Cinnamon Leaf Oil

#### Cinnamon Leaf Oil. This oil is steam distilled locally from partly dried leaves and twigs of **Cinnamomum**** ****Zeylanicum**, the same tree which yields the Ceylon cinnamon bark (see previous monograph). The tree grows wild, and is cultivated in Ceylon, South India, Indonesia, Indochina and in the Seychelles, a tiny island group midway between Zanzibar (east Africa) and Ceylon. Recently, small scale distillation has commenced in Zanzibar, too. The main producing centers are Ceylon (south) and the Seychelles. In Madagascar and the nearby Comoro Islands, small quantities of a good cinnamon bark are produced, and occasionally the leaves are distilled on the spot. During the recent years of steep decline in the clove leaf oil price, however, there has been less interest in the production of cinnamon leaf oil. The two oils both contain about 80 to 90% eugenol, and the cheapest oil will serve as a starting material for the isolation of this important perfume material. Eugenol, isolated from different natural oils, displays certain small variations in odor type. Due to its fresher note, eugenol from **Bay Leaf Oil **(see monograph) has recently become more popular than eugenol from clove leaf oil or from cinnamon leaf oil. If isolated in a gas chromatograph column, all the eugenols would smell exactly alike, but traces of "impurities" (those which "create odor and natural nuances", the perfumer would say) result in different types of eugenols when these are isolated on a large scale. Since **Cinnamon Leaf Oil **is now more expensive than clove leaf oil, the latter presents a possible means of adulteration for cinnamon leaf oil. The two oils are produced in rather primitive stills (some of the Seychelles installations are, however, quite good: of large capacity and fairly up-to-date design), and being produced in neighboring areas, there is always a strong possibility of "coupage" ("cutting" of the cinnamon leaf oil with clove leaf oil). Apart from that, only the usual crude diluents, such as alcohol, fuel oil, kerosene, petroleum, etc., might come into consideration. **Cinnamon Leaf Oil **is a yellow to brownish- yellow oil of warm-spicy, but rather harsh odor, lacking the rich body of the bark oil. It has some resemblance to the odor of clove leaf oil and clove stem oil. The flavor is somewhat bitter, slightly pungent, irritant-burning, but very spicy and powerful. The oil is used in perfumery for its spicy notes and its warm and woody-Oriental type. In the chemical industry, it is used for the isolation of eugenol (from which again vanillin and other derivatives are produced), and in flavors, as a modifier in spice blends, as a "warm" note in certain fruit essences, e.g. cherry, raspberry and prune, in chocolate and liqueur flavors, in soft drinks and candy, etc. It blends well with benzaldehyde, anisaldehyde, anisalcohol, vanillin, ethylvanillin (so-called), peppermint oil, nonanolide and undecanolide, many glycidates, ion-ones (and ionone-glycidates), cinnamic alcohol, etc. The annual world production of cinnamon leaf oil is, as mentioned, somewhat dependent upon the demand for eugenol and the production of clove leaf oil. An average of 150 metric tons of **Cinnamon Leaf Oil **is estimated. Up to 90 tons annually has been produced in the Seychelles alone.