The last Friday in March! (It’s also World Piano Day and Pearl Bailey’s birthday.) Our community project for today: wear an orange blossom or neroli fragrance, if you have one.
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
I am repeating last Friday in Hermès Eau de Néroli Doré…
A short film from International Flavors & Fragrances' in house naturals facility, Laboratoire Monique Rémy, about the cultivation and processing of Tunisian orange blossoms into orange blossom absolute and neroli. (If you never understood the difference between the two products, this video will explain.) About 6 minutes; perfumer Anne Flipo appears at about the 5:20 mark.
I may wear rose more often than any other floral note in my fragrances, but I’m also very fond of violet and carnation, and sometimes I really crave an orange blossom perfume. Parfums de Nicolaï recently launched Néroli Intense, Patricia de Nicolaï’s tribute to her own “passion for the orange flower,” and since this house is one I respect, I was looking forward to trying this new scent.
Néroli Intense’s composition includes notes of mandarin, neroli, tarragon, pittosporum flower, petitgrain, beeswax, patchouli and white musk. It does indeed evoke the “different olfactory properties” of the bitter orange tree, while remaining coherent and tightly constructed. Its petitgrain note — evoking the oil distilled from the twigs of the bitter orange tree — is green and raspy, and takes the lead after Néroli Intense is applied to skin…
I once heard perfumer Thomas Fontaine say he considered orange blossom an American note. (Iris and galbanum were French, he said.) Right away, I thought of bars of soap, brides, and piles of white laundered towels. Is that what Americans are about — cleanliness and innocence? Maybe I should have asked, is that what orange blossom is about?
Orange blossom is a lot more expressive than its association with laundry detergent would have you believe. Here are five relatively easy-to-find1 orange blossom-centered fragrances that explore a variety of non-Girl Scout takes on the note:
Serge Lutens Fleurs d’Oranger: Fleurs d’Oranger kicks off as bright and juicy as a grove of Florida Ambersweets in spring…
Just in case you haven’t noticed, the phrases “conscious consumerism” and “sustainable luxury” have been appearing with increasing frequency over the past year or two. And now we have Sana Jardin, “the world’s first socially-conscious, luxury fragrance house. . . . created primarily as a vehicle for social change to power social impact through the economic empowerment of women through The Beyond Sustainability™ Movement.”
If you’d like to do some reading about Sana Jardin’s back story and business model, you can find plenty of information on the company website. I’ll limit myself to brief reviews of three Sana Jardin fragrances (from a collection of seven, all developed by perfumer Carlos Benaïm) that I’ve been trying over the past week or so, and you can decide for yourself what socially conscious fragrance might be and how far you’re willing to go for it…