Material guide: mace oil — the same seed as nutmeg, just the red net around it

About a 4 minute read.

The short version

• Name: mace oil, CAS 8007-12-3, FEMA 2653
• Odour type: spicy; odour: mace, nutmeg, sweet, spicy, peppery, woody, nut skin, mastic, incense
• Strength medium (rank 2); substantivity only 64 hours — short for this series
• Suppliers: 34
• Two specific gravity ranges on file: 0.880–0.930 and 0.854–0.880
• The toxicity field carries human data: oral-man TDLo 400 mg/kg, effects hallucinations and arrhythmia

The synonym field holds a definition

Most records put another name in head_synonym. This one puts a sentence:

essential oil steam-distilled from the dried red case which surrounds the ripe seeds of the nutmeg, Myristica fragrans, Myristicaceae

Mace is not a different spice. It is part of the same fruit — the bright red lacy aril wrapped around the seed, which turns orange-brown once peeled off and dried.

One tree, one fruit, two products. (And the database's occurrence field says "nutmeg seed." Even the source of occurrence points back to the same place.)

Why it is worth distilling separately

Ashokkumar and colleagues compiled essential oil yields for four tissues of the nutmeg tree in Phytotherapy Research in 2022:

Part	Yield
Leaf	0.7–3.2%
Aril (mace)	8.1–10.3%
Seed	0.3–12.5%
Kernel	6.2–7.6%

Mace is the highest, and its range is the narrowest. The seed's 0.3 to 12.5% is too wide to predict anything; mace's 8.1 to 10.3% is a number you can plan production around.

The primary constituents they list: sabinene, eugenol, myristicin, caryophyllene, β-myrcene, α-pinene. Sabinene and pinene account for the "peppery" and "woody" in the odour field; eugenol accounts for "spicy."

And myristicin accounts for the next section.

The human entry in the toxicity field

toxicity_oral:

oral-rat LD50 3640 mg/kg (Food and Cosmetics Toxicology Vol. 2, p. 327, 1964) oral-man TDLo 400 mg/kg — behavioral: "hallucinations, distorted perceptions"; behavioral: toxic psychosis; cardiac: arrhythmias including changes in conduction (American Journal of Emergency Medicine Vol. 10, p. 429, 1992)

TDLo is the lowest published toxic dose, not a lethal one. And a figure labelled man has only one possible origin: somebody took it, ended up in an emergency department, and somebody wrote it up as a case report.

I counted the 156 records carrying human toxicity data across the database earlier. This is one of them.

400 mg/kg for a 60 kg person is 24 grams. Roughly two or three whole nutmegs — an amount you cannot reach by accident but can reach on purpose.

What those cases actually look like

The number tells you nothing about frequency. Ehrenpreis and colleagues reviewed a full decade of Illinois Poison Center records, 2001 to 2011, in the Journal of Medical Toxicology in 2014:

Thirty-two cases of nutmeg ingestion were reported. Of the 17 (53.1%) unintentional exposures, 10 subjects (58.8%) were under the age of 13. Four of the exposures in children under 13 were ocular. Fifteen exposures (46.9%) were intentional. Of these, five (33.3%) were recorded to have combined drug intoxication. All of these were between the ages of 15 and 20.

Ten years, an entire state, 32 cases. More than half accidental, mostly children, and four of those got it in the eye.

The two papers only mean something together. The database gives you one dose; the paper tells you how that dose is distributed in the real world. TDLo 400 mg/kg on its own makes this look like a high-risk material. Ehrenpreis shows 32 cases per state per decade, most of them kitchen accidents.

(The dermal cell reads skin-rabbit LD50 > 5000 mg/kg, 1979. Acute toxicity is not this material's problem in a formula.)

Two specific gravity ranges

The specific_gravity field:

0.88000 to 0.93000 @ 25 °C. | 0.85400 to 0.88000 @ 25 °C.

Two ranges separated by a pipe, and they barely overlap.

The database does not label what the two are, but mace oil is sold commercially in East Indian and West Indian origins, whose compositions differ in well-known ways. The likeliest explanation is two products under one name.

In practice: measure the gravity on arrival and confirm which one you bought. (Different things under one name is something I measured in records that share a CAS; birch tar is the other form of the problem — a single range 19% wide.)

Substantivity is only 64 hours

odor_substantivity reads 64 hours at 100%, strength medium.

That is short for this series. For contrast: treemoss 400 hours, birch tar 400 hours, vanillin longer still. Sabinene and pinene are light monoterpenes and they leave fast.

So this is a top-to-middle spice, not a base. If you want a spice note that stays, this material will not do it for you.

How to use it

• Top to middle. The 64-hour substantivity settles where it sits.
• The odour field carries "incense" and "nut skin." That is what separates it from clove and cinnamon — it is not as sweet.
• Confirm the origin before buying. The two gravity ranges are not a typo.
• Myristicin is not a concern at formula concentrations. The human cases involve tens of grams of powder, orders of magnitude away from what you drop into alcohol.
• It is FEMA GRAS (2653) and carries a flavour listing too — the flavor field adds "citrus" and "licorice," neither of which appears in the odour field.

What this doesn't establish

• I have not smelled it. This is fields, whole-database statistics, and two papers.
• "Two gravity ranges means East and West Indian" is an inference. The database does not label them and I did not check supplier specifications.
• Ashokkumar 2022 is a review, so those yields are their compilation of other people's numbers; I did not chase each primary source.
• The TDLo entry is a citation string in a field. I did not go to the 1992 emergency medicine paper, so I do not know the details of that case.
• Ehrenpreis 2014 counted ingestions of nutmeg, not of mace oil. Their myristicin contents differ and I cannot map those 32 cases onto this essential oil.
• I did not check IFRA's text for this oil, nor any myristicin content specification.
• "Sabinene and pinene leave fast" is chemistry-common-knowledge, not something I measured from this record.