Material guide: methyl cedryl ketone (Vertofix) — the corpus calls it by five names, and the database's official one finds a third of them

About a 5 minute read.

The short version

• Name: methyl cedryl ketone, trade name Vertofix (IFF), also acetyl cedrene, CAS 32388-55-9
• C17H26O, molecular weight 246.39, 71 suppliers
• Odour type woody; odour: woody, vetiver, amber, leathery, musk, cedar
• Medium strength (rank 2), substantivity 400 hours, vapour pressure 0.000084 mmHg. Here the 400 is credible
• The corpus uses five names; merging four puts it in 86 formulas (9.0%) at a median of 5.44%
• Counting only the database's official name gives 26 and misses 60
• The notes field holds one sentence, and that sentence is a clue about how it is made

One material, a whole accord

The odor field puts six words on one line:

woody; vetiver; amber; leathery; musk; cedar

Most materials' odour fields subdivide a single direction (perilla alcohol's green, cumin and cardamom all sit on the spice side). This one does not. Vetiver, amber, leather and musk are four separate families in the traditional taxonomy, and one material carries all four at once.

The three evaluation entries all say the same thing:

A warm precious wood aroma with musky undertones. Long lasting and diffusive. Woody, cedar, leather, dry.

Warm, woody, cedarwood, resinous note with musk undertones. Long lasting.

That is why it has 71 suppliers. It is a material for laying a base, not for modifying one.

The corpus calls it by five names

Searching the 954-formula corpus for this material turns up five spellings:

Spelling in the corpus	Occurrences
vertofix	50
methyl cedryl ketone	26
acetyl cedrene	7
vertofix coeur	3
methyl cedryl ketone replacer	2 (a different thing, excluded)

The first four share a CAS number. Merged:

	Dose
Formulas	86 (9.0% of 954)
Median	5.44%
Quartiles	4.00% – 8.50%
Max	44.8%

The database's official name methyl cedryl ketone reaches only 26 of them. Counting by the official name drops 60 formulas and turns a material used in 9% of the corpus into a 2.7% obscurity.

I have measured the scale of the name-matching problem, hit it once in styralyl acetate with two names, and once at the top of the dose leaderboard with dipg versus dipropylene glycol. Five names is the worst case I have measured so far.

The cause here is plain: the trade name (vertofix) is shorter and easier to say than the chemical name, so perfumers write the trade name. The database records the chemical name. Neither is wrong.

This material's 400 hours is credible

I wrote just last round that 400 hours accounts for 16.5% of every substantivity value in the database, and that it is a bucket label for "very long" rather than a measurement. So a 400 should draw suspicion first.

This one earns an exception. Its 25 °C vapour pressure is 0.000084 mmHg. Within the 400-hour bucket (the 137 members that carry a vapour pressure) the quartiles run 0.000157 to 0.011, so this material sits below the first quartile. It is at the least volatile end of that bucket.

Put another way: the 400 label is on the right material here. It has nothing in common with its bucket-mate isovaleric acid, whose vapour pressure of 0.554 makes it more volatile than dextro-limonene.

It comes from cedarwood, and nature does not make it

The occurrence field reads not found in nature.

This time that is correct, and the route is worth seeing. Virginia cedarwood oil (Juniperus virginiana) is mostly cedrene and cedrol; Eller and Taylor compared pressurised fluid methods for extracting that oil in J Agric Food Chem in 2004 (PMID 15080642).

Acetylate that cedrene and you get this material. Nature supplies the skeleton; the factory adds the ketone.

The notes field holds a single sentence:

Blends well with cedrenes.

At first that looked like it said nothing. Then it clicked: it blends well with cedrenes because unreacted cedrene is already in the commercial product. A formulation tip that doubles as a manufacturing clue.

What it appears alongside

The most frequent co-occurrences across the 86 formulas:

Material	Count		Material	Count
coumarin	40		linalyl acetate	32
lilial	37		iso e super	32
hedione	37		linalool	31
dipg (solvent)	37		citronellol	30
benzyl acetate	32		alpha-hexyl cinnamaldehyde	28

Coumarin first, Iso E Super seventh. That is the standard roster of a masculine fougère or woody amber. It is not a material for building florals.

Two gaps in the record

For a material with 71 suppliers, two fields are empty or nearly so:

• toxicity_oral reads Not determined, which is a placeholder, not a statement that it is non-toxic
• The regulatory field is empty entirely. No FEMA, no JECFA, no CoE

The empty regulatory field makes sense: this is a pure fragrance material rather than a flavour material, so it never enters the FEMA GRAS list. But it also means you cannot read its usage limits off this database. Go to the IFRA standards.

Scognamiglio and colleagues published a fragrance material review of acetyl cedrene in Food Chem Toxicol in 2013 (PMID 23907023); the toxicology lives there, not in this field.

What this doesn't establish

• I merged four of the five names, not all five. methyl cedryl ketone replacer is a replacement product rather than the same material, so I excluded it. The corpus may still hold spellings I did not recognise, which would make 86 an undercount.
• The 9.0% is a share of the demonstration corpus, not of products on the market.
• The vapour pressure carries (est). I used it to argue the 400 hours is credible, and it is an estimate.
• I did not verify the acetylation route. Linking Blends well with cedrenes to unreacted cedrene is my inference; neither the field nor the literature says it.
• Four families in one odour field does not mean it substitutes for those four classes. Those six words are an evaluator's description, not a perfumer's replacement advice.