Is Mugwort a Top, Middle or Base Note? What the Data Allows

The shop page lists mugwort oil as a middle note, and that is the answer we give. It is a convention rather than a measurement, and the published data shows why no single position can be derived: oils sold as mugwort have been reported at two very different ends of the volatility scale, one dominated by molecules that boil near 176 to 209 C and another dominated by molecules that boil near 256 C. Which one a bottle resembles is a question for its GC-MS report, which our published COA does not contain.

Mugwort Essential Oil bottle

Mugwort Essential Oil

Our own Mugwort Essential Oil, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.

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What the pyramid is and is not

The three-tier scheme is usually traced to W. A. Poucher, who listed fragrance materials in order of volatility and gave them evaporation coefficients from 1 to 100: top notes 1 to 14, middle notes 15 to 60, base notes 61 to 100 (as reported in the Wikipedia article on perfumery notes, which cites Poucher, Poucher's Perfumes, Cosmetics and Soaps, vol. 2, 9th ed., 1993; the book itself was not read). Two things follow from that origin. The scale ranks single materials, not blends. And it is a ranking, so the cut points between tiers are a teaching convention.

Working perfumers' writing is blunter. Victoria of Bois de Jasmin (2011) calls the tidy pyramid "a myth as it pertains to modern fragrances", says most contemporary fragrances are not built in that style, and says the note list on a bottle is "heavily driven by marketing considerations" (Bois de Jasmin, 2011). Treat the tier as a rough prediction of what is lost first from a strip, not as a property of the oil.

Volatility does carry information, though. A 2015 chemical engineering study measured fragrance release from a dipropylene glycol matrix and found that Henry's constants of single compounds correlated with those of 2-, 3- and 4-ingredient mixtures (r² 0.998, 0.997 and 0.996) (Costa et al., 2015). That is a simple matrix with at most four ingredients, so it supports ordering by pure-compound volatility without covering a 50-ingredient perfume.

The molecules, and the numbers that disagree

These are constituents reported in mugwort oils in the literature. PubChem lists several sources for each and the sources do not always agree.

CompoundBoiling pointVapor pressure
1,8-Cineole176 C (CRC Handbook, 95th ed.)1.90 mmHg at 25 C (HSDB)
Thujone200 to 201 C at 760 mmHg (a flavor database cited by PubChem)none listed
Camphor204 C (ICSC) to 209 C (Merck Index, 2013); sublimes27 Pa at 20 C, about 0.20 mmHg (ICSC), and 0.65 mmHg at 25 C (a 1960 sublimation-pressure paper)
Beta-caryophyllene256 to 259 C at 760 mmHg (flavor database, JECFA 256 C)none listed

Source: PubChem compound records for 1,8-cineole (CID 2758), thujone (CID 261491), camphor (CID 2537) and caryophyllene (CID 5281515), read 28 October 2026. Camphor's two vapor pressures differ by more than threefold, and one of them comes from a sublimation paper, so the table gives both rather than choosing. The caryophyllene and thujone entries have no vapor pressure at all. These are pure-compound values, not statements about an oil. Camphor is also a solid that sublimes (PubChem quotes the CRC Handbook: it "sublimes at boiling point"), so it leaves a strip by a different route from a liquid, one more reason a tier read off a boiling point alone is rough. Mixing adds another layer: in an ideal mixture (Raoult's law, which the Costa et al. model also builds on, with corrections) a compound's partial pressure falls in proportion to its share of the blend, and real blends deviate from ideal, which is why a smell strip tells you more than the table.

Arithmetic shows how far apart the ends are. By the listed vapor pressures, 1,8-cineole (1.90 mmHg) is about 17 times more volatile at 25 C than linalyl acetate (0.111 mmHg), a clary sage constituent used here only as a yardstick. And a boiling point 80 C higher for caryophyllene than for cineole (256 against 176) is a far larger gap than any between neighbouring tiers.

Same name, different shelf

Literature on A. vulgaris oil shows how much the label name covers. A 2019 study of leaves from a botanical garden in Brazil, hydrodistilled, reported caryophyllene 37.45%, germacrene D 16.17% and humulene 13.66%, with no monoterpene hydrocarbons detected (Malik et al., 2019). Those three sesquiterpenes sum to 67.3%. A review table covering other origins lists oils rich in camphor, 1,8-cineole and myrcene: Italian oils with myrcene 9 to 70% and 1,8-cineole 1 to 27%, French oils with camphor 1 to 13% and 1,8-cineole 1 to 23% (Ekiert et al., 2020), and the review says the high diversity and differing test methods make it difficult to indicate one profile.

A second species shows the same pattern. Chinese mugwort (Artemisia argyi) oils from Austrian-grown plants had 1,8-cineole 32 to 42%, camphor 12 to 14% and borneol 10 to 12% (Chizzola and Gansinger, 2023), so those three alone make 54 to 68% of the oil. Place the Brazilian profile and the Austrian one on the table above and they fall on opposite sides of 200 C.

That is the practical reading. A monoterpene-rich mugwort oil would be expected to leave a strip sooner, a sesquiterpene-rich one later, and both are sold as mugwort oil. The label's Latin name and the batch paperwork should name the same species, and the species is only part of the answer (see the label-reading post). The COA we publish for its batch reports a relative density of 0.895 and a refractive index of 1.4750, with no constituent data; neither number is a volatility measure, so the COA cannot place the oil on the pyramid. We cannot say which of these profiles a given bottle resembles and have no GC-MS figure to offer. A buyer who needs one should ask in writing before ordering and get the answer in writing.

Judging it yourself

Reasoning from the above, not from any test of ours: smell a strip at fixed times and write each time down, rather than trusting a tier. Run a reference you already know on a second strip, one fast material and one slow one, so you can see what your own nose calls early and late. Do it with the oil diluted for the strip, and keep it off skin. A strip is not application: our copy says to dilute to 0.5% to 2% in a carrier for skin and patch test first, and IFRA's thujone standard caps thujone at 0.095% of a Category 5A body product, which for a 2% oil means 4.75% thujone at most (IFRA, 51st Amendment, 2024). Our oil's thujone is unpublished. Our copy also says to avoid use during pregnancy and to keep it from children and pets.

When the strip tells you it is a middle-tier material for you, build on that: see the pairing guide and the perfumery post, and for the aroma description the smell profile.

Mugwort Essential Oil bottle

Mugwort Essential Oil

Mugwort Essential Oil from our own shop, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.

From $16.99

Shop Now →

Sources & Further Reading