Material guide: Veramoss / Evernyl — one molecule under five trade names, and the database says it doesn't occur in nature (it's wrong)

First, something that makes people buy the same thing twice.

All of these names are one molecule:

Evernyl (Givaudan), Veramoss (IFF), Atralone, Phenomoss, Mousse de Metra, atraric acid, methyl 2,4-dihydroxy-3,6-dimethylbenzoate.

All of them are CAS 4707-47-5.

The public formula corpus trips over this itself. Across 954 formulas:

• 25 write it as veramoss
• 27 write it as evernyl

Fifty-two formulas in total (5.5%), and searching by either name shows you half of them.

The short version

• One molecule, at least five trade names, split into two piles in the corpus, appearing in 5.5% of formulas once merged.
• Median dose 0.500%, third quartile 1.43%, heaviest single formula 5.56%. Strength is rated high, recommend smelling at 10% or less, substantivity 400 hours at 10% in DPG.
• The commercial reason it exists is regulatory. IFRA Amendment 49 caps oakmoss extracts at 0.10% in Category 4 (fine fragrance) and requires atranol and chloroatranol each below 100 ppm. This molecule has no standard in Amendment 49 at all.
• That restriction has clinical grounding: a "new oak moss" with reduced atranol and chloroatranol elicited significantly less contact dermatitis in 30 oakmoss-sensitive subjects, and it remains an allergen (Andersen et al. 2015).
• It and oakmoss absolute almost never appear together. 52 formulas use this, 37 use oakmoss absolute, and exactly 1 uses both. That is substitution, not partnership.
• The database occurrence field reads "not found in nature", and that field is wrong. A 2020 study obtained it as a secondary metabolite of the lichen Heterodermia hypoleuca (Mun et al. 2020).

About 8 minutes.

Why it was invented

Oakmoss absolute, from the lichen Evernia prunastri, has been a structural material of the chypre family for more than a century. The problem is two molecules inside it: atranol and chloroatranol.

IFRA Amendment 49 treats oakmoss extracts about as strictly as anything in the standard:

IFRA category	Oakmoss extracts	For comparison: benzyl salicylate
Category 1	0.020%	1.3%
Category 4 (fine fragrance)	0.10%	7.3%
Category 5A	0.076%	1.9%
Category 11A	0.10%	28%

A tenth of a percent in fine fragrance. Benzyl salicylate in the same category gets 7.3%, seventy-three times as much.

And the standard's own text says what the limit is for:

For Oakmoss and Treemoss extracts, the restrictions in the Standards are directly linked to the presence of Atranol and Chloroatranol in the finished products. To ensure that those remain below trace levels, the upper concentration levels have not been increased compared with the 2008 Amendment 43.

The specification adds that levels of atranol and chloroatranol should each be below 100 ppm in oakmoss extracts.

And atraric acid does not appear in the text of Amendment 49. No standard, no limit, no specification.

That gap is this material's market.

Does "new oak moss" actually work

The oakmoss side made its own attempt: a "new oak moss" with the atranol and chloroatranol washed out. Somebody tested whether that helps.

Andersen and colleagues compared two preparations of oakmoss absolute in Contact Dermatitis in 2015: "classic oak moss", the historically used preparation, and "new oak moss", with reduced contents of the major allergens.

The method is worth reading: randomised double-blinded repeated open application tests plus serial dilution patch tests, in 30 oakmoss-sensitive volunteers and 30 non-allergic controls.

The result: in both test models, new oak moss elicited significantly less allergic contact dermatitis in oakmoss-sensitive subjects than classic oak moss. The control subjects reacted to neither preparation.

Their conclusion stays careful: new oak moss is still a fragrance allergen, eliciting less allergic contact dermatitis in previously sensitised individuals, which suggests it is less allergenic to non-sensitised individuals.

Note the "still a fragrance allergen" half. The paper does not report a solved problem; it reports a risk reduced by an order of magnitude and not to zero. The IFRA cap on oakmoss was indeed not relaxed on the strength of it.

So a formulator has three routes: restricted oakmoss, new oak moss (governed by the same cap), or this unrestricted synthetic. The corpus shows most people take the third.

It and oakmoss almost never co-occur

This is something you can simply count. Across 954 formulas:

	Formulas
Use veramoss / evernyl	52
Use oakmoss absolute	37
Use both	1

Out of eighty-eight formulas, one puts both in.

That number says substitute rather than companion. Some materials are partners — rhodinol sits at a lift of 2.59 alongside phenethyl alcohol — and this pair is mutually exclusive.

Nobody stacks them for extra moss. It is one or the other.

Dosing: it belongs to the sparing group

Property	Value
Strength	high, recommend smelling at 10% or less
Substantivity	400 hours at 10% in DPG
Corpus appearances	52 / 954 (5.5%)
Median dose	0.500%
Third quartile	1.43%
Heaviest formula	5.56%

A median of half a percent. We built the ladder from strength label to dose: materials labelled high have a median dose of 0.80%, and materials labelled low sit at 5.78%. This one is at the low end even within the high group.

And those 400 hours were measured at a tenfold dilution. The record for oakmoss absolute reads 400 hours at 20% — the same persistence from half the concentration.

This is also why it causes trouble in other people's control tests. Someone chased the wrong suspect for a year over it: he was testing salicylates, and the bottle he had handled most that day was this one. A trace of a material dosed at 0.5% is still above threshold when it lands on skin.

That database field is wrong

The occurrence field for this material reads:

not found in nature

That field is wrong.

Mun and colleagues studied the anti-inflammatory activity of this molecule in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences in 2020, and their opening states that lichens, composite organisms resulting from the symbiotic association between fungi and algae, produce a variety of secondary metabolites with pharmacological activity; the study set out to investigate the anti-inflammatory activities of the secondary metabolite atraric acid produced by Heterodermia hypoleuca.

They got it out of a lichen. It occurs in nature, and it belongs to lichen chemistry in the first place — oakmoss is itself a lichen.

I can guess why the field is wrong, without evidence. The plausible reading: the material is purely synthetic in the fragrance trade, with no commercial natural source, and "no commercial natural source" became "not found in nature" at editing time. Those are two different statements.

This kind of field error is worth naming on its own. We've written about reading a datasheet: every field carries the intent of whoever filled it in, and that intent need not match the literal meaning of the column heading. An occurrence field often means "where it is sourced from commercially" rather than "whether it exists in nature".

(For the record, the Mun paper measures anti-inflammatory effects in cells and a mouse model, which has nothing to do with perfumery. I cite it only to establish the natural source.)

Physical properties

Property	Value
CAS	4707-47-5
Formula	C₁₀H₁₂O₄, MW 196.20
Appearance	white to pinkish yellow crystalline powder
Melting point	143 °C
Boiling point	246 °C
Flash point	182.8 °C
Water solubility	310.6 mg/L at 25 °C (estimated)
Shelf life	24 months or longer
Suppliers	40
GHS	H315 (causes skin irritation), H319 (causes serious eye irritation), H335 (may cause respiratory irritation)
Odour	mossy, oakmoss, woody, phenolic, earthy

A crystalline powder melting at 143 °C, which puts it at the high end among the materials this series has covered. It has to go into ethanol or DPG before you can use it, and if white particles turn up in your bottle, this class of material is a regular on the suspect list.

A flash point of 182.8 °C is generous for shipping and storage.

All three GHS statements are irritation, with no sensitisation statement among them. That inverts oakmoss's situation: oakmoss has an allergy problem and this has an irritation problem. Different mechanisms, and different precautions.

What this doesn't establish

I have not compared this against real oakmoss by smell. One comment collected in the database says the synthetic will never have the soft diffusiveness of nature's oak, which is one person's subjective assessment; I cannot verify it and have not written it as a conclusion.

"IFRA has no standard for this" is the result of searching the text of Amendment 49. No standard does not mean safe or unregulated — it may fall under other frameworks (EU cosmetics labelling requirements, for instance) and may be taken up in a future amendment. This describes the state of things in August 2026.

The 52-versus-37 comparison rests on an assumption: corpus material names are recorded as the original formulas wrote them, so if some formulas used a third trade name I did not merge (Atralone, Phenomoss, Mousse de Metra), 52 is an undercount. I merged only veramoss and evernyl.

"Only 1 uses both" is a fact about these 954 formulas, not proof of industry practice. 74% of the corpus comes from patents and published sources, and those formulas need not represent what is on shelves now.

The Andersen study tested 30 already-sensitised people. "Less allergenic to non-sensitised individuals" is an inference they draw from the result, not an endpoint the study measured directly. That paper also did not test this synthetic.

The Mun paper is cell and mouse anti-inflammatory work, and I use it only to establish the natural source. It says nothing about fragrance safety and cannot be used to claim this material is good for skin.

"The occurrence field means commercial source" is my speculation. I have no database editorial guideline to cite; that sentence offers a plausible explanation rather than a verified fact.

References

F. Andersen, K. H. Andersen, A. Bernois, et al., Reduced content of chloroatranol and atranol in oak moss absolute significantly reduces the elicitation potential of this fragrance material, Contact Dermatitis, 72(2), 75-83 (2015). PMID 25395354. doi:10.1111/cod.12312

S. K. Mun, K. Y. Kang, H. Y. Jang, et al., Atraric Acid Exhibits Anti-Inflammatory Effect in Lipopolysaccharide-Stimulated RAW264.7 Cells and Mouse Models, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21(19), 7070 (2020). PMID 32992840. doi:10.3390/ijms21197070

Related: his control test lied to him for a year, is this material still legal, reading a datasheet, the starter palette map.