentration, in DPG) and the numeric column dropped all of them.

Javanol's source field is different. It reads "400 hour(s) at 100.00 %" — no greater-than sign, and measured neat. Two entirely different measurements, both landing in the numeric column as 400.0.

The sandalwood family makes it blunter:

Material	Substantivity	Strength
Sandalwood oil itself	400 h	medium
sandalrome	400 h	high
sandal butenol	400 h	medium
sandal pentanol	400 h	medium
sandal pentenol	400 h	medium
sandal cyclohexanol	400 h	medium
santall	400 h	medium
muscomer	400 h	medium
Javanol	400 h	high

Nine materials, nine 400s.

"Unprecedented substantivity" gets the same number as sandalwood oil in this field.

That does not make the blurb false. It means the field has no resolution to answer the question. Verifying "unprecedented" needs comparative testing under one method, and the 400-hour ceiling flattens the whole sandalwood family into a single cell.

Look at the right-hand column of that table: strength separates them, substantivity does not. Given the same set of materials, one field produces a 3-high / 21-medium spread and the other produces nine identical numbers.

The 15 points in the assay field

The assay field reads 85.00 to 100.00, sum of isomers.

Across the 2,091 materials with ≥10 suppliers and a parseable assay floor:

Assay floor	Count
95	634
98	504
99	331
97	272
96	130
90	43
85 or lower	77 (3.7%)

85 sits in the bottom 3.7%. And most of the records below it are deliberately made-up solutions (1% sol, 30% in PG) or reagents (hydrogen peroxide, hydrochloric acid), not aroma chemicals sold neat.

"Sum of isomers" means that those 15 points of latitude are filled by other stereoisomers of the same molecule.

Hasegawa and colleagues did something relevant in Molecules in 2012. They synthesised a series of (Z)- and (E)-α-santalol derivatives and evaluated each one by nose. The finding: the Z isomers smelled woody, while the E isomers were "odorless, fresh, or fatty" — flip the double-bond configuration in the side chain and the woody character disappears.

Javanol is not α-santalol. It is a cyclopropane skeleton (JECFA name: (1-methyl-2-(1,2,2-trimethylbicyclo[3.1.0]hex-3-ylmethyl)cyclopropyl)methanol), so that paper cannot be applied to it directly. But it establishes one thing: in sandalwood-type odour molecules, isomer configuration can decide whether the material smells woody at all.

And Javanol is sold as "sum of isomers, 85 to 100". Up to 15% of what arrives is material the supplier has not committed to any particular isomer.

The practical reading is simple: treat a supplier change or a lot change as requiring re-evaluation. Do not assume two lots are drop-in equivalent.

When Brocke and colleagues reviewed the chemistry of sandalwood odorants in Chemistry & Biodiversity in 2008, they stated the motivation for the whole line plainly — natural sandalwood oil is scarce and expensive, so the search for synthetic materials imitating its odour profile remains "as challenging as ever". Javanol comes out of that search.

Other fields

• natural_synthetic says "natural/synthetic" while occurrence says "not found in nature". Those two contradict each other, and this is not a one-off — there are 306 such records, which I counted in My database can't settle the synthetic-versus-natural argument. I go with occurrence here.
• All three toxicity fields read "Not determined". That sounds like a warning, so I counted first: of the 3,156 materials with ≥10 suppliers, 1,506 (47.7%) have all three toxicity fields undetermined. This is the norm, not something specific to this material.
• Vapour pressure 0.001 mmHg (est), boiling point 270.42 °C (est), logP 4.10 (est) — all three are estimates.
• Flash point 136.11 °C, far above the shipping flammability threshold, so this one is not subject to those rules (Shipping a flammable liquid).
• 14 suppliers, which is few in this database. Patent 6,235,943 (Odorants).
• It carries FEMA and JECFA numbers, so it is also treated as a flavour material; the flavor field reads amber, musk, woody, clean, herbal, floral, clary sage, sandalwood.

How to use it

• Make a 10% dilution first. The field says so itself, and it is not a formality.
• Its rank by weight in a formula will be lower than your intuition. Powerful materials should be dosed low, which makes them look unimportant on a weight table — that is exactly the problem in Five people diagnosed the same formula.
• Do not use the substantivity field to compare it against other sandalwood materials. Nine of them share one number.
• Re-evaluate on a lot change. The assay floor is 85% and the missing 15% is isomers.

What this doesn't establish

• I have not smelled Javanol. The whole article is fields, database-wide counts and two papers.
• "400 is a ceiling" is inferred from the distribution (16.5% piled on one value, only 17 above it). The database does not state an upper bound, and since 17 records exceed it, it is not strictly a hard cap.
• For the nine sandalwood records I only checked the numeric column, not each source string's qualifiers. Javanol is neat at 100%, Ambroxan was 10% in DPG — which of those the other seven are, I did not look up.
• The Hasegawa paper is about α-santalol, not Javanol. Different skeletons. What I take from it is the general point that isomer configuration can decide whether sandalwood character is present, not anything specific about Javanol's isomers.
• I do not know what that 15% actually is. "Sum of isomers" only says they are isomers.
• "29 sandalwood materials" is my own pull (odor containing sandalwood, ≥5 suppliers), not an official classification. Change the filter and the number changes.
• The strength field is the database's judgement, has no unit, and does not convert into dose.
• The 47.7% undetermined-toxicity figure is for the ≥10-supplier subset, not the whole database.
• I did not check price or availability. A count of 14 suppliers describes coverage, not whether you can buy it.