Terpene Library
Learn about the aromatic compounds that shape each strain
Bisabolol is chamomile — the tea, and the smell of it steeping. It comes from only two notable sources, chamomile and the Brazilian candeia tree, which makes it the most narrowly sourced terpene we list. In cannabis it's soft, sweet and faintly floral, and easy to miss under louder company.
Geraniol is rose. It's the molecule behind rose oil and geranium, it's what citronella candles are built on, and it's the sweet note in some pipe tobaccos. In cannabis it's rare and immediately recognisable: a jar that smells faintly of a flower shop.
Nerolidol is bark and blossom at the same time. It's in neroli — orange blossom — as well as jasmine, ginger and lemongrass, and it smells like fresh-cut wood with something floral behind it. In cannabis it usually works as a background note, giving depth rather than character.
Camphene smells like a damp forest floor: fir needles, wet wood, a trace of camphor underneath. It gets confused with myrcene constantly, and honestly the two are easy to mix up in a jar — camphene is the colder, sharper of the pair.
If you've smelled a fresh hop flower, you've smelled humulene. It's named after *Humulus lupulus*, the hop vine, and it's a good part of why cannabis and beer smell like cousins. Sage and ginseng carry it as well. In a jar it's dry, woody and a little bitter.
Ocimene is the sweet, almost tropical note in mint, basil and parsley — and in orchids, which is the tell. It's a smell plants make to be attractive. In cannabis it reads sweet and green at once, sitting on top of a profile rather than underneath it.
Walk into a pine forest and the first thing that hits you is pinene. It's the most common terpene in the natural world — not just conifers but rosemary, basil, dill, parsley. In a jar it reads sharp and green, the smell of something just cut.
Terpinolene is the hard one to pin down, because it doesn't smell like a single thing. There's apple in it, and lilac, and something sharper underneath closer to nutmeg or cumin. It's the terpene that makes a strain smell complicated rather than simply fruity or piney.