Floral

Mogra is jasmine sambac, and it is not a polite flower. In small amounts it reads clean and white and slightly green. Push it and it goes indolic, which is the heavy, almost animal, faintly overripe note you get walking past a jasmine hedge at eleven at night. This sits closer to the second than the first. That is deliberate, and some people will not like it.

The opening is litchi and pink pepper and both are gone inside ten minutes. Pink pepper is doing a specific job: it puts a dry, prickly edge on the front so the mogra does not arrive as a wall of sweetness. Litchi is there for about four minutes and then it is a memory.

Damask rose underneath stops it being a single-flower fragrance. Rose and jasmine together is one of the oldest pairings in perfumery, and it lasts because it is practical rather than romantic: rose is tart and slightly green where jasmine is heavy and sweet, so each one keeps the other from taking the whole thing over. Orris butter arrives last and does something harder to name. It powders everything down, pulls it closer to the skin, cools it, and leaves an impression somewhere near the inside of a wooden drawer.

Heat is the thing to watch. In a Surat summer, jasmine-heavy fragrances get louder and sweeter and can tip into cloying by mid-afternoon. One press is enough in that weather. Two is enough anywhere else. In cold or in air-conditioning it does the opposite and holds tight against the skin, which is when the orris is most obvious.

It does not sit well over a strongly scented hair oil, which is the usual collision, because coconut and jasmine both want the same space. Over unscented moisturiser it is fine. On a dupatta or the inside edge of a sleeve it lasts considerably longer than on a wrist and loses some of that indolic edge, which is worth knowing if you find the edge too much.

If the jasmine fragrances you know are the soapy, laundry-clean kind, this is not that. It is nearer to what the flower actually smells like on the plant, which is a stranger and less tidy thing. That is a preference and not an improvement. Plenty of people want the soapy version and there is nothing wrong with wanting it.

Floral is an eau de parfum at 100 ml, blended in India.

[PRODUCT: measured longevity from your own wear tests — hours on skin, hours on cloth. Do not estimate.]

[FOUNDER: the specific mogra memory, if there is one — whose garden, which house, what time of year, what else was in the air. One or two sentences.]

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