Privé
Ormonde Jayne (2018)

Privé is about as elegant as a scent can get. Understated luxury yet again from this wonderful house. Light and airy, but with staying power, and some spice. But the spice is sunny and translucent, not heavy. I mean this as a compliment when I say this is Ormonde Jayne's modern take on Chanel's sublime “Bois des Îles”. This is lighter, airier, whereas the Chanel is darker, sweeter, more dense. But they're cousins, those two. Oh, and “Privé” is absolutely unisex. A perfect example of what unisex can be. Perfection, just like Ormonde Man.

In the main, Ormonde Jayne peddles a line of unostentatious luxe that would seek to focus on such things as taste and refinement rather than the vulgarity of wealth accumulation and, possibly, display – though, be in no doubt, the latter is where the truth of luxury really lies. So it is no surprise that Privé is a well-mannered creation that sparkles quietly – its opening emanation of citrus tones elevated beyond the merely lime-and-lemony to a kind of filtered sunlit rendition of mandarin peels and things too exotic for the plebs to have encountered bring an exalted freshness far removed from the shower product. They merge seamlessly with delicate, spring-blossom florals and a foam of rice powder and skin musk. This is the interior version of springtime – all polite conversation and tea at Claridges but with the enlivening of the season very much in the air.
It's chicly executed for sure and wears like a soft shift dress, but it ain't for me. If a genteel, fresh abstract floral is what you are after, it would be worth checking out.

It's a rare thing, an Ormonde Jayne fragrance I do not quite get on with, but here it is. Privé seems to be an amalgamation of pretty much every typical OJ note; tea, citrus, dry woods, flowers, iris, vanilla, you name it, it's there.

I thoroughly like all of these notes, a lot of which are recognisable from other OJ fragrances. I even like them together; they're well blended, a s per usual and the resulting scent has that dry chiqueness that is Ormonde's signature. The problem is that this seems to be the fragrance where perfumer Geza Schoen has gone overboard with some woody aromachemical or other. I normally very much enjoy the way he uses things like Iso E Super in this line (i.e., restrained, never the focus, but very effective), but in this scent there's some radiant, dry, woody note that just takes over and overpowers all the other notes.

My nose seems particularly sensitive to one or more of the popular woody aroma chemicals (I smell nothing but an incredibly radiant alcohol like note in Sauvage, for example), so I think this is causing the problem here. I suspect for someone who's nose is tuned differently, this could be a fantastic scent