Ormonde Woman
Ormonde Jayne (2002)

For all the accolades Ormonde Woman received, I was left underwhelmed after sampling it. The opening is the gorgeous, enchanted green forest with spice and violet, but I find it sputters rather quickly into something delicate, wan, even.

I am not a stickler for performance, but I just feel like the development curve on this is so steep that it just doesn't gratify. It's ends up mostly sweetly soft and lightly sage-y, but that isn't really doing it for me. So far it's only been Schoen's Tolu from this line that captivates me. He really needs to lay off the Iso E, too.

Genre: Woody Green, Modern Chypre (Green)

Ormonde Woman is the scent of a mysterious witches' forest, just after a rain, at the moment when the clouds begin to subtly lighten and then darken again, deeply shaded, with a thick carpet of pine needles and decaying leaves, somehow transparent, elusive, alive, and also dense, powerful, and incredibly evocative, greens and browns melting into shades of black. It smells wild as hell, and, also, incredibly put together. It creates the illusion of rough surfaces, tree bark, lichen, moss; yet, also, has a silken sheen netted around it. It is an earth mother, it is a goth chick. It is fresh, and it is smoky. It is unorthodox, yet it is easy to wear. It is a perfume of opposites, as many of the greatest perfumes are, and it belongs with the best, not only of modern perfumery, but of all time.

One of Ormonde Woman's mostly compelling olfactory tricks is its effortless shape shifting between its signature bitter green hemlock accord and its subtly powdered amber base. Its green chypre ancestors tend to be more strident--starched and pressed by musk, or turned va-va-voom by animalics--so their greenness feels tamed in comparison. YSL's Y is wild but spring-tender, Balmain's Vent Vert is a windy meadow with no shadows, Chamade is a topiary, and Futur's Day-Glo is not of this earth at all. Vintage Estee Lauder Private Collection comes close, but it still feels hydroponically grown next to Ormonde Woman's fetching rootiness. Givenchy III is its closest ancestor, to my nose, but III has more overt florals and sweeter amber. None of them exude Ormonde Woman's poisonous bitter appeal. It also has some relation to green tea fragrances, especially the silk weft of Elizabeth Arden's underrated Green Tea Extreme, but that family has a compulsive cleanliness at its core that makes them creatures of artificial lighting and indoor spaces. In many ways, Ormonde Woman is sui generis--not that I won't keep looking, as I love all greens, and long for more that feel appropriate in cooler months. (Green incenses--Jaisalmer, Dzongka, Timbuktu--satisfy many of the same cravings, but without the finesse that makes Ormonde Jayne a marvelous Trojan horse for professional environments).

In the early years of the 2000s, as the sad reality of the oakmoss ban set in, the future of green fragrances seemed like grim; I remember the prognostications of a future without Mitsouko, not to mention the perfumes I listed above. These days, many people also find green perfumes old-fashioned, or too frigid for comfort. It also often feels as if there is nothing new, or at least unique, under the fragrance sun. Modern, comfortable to wear, and original, Ormonde Woman defies all these notions, and is also addictive smelling, a stunningly beautiful raw emerald, in the crown of the house of Linda Pilkington. She and Geza Schoen have done work as good since Ormonde Jayne Launched, but they haven't done better.

As for reformulation: the bottle I have now was purchased maybe four or five years ago. It smells the same as the dregs from my much older bottle--but this perfume is not a powerhouse. Iso-E-Super, one of Geza Schoen's favorite ingredients, needs to be tempered, in my experience. Many perfumes that contain it are almost impossible to smell when newly bottled, or recently transported, so I am sceptical of rumors of recent weakening. It can sometimes take six to eight weeks, or even longer, for modern perfumes to smell like they should. I believe something about the introduction of oxygen helps. This is especially true of Ormonde Woman, which employs Iso-E-Super's in its composition, for its lovely piney-green scent, and for its ambiguous mysterious texture. I find, in general, that reformulation does not weaken perfumes, so much as flatten them, cause them to develop much faster, and overall render them less complex.

When I first tried this, I loved it! Couldn't get enough of that green, pine-y, hemlock-y opening. The dry down was a little dull, but that opening really made up for it. And then after a few months, I started to find it a little screechy--maybe all the Iso E Super? And that was all I could smell, the opening no longer made up for it. I didn't pick it up for months, maybe a year or so. When winter came around this year, I tired it again. And the opening was more muted, but so was all the rest of it, and I found I could wear it. So I have now spent the past 6 weeks wearing this almost every day, finishing up my 50mL bottle. I do not plan to repurchase. I'm not sure if the scent became less strong because I'd had it so long, or if my skin chemistry changed. There have been times I've loved this and times I just haven't wanted anything to do with it. Totally worth trying, an intriguingly changeable scent.

Years ago when I first smelled this, I thought maybe I wasn't sophisticated enough to enjoy it, but after having smelled a billion-zillion scents in the interim, I still have to say...blech. I simply cannot stand the way in which this fragrance company uses synthetic aroma chemicals. The large Iso E Super dose here simply overrides any pleasure I might get in this green chypre (a category I normally love). But realize, I also can't stand Black Gold, so take my impressions/views with a large grain of fake cedar-chemicals.

The opening is green & herbal, but not bitter or sharp, with the top notes of grass, cardamom & coriander clearly discernable. l also smell sage here, evoking the dry verges of a Greek mountain road in summer. As it develops, there's a vaguely citrussy note, & a peppery sweetness, perhaps violet? l had to look up the scent of black hemlock, & apparently it's a sweetish, fruity & mild conifer scent, which chimes with my experience here. After an hour, a more savoury, mossy element creeps in, & another hour later it's slightly more woody, & much softer. As ClaireV mentions, however, it does seem to advance & recede several times over the course of the day, still detectable the next morning. And those final traces smell to me just like the golden, fuzzy scent of mimosa, a scent I adore.

From reading the reviews, l expected to experience a deep, dark forest here, but was surprised to find a sunny Mediterranean hillside. The kind basenoter who sent me this sample tells me it's around eleven years old, so it's not a more recent reformulation, & the juice is a greenish-yellow colour, if that helps anyone. Not being usually a fan of very green scents, l find this one surprisingly cheerful & likeable.

This is another fragrance that was ruined by re-formulation.
I loved the original fragrance, so I put it on my Christmas 2020 wish-list. My husband bought it for me, and I thought there was a huge mix-up, or it was a fake. But it wasn't - he bought it from Ormonde Jayne's website.

Then I noticed the color was different, now being yellow-amber, instead of the distinctive original green juice. That's when I realized a major re-formulation must have happened. And I do mean major.

I've not been privy to the inner workings of this perfume house, not knowing if there's been a shake-up in management. But I'll be pretty cautious about purchasing anything further from them without testing first, so big is the change in Ormonde Woman.

The original was a warm, pleasant chypre-lite autumnal scent with a notable and likeable hemlock note. The predominant note of the reformulation is sneezy aldehydes and hairspray. My husband asked if I could apply the fragrance in the bathroom instead of our bedroom because the aldehydic smell lasts all day. That's a bad sign. To say I'm disappointed is understating it. Should the Ormonde Jayne site have made mention of such a major re-formulation on the perfume description page? I believe so. I won't go further into my Christmas gift disappointment of their 120 ml. bottle.

For lovers of the original, if you're wanting to replenish your stock, look for the older green-colored juice.