HONEY AMBER

Notes include:- Night-blooming Jasmine, Frangipani, hand-tinctured Vanilla beans, Labdanum, Benzoin and Virginian Cedarwood

The perfume trail at Teone Reinthal started many years ago with Honey Amber, a simple but deeply satisfying oil perfume that translated nicely to eau de parfums, and paved the way for many more experiments with labdanum.  The relaunched Honey Amber is all about amber. It smells to me like Frangipanis on velvet. It’s plush, and only gets plusher over time. On first spray the florals appear to shiver against the woody resinous backdrop, in combination producing a plump fragrance, reminiscent of elements of some beloved orientals*; those vintage-styled, great, big exotic ambers from last century. There is a haunting familiarity about it, in that it reminds me just a little of the original Ysatis by Givenchy, as well as facets of other long-gone treasures in that genre.

As the dry-down unfolds, the warm, soft floral heart becomes anchored by the ambery/woody base, producing a long-lasting and deeply satisfying signature-style fragrance.

*Oriental is a word commonly used to describe a genre of perfumery that stylistically straddles the nexus of gourmand (by way of vanilla, creamy, sweet woods and tropical florals), when combined with incense (through the use of sandalwoods, myrrh, frankincense, styrax and benzoin). The term ‘oriental’ however references a colonial chapter in our history that fetishised and erroneously described disparate regions of Asia and The Middle East under the single banner of ‘oriental.’  This term has more recently been recognised as incorrect (there is no country or region in the world actually called the Orient) and disrespectful to the minutiae of various peoples, cultures, islands and continents clustered under this superimposed construct. So the term is used here only to reference the vintage aspect of the perfume, which hearkens back to fragrances that were once imagined as being ‘oriental’.

I prefer ‘floral amber’ to describe fragrances featuring botany native to South East Asia, Southern Asia, as well as North Africa and Middle East.