A fragrant chemical compound that gives caraway seeds and spearmint their characteristic spicy-minty smell and taste.
From Latin 'careum' (caraway) combined with the chemical suffix '-one' (indicating a ketone group). It was first isolated from caraway essential oil in the 19th century.
Carvone is one of nature's most useful flavor molecules—the R-form smells like spearmint while the S-form smells like caraway, even though they're identical molecules! This mirror-image difference (called chirality) shows how chemistry can create completely different experiences from the same atoms.
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