ACQUA DI PARMA COLONIA AMBRA
by Acqua di Parma
ingredients: bergamot, musk, vanilla
Some years ago, there was a fashionable effect for film titles in which the letters started out at normal spacing, then the spacing increased evenly to spread the letters out, without the letters themselves getting bigger. This gave an ominous impression of things getting closer while somehow receding. A similar thing happens in this fragrance. It starts out with a powerful note reminiscent of shiso mint, a smell so oddly placed in our odor coordinate system that its main component, perillic alcohol, has been described by normally laconic professionals as “sweet, woody, aromatic spicy cardamom and green, cumin-like with dried orange peel and green waxy floral nuances.” What the perfumers have done is essentially take those facets and repeat them in the core and drydown, long after the shiso effect is gone, using a separate material for each.
About twenty minutes into the fragrance, the sweet and green-waxy aspects begin to dominate, respectively carried by honey and violet leaf notes, and a familiar face emerges from the darkness: Grey Flannel (Geoffrey Beene, 1975). GF so much embodied a temperament, at once affable and sardonic, that you feel like exclaiming, “I know that guy!” I wonder what the (unnamed) perfumers think about the fragrance’s name, which is about as uninformative —not a cologne, not amber—as it is possible to be.
green honey
