Osmanthus
The Different Company (2000)

Osmanthus is a strange accord that is hard to get your hands (or nose) around. All you have to do to confirm this statement of mine is read the reviews of this perfume. In its purest and most botantical form, I would say the majority of people find the flower off putting. I think it's one of the best olfactory marvels of nature, so, naturally, I love DC's Osmanthus and many do not. In order to like - little alone love - this perfume, you need to have a general fondness for the real deal, because Jean-Claude Ellena is going to give it to you unapologetically and in full force. If you have never smelled real osmanthus, either in flower form or perfume form, and you're unsure if you like it or don't like it, DC's Osmanthus is far from being a safe blind buy.

The perfume's opening is going to grab your attention and check your courage. Galbanum, bergamot, and orange come together to give a very bitter, slightly sweet, and very green accord, that calls to my mind underripe green bell peppers. Ellena is taking cover charges at the door with this opening accord; you're either going to like it and think it's worth the price of admission, or you're going to turn around and leave. What comes next in a seamless dry down from the opening notes is osmanthus. There are little bits of jasmine and rose here, but the accords that shine are the leather and tea. Real osmanthus has pretty clear presentations of both, but very few osmanthus perfumes lean into them; the accords can be quite challenging, so brands prefer to dial them back in favor of osmanthus's fruity and floral notes. Not Ellena and DC, though. The leather here is a rich, freshly tanned suede that is both strident and strong yet plushy and velvety. The tea note is a funky fruity black tea, and this is the part that piques my curiosity the most. In many osmanthus perfumes, as I mentioned, the fruity part of osmanthus is given favor and put front-and-center, and this note is usually very reminiscent of apricot (or perhaps underripe nectarines, or some similar yellow tree fruit). In this pefume, the fruit hovers over the earthy, grassy, rooty, fermented leaves of Camellia sinensis, seamless and inseparable. The heart of this perfume is funky; be warned. The musks at the base give this earthy and rooty fruit-inflected tea note a dense silkiness that I find very addictive. It's a small difference compared to other osmanthus perfumes, but it has outsized effects. If you have been able to make it through to the end of DC's Osmanthus, this is another part where people have a problem. For many this smells a bit too lotion like or soap like. Welcome to Fragrances in Cosmetics 101; today we start on Chapter One. The floral aspects of the osmanthus, namely the pink rose part of it, combined with the musks do have a soapy or lotion type accord to them, but if you don't like it that means you don't like it, not that Ellena made a technical mistake: natural osmanthus does have a fair bit of this aroma to it. I, for one, like it, and it also works in a naturalistic and logical way by providing a pleasant salve at the end to help you recover from the more difficult parts of the perfume that came before.

I love this perfume. Whenever I try an osmanthus perfume that's new to me, I usually at some point ask myself "what do I think of this compared to DC's Osmanthus?" It was after I realized that I was doing this, some better part of two decades ago, that it truly occurred to me just how good it is. Two decades on, it's still a bar to measure against.

You say you want your osmanthus pure? Are you sure? Well, here you go then. For better or for worse, this is probably the purest rendition of osmanthus out there, and yet, after an hour of it, you’ll be so bored you’ll wish the perfumer (Ellena) hadn’t stuck quite so rigidly to his brief. We all say we want purity until we get it, and we see we’ve been sold the glossy dustjacket to an empty book.

At first, it is all green, rustling leaves – the scent that blooms from a cup of loose green tea at the precise moment the stream of boiling water hits. The sunlit apricot skin and brown paper loveliness of osmanthus is there alright but curled shyly in the veins of the dried tea leaf, slightly unripe and waiting to take shape. A whisper of suede makes my ears perk up, and I listen carefully, but when focusing this hard, all I really pick up is the scent of hands that have been washed three or four times in a row by someone excessively concerned with hygiene.

If this is osmanthus – and by all accounts, this really is a true osmanthus – then osmanthus must be a flower carved from a piece of green guest room soap, the very hard, pure kind whose looks out-strip its function. I am positive this would have worked better as one of the Bvlgari tea series. As it stands, there’s not much to justify the price jump between this and something like Roger et Gallet Fleur d’Osmanthus, which I greatly prefer.

Dokudami tea
Meets gin or kin mokusei
Somewhere in China.

Archaeopteryx
To both Osmanthe Yunnan and
Jour d'Hermès, methinks.

On a poster on
The dorm-room wall of that new
Tiffany fragrance.

A floral whistle
On a spring breeze pouring out
Of that soap box in

The laundry closet
Next to those clean, slept-in sheets
Where she is lying

With her damn smartphone
Windows open, blinds rustling
On a clear spring day

And some kind of tea
(Not being a tea person)
Think I could get used

To this aroma
Though coffee and a bagel
Would sure hit the spot.

Green Apples by Paul Cezanne

Delicate but still consistent, honest and clear take on osmanthus, quite linear and pleasant. Perfect for spring. It is also finally the first TDC fragrance I smell which *does* have a clear and defined smell and you can actually wear it for a while before it is vanished. Usually their scents are so light I can barely detect them. This is not exactly a "powerhouse" and does last shortly but it's decent. Bit of a synthetic feel but the osmanthus absolute itself weirdly has it at some points, so not a "con" here. I still prefer Osmanthus Interdite by Parfum d'Empire on this theme, which develops the osmanthus in a more complex and interesting way - here on the other side you can actually smell it a bit more simply and clearly.

7/10

Another modern non-scent.

The opening holds a great deal of promise - it begins like Mitsouko with the dark apricot/peach note, but this almost immediately fades into a nondescript woody nothing.

Turin gives this four stars and describes it as "dreamy peach." He has obviously never smelled a peach before. Considering the notes he says are in pure osmanthus oil (apricot, peach, cassis, violet, camphor, coconut), this should have been a fragrance trip.

As is, it breaks down before it leaves the station.