Tobacco in the oil houses: dry leaf, sweet pipe, boozy cabin

Tobacco in this library is not one smell but three, and the note list usually gives away which one is on offer before the family tag does. The tobacco page sits in the Tobacco and Boozy family and is carried by 168 fragrances, with eight recurring companions: patchouli, amber, musk, vanilla, leather, oakmoss, labdanum and cedar. That range runs from dried leaf on damp ground to caramel and cocoa, which is why "tobacco perfume" is close to useless as a search term on its own.

The three houses below are all recorded as oil houses, which matters for a note this heavy. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, founded in 2000 by Elizabeth Moriarty Barrial and Brian Constantine, hand-blends into coconut or jojoba bases rather than alcohol. Alkemia Perfumes, started in 2009 by Sharra Lamoureaux in Western Massachusetts, runs an alcohol-free line. Nui Cobalt Designs has made perfume oils in Columbus, Ohio since 2012 under founder Forest Nui Cobalt, who describes each batch as "charged under optimal astrological conditions".

Dry leaf: tobacco filed as a green note

The driest treatment sets tobacco next to moss and soil and adds nothing sweet at all. Goose Turd Green Dragon lists pale lichen, damp soil, fig sap, crushed fern, patchouli root, oakmoss, tobacco and vetiver, and the library files it earthy, green and woody. No vanilla, no honey and no smoke appear anywhere in it. At $33 it is currently out of stock, which is worth knowing before anyone goes looking.

Alkemia takes the same approach in Feu Follet (Swamp Fairy), where the maker writes "Tobacco Leaf" rather than tobacco and places it between oakmoss, leatherleaf, leather and wet mud, with artemisia, caraway and bog rosemary above. Families: earthy, herbal, woody. The leaf is doing the work of a bitter green note here, not a comfort note.

That leather pairing is not a coincidence. Tobacco appears among leather's most frequent companions and leather among tobacco's, the only one of the four notes discussed here where the relationship runs both ways.

Sweet pipe: cocoa, caramel, and the word on the label

The gourmand camp changes almost nothing about the tobacco and everything about its neighbours. Wenge Dragon is wood ash, cocoa, tobacco, patchouli root, hemlock needles and ancient bark: woody, smoky, gourmand, with a single cocoa note carrying the whole gourmand tag. It is $33 and also out of stock at present.

The Beautiful and the Damned is the fuller version of the idea, and it is the one fragrance here where the maker qualifies the material: "Blonde Tobacco", surrounded by honey caramel, cocoa, vanilla, redcurrant, champagne aldehydes, cubeba pepper, opoponax, guaiac wood and copaiba balsam. Filed gourmand, amber, spicy. The qualifier is the signal: a maker who writes blonde is pointing at the hay-sweet end of the leaf, and the formula around it confirms the direction.

Two numbers are worth setting side by side. Vanilla is fourth on tobacco's list of frequent companions despite being carried by 600 fragrances, so that pairing is genuinely strong rather than a statistical artefact of vanilla being everywhere. Honey, by contrast, is carried by 150 fragrances and does not make tobacco's top eight at all; its own regular company is vanilla, amber, patchouli, musk, ambergris, sandalwood, labdanum and rose. Honeyed tobacco has a bigger reputation than its actual frequency supports, which makes the few blends that do it, like the Alkemia above, more distinctive than they sound.

The boozy edge: hooch, embers and a cabin

The third camp is the autumn one. The Conjure Man's Cabin is built as a place rather than an accord: pinyon in the fireplace, ancient leather, copal, vetiver, mud, hay, potent spices simmering, twisted roots hung from the rafters, top shelf hooch, pipe tobacco, Appalachian wilderness. The library reads it as woody, earthy and boozy, and the booze is listed before the tobacco, which is the correct order for how the thing is composed.

Alongside it, Watching the Sun Glow at $31 takes the fireside half without the drink: leaves, earth, smoky birch tar, beeswax, embers, guaiac wood, tobacco, woody myrrh, labdanum and glowing russet amber, filed earthy, smoky and amber. Birch tar and beeswax around tobacco is the closest thing in this set to a bonfire, and it is in stock.

The near neighbours with no tobacco in them

Tobacco's reputation rests on four things it is not: hay, leather, dried fruit and spirits. Several fragrances assemble those without the leaf, which is useful for anyone who finds tobacco notes ashy or cloying.

• Bibliotheca lists leatherbound books, plush club chairs, vinyl records, polished mahogany, fountain pen ink, black tea, plum brandy, vetiver and tweedy woolens. Animalic, woody, earthy, and the reading most people call a tobacco room.
• Evil Temptress does the sweet half with hay, pears soaked in honey cognac, tonka bean, caramel, leather and cardamom-infused patchouli.
• Esprit de la Terre runs birchbark, cedar, Earl Grey tea, leather, oakmoss and ambergris: the dry, earthy side.
• Black Licorice, The Vampire Lestat and Long Face, both $36, cover the boozy and the animalic ends, the first with champagne, plum and rosin, the second with greasepaint, sweat and frankincense.

For browsing the rest, there is everything carrying tobacco, tobacco in the gourmand family for the pipe-and-cocoa group, and tobacco in stock under $35 when the point is to try rather than commit.

Where to start

• The Conjure Man's Cabin, 1 ml $4.75 or 5 ml $19.95. The boozy cabin version, and the cheapest way into this note anywhere in the library.
• Watching the Sun Glow, $31. For readers who want leaves, tar and embers with no sweetness listed at all.
• The Beautiful and the Damned, 5 ml extrait $20. The sweet pipe treatment, blonde tobacco under caramel and cocoa, for anyone who came looking for tobacco vanilla.