Nigella (black cumin / love-in-a-mist) seed oil has a distinctive dry, peppery-spicy aroma with green herbaceous facets and a faintly nutty, earthy undertone. Cumin-adjacent warmth appears in the heart, softening into a mild woody-oily background. Overall dry, slightly bitter and unusual rather than sweet.AI · claude-opus-4-7
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Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin, page 273.
Oil of Nigella Damascena is a yellowish liquid.
The oil has a peculiar and intensely sweet-fruity, nauseating and somewhat unpleasant odor when freshly distilled. After proper ageing, it shows a very pleasant dryout of a peculiar winy or brandy-like character, reminiscent of ambrette seed oil, cognac oil, decyl propionate and certain higher esters of anthranilic acid or N-methyl anthranilic acid.
The flavor of the oil is sweet and distinctly fruity, but also perfumey unless the oil is diluted to a point only slightly above the Minimum Perceptible which is 0.02 to 0.06 mg.
Nigella Damascena Oil can be used in perfumery, not only for lipstick perfumes where it produces interesting modifications of the conventional strawberry-peach-pineapple type of fruity perfumes, but also in many floral bases, e.g. gardenia, honeysuckle, jasmin, lilac, neroli, etc.
The seeds of Nigella Damascena are occasionally steam distilled to yield an essential oil.