Jo Malone takes you by the nose to the English Fields
With enjoyable, tropical warmth all year round (depending on your preferences), I know it’s summer by the scent of the flowering calachuchi trees beside my bedroom that is most potent during humid afternoons. For Jo Malone London head of fragrance development Céline Roux, who spent her summers growing up in the French countryside and now UK-based and summering in the British countryside, summer’s sensory cues signal harvest traditions. Sunlight skipping across golden fields rich with precious grains. Poppies dancing in the wind...
“There’s a beauty to the imperfection of the English landscape- — I love the contrast of cultivated fields against the pops of flowers and lush pastures that you can’t control. That was the twist I wanted to capture,” Céline said in a press release about the summertime line simply and aptly named English Fields.
An individual cologne wouldn’t suffice. “It would have been too limiting to stop at one when there are so many flavours to explore. We focused on grains such as wheat, barley and rye, but since they all have different olfactive qualities it felt natural to pair them individually with complementing wild flowers.”
For the five-piece collection, she collaborates once again with master perfumer Mathilde Bijaoui. She has already teamed up with Céline for the much-loved Myrrh & Tonka and the festive favourite Green Almond & Redcurrant.
“Making cereals and grains the main focus was a first for me, somewhere I’ve never been before as a perfumer,” says Mathilde, whose nose portfolio includes scents for celebrity lines and fashion brands as well as niche perfumers. Working with flowers like poppies and primrose which do not bear a scent, the challenge was in capturing their aesthetic vibrance and — in a very Jo Malone fashion — contrasting it with the warmth of grains. At first whiff, it evokes youth and the new beginnings and possibilities of a new season.
Green Wheat & Meadowsweet is the start of spring captured in the limited edition line’s unique and original ceramic-like bottle. To replicate that moment when a fresh breeze rustles through fields of young wheat, Mathilde adds grapefruit and then vetiver as an earthy note.
It is typical to see bees flying over the meadows and pollinating flowers come summer, and that’s where Honey & Crocus comes in, the latter being a quintessential English spring flower. Both notes are enhanced by English lavender and almond milk.
Another quintessentially British and symbolic flower is the bright red poppy in Poppy & Barley. Barley contrasts it with a cotton-soft texture and nurturing warmth, conveyed with violets, fruity blackcurrant, barley, bran and powdery white musk.
For Oat & Cornflower, Mathilde came up with an accord to replicate the nuttiness of oats by using hazelnut, enhanced with sweet tobacco and earthy vetiver to represent the oats’ mouth-watering qualities.
The primrose in Primrose & Rye bloom during the early spring in European woodlands and therefore symbolizes youth. Mathilde adds a spicy hint of vanilla and uses golden corn, coconut and mimosa to enhance the rich and hazy solar effect of yellow primroses, as if in a fervent wish for summer in the English Fields to never, ever end.
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In the Philippines, Jo Malone London is located at Greenbelt 5, Ayala Center, Makati and Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.
