Elizabeth Arden Green Tea: fragrance review & story

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea is one of Francis Kurkjian's timeless success stories, which built his reputation for effortless light diaphanous fragrances, in turn setting the record for his own Maison Francis Kurkdjian creations that sparkle and trail like gauze in the morning sun. Yet Green Tea is a case where one perfumer imitates another. 

 pic via pinterest

The sophisticated and intellectual Jean Claude Ellena created L'Eau Parfumée first as a room spray for Bvlgari boutiques in Rome in the 1990s, and as a stand alone fragrance around the world later. He came up with it while playing with Iso E Super and jasmine chords, creating an original accord that he called "green tea." He states so in his writings, that he chose the name because he was impressed by the Japanese green tea ceremony. He wanted to recreate that feeling of comforting serenity, that precious luxury, the one of seemingly endless time. Or at the very least of meaningful time. He was mindful before mindfulness was a thing. 

Ozonic with a green bamboo note, and lemon accords that do not bring images of classic Eau de Cologne, thanks to its green grassy shade, Green Tea takes you because of its name in the highlands of Darjeeling and Sikkim, on the backs of elephants. It perfectly makes me at once calm down and feel like the draining energy of intense heat is not a worrisome burden anymore. There is the promise of spice and botanical stuff but it's just that – a hint, a soupçon of a taunt, never fully materialized. It remains cool and collected, not passionate.

Delicate, fresh, drumming like light percussion, airy and tonic, Green Tea by Elizabeth Arden is welcome coolness in the heat, which is much appreciated for casual occasions and daytime. But if you're the type of person to eschew evening fragrances in the summer months, this could easily fit in your wardrobe.

It's also a startlingly good steal on online stores, demanding very little. 

Fragrance notes for Elizabeth Arden Green Tea:

Top notes are Lemon, Bergamot, Mint, Orange Peel and Rhubarb

Middle notes are Jasmine, Oakmoss, Fennel, Musk, Carnation and White Amber

Base notes are Green Tea, Jasmine, Oakmoss, Musk, Celery Seeds, Caraway, Cloves and Amber

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Roger & Gallet Bois d'Orange: fragrance review

 The house of Roger & Gallet presented Bois d'Orange built from fresh accords of citruses and the warm nuances and strength of wood several years ago, but it's still in production, perfect for warmer weather. The fragrance invites for a long and pleasant walk in the garden of Andalusia, among alleys of fragrant oranges. It's the vibrant and sunny freshness of leaves, combined with orange blossom and the scent of fruits to regenerate the aura and give pleasure to each user.

It was the scent I turned to after I gave birth, mostly using the luxurious soaps and shower gel formulations.

The top notes of Bois d'Orange introduce mandarin, basil, and lemon verbena, a fresh and encouraging scent of citrusy-green aromas. The heart brings us orange blossom and neroli, while the base adds strong and warm amber, rosewood, and cedar.

It's hard to parse the scent into all those notes and components; there is a uniformity of feel-good vibes which are derived by the stalwart luminosity of the neroli and verbena. It only opens up on warmer days, giving a more woody aspect in cold weather, but when the sun is high in the sky it blooms and reveals its happy facets that come tumbling down from a bowl of just-picked fruit someplace warm and casual. No wonder I sought this scent when I was at my most vulnerable.

The fragrance is available in the characteristic packaging of the house of Roger & Gallet. Besides the fragrance Bois d'Orange, an accompanying body care line with the same aromas was introduced. It includes luxurious soaps, which made this house famous.

 

This woody aromatic fragrance was created for women as well as for men and I find no fault with either wearing it on any occasion that calls for some optimism and feeling good about oneself.

Bois d'Orange originally launched in 2009 and continues to be in production after all these years.

 The finer, nonalcoholic Eau Parfumée version can be worn in the sun, making it perfect for summer. It's part of the Eaux Parfumées line in frosted glass bottles.

Please note there is also an edition with golden shimmer, the Bois d'Orange Eau Sublime Or, but this is a different interpretation with a lactonic component reminiscent of suntan lotion, with salicylates enhancing the floral facet. It's obviously made for summertime with the idea that some golden shimmer enhances one's tan. This one would be more appreciated by the ladies, I presume.

Milano Fragranze Naviglio: fragrance review

 Finding one's perfect soapy fragrance is a question of defining the scent of soap in the first place. Will it be the classic Camay and Lux soap of yesteryear, which smelled of roses and aldehydes? Will it be the original Dove with its iris-musk aura or its newer iterations with fruits and coconut? Are we talking about chamomile and the botanical smells of pine and lavender, perhaps of jasmine and flowers, allied to powerful powdery aspects, or are we concentrating on fatty aldehydes known from Aleppo and Marseilles soap which smell like clean laundry on a line? I'm personally quite fond of the latter, to be honest.

The promise of Marseilles soap, in its own particular way both sweetish and fatty-acrid, is strikingly fulfilled in Naviglio by Italian niche brand Milano Fragranze. It does smell soapy, really soapy-smelling! The perfect scent for capturing summer cleanliness, but also great for year-round, when you want to project that pristine white, bright impression that is deliriously happy, like lily of the valley bells peaking through the grass on a warm day.

Although we're prepared by the brand for a marine fragrance, with the mention of the canals outside Milan, the aquatic notes here are not the sort met at the seafront, salty and/or with whiffs of organic matter decomposing. In Naviglio, they instead recall the clean ambiance of a humidifier, the lovely sweetish scent of water ponds, and dewiness on a climbing ivy. This effect reminds me of two quirky little scents, Rem by Reminiscence and Ivy by the Fragrance Library (Demeter). It's captured perfectly here, and alongside the soap, it creates a charming, easy-to-wear fragrance. 

Bonus points for its incredibly long-lasting quality. It radiated on my skin for the full 12-hour mark!

Jul Et Mad Aqua Sextius: fragrance review

The shady, cloistered Cour Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence hides a treasure trove of small cafes to challenge even Athens. But it is the seemingly endless array of fountains that belies the connection with my city of dwelling. The palpable coolness and crispness of water spray in the air are solace in the hot summer months, the ivy clad building where Chez Feraud gets its business, the birthhouse of the painter Cezanne transformed into a small museum, the parade of students resting their bikes by the bottle green hitching posts on the street a buzzing beehive of life… A slice of that joyous life is caught in Aqua Sextius, launched by Jul et Mad last March during the Excence scent exhibition in Milan.

via

Aqua Sextius is the latest opus by Cecile Zarokian, a perfumer that shapes up to become a force to be reckoned with in the niche perfume sector. I have enjoyed her Amouage Epic for the ladies, exhibiting a gift for plushness that doesn't drag by impenetrable density. Her portfolio includes fragrances for Jovoy, Laboratorio Olfactivo and MDCI Perfumes, and also other even more esoteric or fledging brands which I admit haven't really explored (but am open to all the same!). The latest composition she submitted to the real life binational couple of "Jul et Mad" (Julien Blanchard and Madalina Stoica-Blanchard) who have based their brand onto their real life romance, told chapter by chapter, fragrance by fragrance, is wildly different from the thing I expected before checking out the press description.
Although Aqua predisposes one for "water", my mind reeled more into the "Eau" French counterpart that usually denotes a light and limpid citrus & herbs composition inspired by the time-honored eau de cologne recipe bequest from the 18th century onwards. Boy, as I wrong in assuming.

Aqua Sextius by Jul et Mad comes across as indeed an "aquatic" and if there's one genre which the current perfumista micro- world hasn't quite forgiven the 1990s (the median perfumista's budding years, I suppose therefore dismissed for being naive?) it is "marine" fragrances.
This is mainly a fault of the relative blandness of the blends, the impression of chilling silence before a piercing battle cry (that'd be the 2000s uber-sweet gourmands that'd risk giving cavities even by osmosis) rather than the smell of water bodies and the sea that aquatic fragrances in vain tried to approximate. As a consequence of perfumers not being entirely able to catch the nuance seascape into a predetermined "chord" or "note", a couple of aces up their sleeves became olfactory code for "aquatic", realism be damned: Calone, the smell of cut melon, dewy and too sweet to stand for convincing water but wildly propaged such as in CK Escape; violet nitriles, giving the damp and juicy impression of sliced cucumbers and dewy violet leaves (a successful example in Eau de Cartier); dihydromyrcenol, a metallic citrus-lavender molecule with a side of dish wash cleaner, famously enshrined to public consciousness in Davidoff's Cool water and its prolific spawn. Unless you'd been told (or had been suggested to by images of sea & river spray via advertising and packaging) you'd hardly pick "water" or "sea" to describe those notes. No matter, they're part of semiotics.

The duo of Julien and Madalina (the Jul et Mad of the company's brand name) apparently asked Zarokian for a fragrance that'd replicate their meeting in Aix-en-Provence (the Latin name of consul Gaius Sextius reflected in the later Germanic-rooted Aix): the fountains, the buzz of warm weather insects, the countryside, the romance of Southern France. One tends to forget it, rapped up into the Parisian sophistication perpetuated for public consumption, but France is a Mediterranean country, a significant part of its shores bathed in the azure of Mare Nostrum. But as mentioned above, catching that elusive scent is supremely difficult. Aqua Sextius instead turns to mint and a hint of eucalyptus to give a fresh green piquancy reminiscent of the "city of 100 fountains" as Aix-en-Provence is famed as, a slice of cedar woodiness and musky amber diffusive elements, the "marine" part reminding me of dihydromyrcenol (thankfully sans Calone). "The market has homogenized tastes and the crisis hasn't really changed that; people turn to   what is already familiar", comments Vincent Gregoire, trend watcher and the Nelly Rodi lifestyle director. Maybe is this a reason behind using such a familiar "note" in a celestial fragrance that comes from a niche brand?  It could be. It could also be a personal bet that Cecile Zarokian put herself in for; it's not easy to divest a popular trope of its signs and view it anew. I don't know what to make of it, really but at least I can see where Zarokian is coming from.

The fragrance's shade, an inviting aqua (bit bluer than the green depicted above in real life) that I'd love to include in my summery chiffon blouses arsenal, is one of those cases that the coloring of the juice is supremely matched to the olfactory impression rendered.

High marks to Jul et Mad for offering several options of packaging in even really small sizes for perfumephiles to cut their teeth onto, such as the 20ml black glass Compagon atomiser and the 5ml Love Dose miniatures.

Sophisticated, Fresh or Dirty? Three Fragrance Genres

"
It isn’t just the likes of Byredo, L’Artisan or Serge Lutens that are experimenting with perfumes packed with dark mystery, even Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent are jumping onto the oud bandwagon with their recent launches. The arguments being offered for this trend are that fragrance has always been divided into two camps: French (floral, girly, sophisticated, subtle) or American (fresh, upfront, clean). But there is a third camp: sexy, dirty, animalistic, darker… And the niche perfume houses have catered to this third camp." [source]

via http://theblacknarcissus.files.wordpress.com

One might even argue that these divides are not so neatly divided as that! In fact the author of the quote, Vir Sanghvi, goes on to mention "dirty" French scents and one he's drawn to himself, Piguet Bandit, which he finds "dirty" even though he notes the French don't ~for what it's worth I don't particularly either. What's more I don't find American fragrances to always be "upfront & clean" either (cue in Youth Dew, Aromatics Elixir etc. )

Additionally, "fresh" seems to have gone through an historical trajectory. I was contemplating this while replying to one of my readers regarding the popularity of fruity notes in fragrances the other day, thinking that as consumers we have removed ourselves from the notion of "fresh" of yore. Back then, in the middle section of the 20th century "fresh" meant soapy scents (full of aldehydes, rose-jasmine and musks) or grooming rituals (the shaving foam impression of a good masculine fougere, the face and body powder dry aura of a mossy fragrance or one rich in aldehydes and musks). Nowadays we have been conditioned to believe that fresh is equivalent to the scent of the products we use in our showers; most shampoos have a fruity aroma (usually peach, berry combinations, grapefruit and green apples). So do shower gels, cleansing products and other paraphernalia of cleaning rituals, be it for body or home use. So "fresh" as a concept has significantly shifted.


 Still, it's fun to contemplate, do these divides help make a distinction between different sensibilities? Are they regionally/culturally founded? Do you find yourself mostly in one camp as opposed to another and why/why not?