"Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden?" Eleanor at Kew Gardens from Virginia Woolf
He makes me strangely melancholy.
Strange, because there is no melancholic undertone in the notes or in the composition of this fragrance. Jamaican lime, Scottish highland pine, English rose. Canadian cedar, Australian eucalyptus and orange(s) from the Bahamas.
Well, maybe melancholy, the melancholy of a past epoch and a faded empire with it...
Almost isolated, I perceive the scents at the beginning. Almost overripe lime, the mild fruit resin of juniper berries. The duality of camphor sharpness and herbal sweet balsams of fresh pine juice. Cool rose, thawed. Tuberose1) in camouflage mode, which dazzles me with its mimesis of honeysuckle and wilted lily of the valley and lures me away from the heart of the rose.
Warm, discreet cedar wood and a eucalyptus playing a joke on me, sometimes flirting florally with tuberose, sometimes bleaching teeth with chlorine2). In between surprisingly, intimate musk.
No, this is not the scented image of the sketch of Royal Mayfair that I in my usual naivety threw down No forest, no pine grove. No wild and romantic landscape, no untamed nature. And yet it lets me inhale more deeply, as if I stepped out of a smog-contaminated metropolis into an old park.
This breath balances my viewpoint.
Expands it, from that of the ant following pheromone tracks in the teeming crowd, to the central perspective of the flâneur in this venerable garden.
It is the string of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew that the fragrance strikes in my memory. Here, in this 'oasis
in the desert of Greater London made of brick and mortar' 3) In this man-made piece of nature, you can breathe a sigh of relief with all your senses. Ancient Lebanon 4) cedars can be found here, familiar and unknown trees in great variety. There are representatives of the pine from all continents. In one of the beautiful, temple-like greenhouses made of white lacquered iron and sparkling glass, an impressive eucalyptus tree thrives and if you are lucky, it blooms in the area of the dry tropical Agave polianthes next to Humboldt lilies.
Countless plants and picturesque arrangements can be admired and perhaps even the one dedicated to the Duke of Widsor 5), which is offered as a reference for the English Rose in Royal Mayfair, is still in bloom in the Rose Garden.
Enough of the dawdling in the autumnal garden of my memory and back to the presence of the fragrance.
It needs further detailed examination until I finally succeed in changing the perspective and I can insert the fragments into an elegant painting.
Juniper, pine and lime fuse together to create a surprisingly pleasant tonic water with dry, herbal gin. Mossily medicinal and to my delight only reflecting the ethereal top notes of the drink. 6)
The cedar carries on a slim but solid trunk an aromatic crown after lovingly tended, sparingly but exquisitely occupied humidor.
But what I feel in my heart is the same floral pulsating of Royal Mayfair. Here I am surrounded by the unique, intimate perfume of a kiss on the cheek of a man who is intimately familiar with the weather and smells of rose soap.
In addition, like a gurgling, glittering stream of water, the eucalyptus meanders through the entire picture and connects the different levels, setting a metallic accent here with tuberose, reminiscent of remnants of smog (after all, we are still in the city), contributing to a transparent expanse with pine and wetting the earth at the roots of the cedar.
The top notes are a sparkling, albeit very much like the drink that inspired them, a short-lived pleasure, although elements throughout the fragrance flash up again and contribute to the clear, cool impression. The heart, to my delight, is perseveringly perceptible, regardless of whether on skin, feather or textile, the base is very close to the skin remains impressively long as a touch of "cedar wood wardrobe" on fabric.
Royal Mayfair is not a fragrance for a forest goblin (generic masculine) but neither is it exclusive to the Gentry (generic feminine).
Elegant, but gets along perfectly without urban chic. Subtle, but with a tangible presence. Not sexy at all, just immediately sensual. To wear as you please.
However, it is a fragrance that I would rather enjoy on a person intimately familiar to me than wearing it myself.
* Trigger warning: No comment containing information relevant to purchase or test divorce, only my impression plus *earworm for Norleans
1) This may also be due to the simultaneous, so far rather fruitless preoccupation with another, very tuberose-emphasized scent
2) checked again: I also find this chlorine-like note like in a Eucalcyptus globulus oil in my fundus
3)A. R. Hope Moncrieff, Kew Gardens
4) surely you will find a few canadian specimens by searching carefully...
5) ironically, this is a tea hybrid that was bred in Germany
6) Alcoholics are among my opponents of fear.
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