Last updated on July 31, 2026 · Originally published March 16, 2017
If you have ever crushed a basil leaf between your fingers, you may have smelled ocimene. It turns up in mango skin, in fresh mint, in parsley, in the green edge of black pepper. Perfumers use it widely for its sweet, herbaceous character.
Some say the smell resembles that of wet cloth. Once somebody tells you that, it is difficult to smell anything else.
Ocimene is a term that represents a group of isomeric hydrocarbons. It shows up across the plant kingdom, and it shows up in cannabis, though not nearly as reliably as most of the other terpenes we cover.
Outside of cannabis, ocimene is commonly found in:
- Allspice
- Parsley
- Pepper
- Basil
- Mint
- Orchid
- Mangoes
- Kumquats
- Ho leaf
- Bergamot
- Lavender
- Petitgrain bigarade
Basil is the one that named it. The genus is Ocimum, and the terpene took its name from the plant.
Three forms, more or less
Ocimene is usually discussed in three forms: α-ocimene, (Z)-β-ocimene and (E)-β-ocimene. Alpha and beta differ in where one double bond sits along the chain, and in α-ocimene that bond is at the end. The two beta forms differ instead in the arrangement around a different double bond. You will see them written as cis and trans, though Z and E are the more precise labels. Further stereoisomers are on record beyond these three, so the usual list is a convention rather than a complete inventory.
They are found naturally as mixtures, and separately too. All ocimenes are oils that emit a pleasant, herbaceous aroma, and that scent of sweet herbs is why ocimene is used in so many perfumes.
It is also close kin to myrcene. Both are acyclic monoterpenes, both share the formula C₁₀H₁₆, and the two are structural isomers of one another. They share a weakness too. Both are readily oxidized once they meet air.
Ocimene is unstable in air, insoluble in water, but soluble in common organic solvents.
The numbers
Molecular formula: C₁₀H₁₆ Molecular weight: 136.24 g/mol Density: approximately 0.80 g/mL (800 kg/m³) Boiling point: approximately 175–178°C at atmospheric pressure Flash point: approximately 56–57°C Percent composition: C 88.16%, H 11.84%
Treat those figures as approximate. “Ocimene” may refer to a single isomer or to a mixture, and reported values shift depending on which. Melting point is the worst offender. A figure of 50°C circulates widely, including in earlier versions of this page, and it cannot be right, because ocimene is a liquid at room temperature. What the correct value is for ocimene as a group is not well established, so we no longer publish one.
Ocimene in cannabis
Some commercial cannabis cultivars have tested relatively high in ocimene. Strawberry Cough, Space Queen, Golden Goat, Chernobyl, OG Kush, Lemon Sour Diesel, and Elwyn are all cultivars in which individual samples have reportedly come back from the lab showing high levels.
Those are individual results, not guarantees. In one controlled study, two cultivars were grown side by side and harvested the same day. (E)-β-ocimene came in at 50 micrograms per gram in one of them and fell below the limit of detection in the other. Not low. Absent, as far as the instrument could tell. That shows how sharply ocimene can differ between cultivars, and it is a good reminder that a strain name is not a promise about what is in the jar.
The plant is not making it by accident. In a 2017 study, researchers functionally characterized nine terpene synthases from Cannabis sativa, and one of them produced (E)-β-ocimene directly.
Plants do not produce it for us, either. In some plant systems, damaged leaves release β-ocimene and neighboring plants respond to it. In honeybees, (E)-β-ocimene works as a brood pheromone involved in regulating the colony. It is a message before it is a scent.
Why it is easily lost
Ocimene is one of the more volatile compounds in the cannabis terpene profile. Drying takes some. Curing takes more. Storage keeps taking it.
Heat takes its share as well, though not all of it. In one comparison of smoke and vapor produced from the same cannabis material, cis-ocimene was still detectable in both. Vapor held onto somewhat more of it than smoke did, and the sharper difference was that the smoke also carried a range of pyrolysis products the vapor did not. So the advantage of vaporizing is real but modest, and it is better described as less damage rather than no damage.
There is a testing wrinkle here too. A certificate of analysis usually reports one ocimene number, but there is more than one ocimene, and the isomers are known to be difficult to separate cleanly under standard conditions. That single figure is summarizing more than it looks like it is.
What the studies actually tested
Editor’s note: the summary that follows is retained from the original 2017 article. A closer reading of the three studies it cites is given immediately below.
There have been a couple of studies that show the benefits of ocimene oils and promote terpene education. One study showed that ocimene is effective in suppressing production of inflammatory cytokines including interleukin (IL)-1beta, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha, and IL-6. In another study, the Ferulago carduchorum essential oil was used to study the reaction to Candida albicans. The study concluded that ocimene was toxic, proving that it had antifungal properties. In the last study, the essential oil of Laurus nobilis was studied in relation to the SARS virus. A major constituent of the oil was found to be ocimene. This study concluded that ocimene had antiviral properties.
All three of those studies tested whole essential oils. None of them tested ocimene on its own.
The antiviral work is the clearest example. A 2008 analysis of oils from seven Lebanese plants found that oil distilled from Laurus nobilis berries inhibited SARS-CoV replication in cell culture, with an IC₅₀ of 120 µg/ml. β-Ocimene was one of four main constituents in that oil, sitting alongside 1,8-cineole and both pinenes, and there was a good deal else in there besides. The researchers drew no conclusion about ocimene specifically, because they never isolated it.
The anti-inflammatory result comes from Citrus unshiu flower oil, where ocimene shared the mixture with limonene, terpinene and the pinenes.
The antifungal study is the most interesting of the three, and not in the way the original summary suggests. That Ferulago carduchorum oil was 43.3% (Z)-β-ocimene, making ocimene the dominant constituent by a wide margin. Against Candida albicans it returned a minimum inhibitory concentration of 2340 µg/ml. But more than forty compounds were identified in that oil, including 18.23% α-pinene. Even a mixture that ocimene-rich cannot tell us what the ocimene did on its own.
So the honest version is narrower than what we published in 2017. Studies of essential oils containing ocimene have reported:
- Anti-inflammatory activity
- Antifungal activity
- Antiviral activity
What isolated ocimene does in a body is, for the most part, still an open question.
A direct test, but only in insects
A 2025 paper paired cannabis extract with individual terpenes against a laboratory insect colony. β-Caryophyllene worked with the extract and made it stronger. E-ocimene worked against it, and more so as the dose climbed. The combination-index values reported for that pairing run from 1.60 to 4.80, where anything above 1 counts as antagonism: the mixture did worse than the two treatments would have been expected to manage separately.
That is an insect assay, and it says nothing direct about people. But it is a documented case of a terpene making a cannabis preparation less effective, which is not how the entourage effect usually gets told. As with limonene, this is being worked out one pairing at a time, and the pairings do not all point the same way.
Ocimene is easy to smell and easy to lose. It is much harder to credit with anything on its own. Sitting inside an oil that works is not the same as being the reason it works, and sitting beside cannabinoids is no guarantee of helping them along. That is roughly where terpene science gets interesting, and it is a long way past where the simple claims stop. For how these compounds are grouped, measured and named, see our guide to cannabis terpenes.
Reviewed by Nani Frenkel, Chief Editor
Last updated July 31, 2026 · Originally published March 16, 2017
Research for this article was compiled using DeepWeed, T&T’s cannabis research database — explore the underlying studies there.
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