Tangerine Oil

#### Tangerine Oil. While **Mandarin Peel Oil **(see this monograph) is well known and is produced on a fairly large scale, the peel oil of the closely related **Tangerine **is a comparatively rare oil. The tangerine tree, **Citrus Reticulata**, grows in Florida, Texas and California (U.S.A.), and is actually the American variety of the East Asian **Mandarin**. The tangerine has recently been introduced in Guinea, West Africa. Small amounts of oil are produced there by hand ("écuelle" method, or "spoon scraping method"). Algeria produces a machine pressed mandarin oil. The tangerine is much larger than the mandarin, almost globoid, and its peel is usually yellow or pale yellow to reddish. It is cultivated mostly for sale as a whole fruit and for the canning of cleaned sections. **Tangerine**** ****Oil**** **is machine pressed from the peel of the ripe fruit in the canning factories. The oil is orange colored, mobile and with a fresh, sweet odor, reminiscent of bitter orange and of Valencia orange oil, rather than of mandarin oil. It completely lacks the characteristic dryness and "perfumery" notes of mandarin oil, and it is also much "thinner" in body. **Tangerine Oil**** **can not be used as a replacement for mandarin oil in perfumery or flavor work. It constitutes a particular citrus note, but it is not sufficiently characteristic to become very interesting. It is used to some degree as a modifier in colognes, as a topnote material in aldehydic perfumes, etc. In flavors, it is a popular modifier (in the U.S.A.) for orange and lemon-lime combination flavors. As a "five-fold" concentrate or similar concentrated (evaporated) oil, it is used in candy flavors, soft drink flavors, ice cream flavors, etc. The peculiar "fishy" amine note of freshly expressed mandarin oil (probably due to a nitrogen compound derived from the anthranilates in this oil) is never present in tangerine oil. The latter may not contain any anthranilates at all. Annual production of American tangerine oil is now over 10 metric tons, but the oil may only become more popular if the growers succeed in producing fruits with closer resemblance to the mandarin fruit.