Edit Published on xoVain.com
I recently went to Jo Malone to buy a fancy candle as a housewarming gift to myself. Doin’ me, etc. While there, I spritzed on some Lime, Basil & Mandarin cologne and wound up telling the saleswoman it would be great if I were a stylish, urban young man with snappy socks peeking out from my impeccable brogues. She recommended alternatives she thought might be more appropriate to my vibes. Hence, a Jo Malone bonanza.
Grapefruit: Jo Malone Grapefruit achieves an absolutely pure grapefruit note, while completely evading the obvious. I immediately associate grapefruit with a voluptuous, bright pink lusciousness. It’s a sexiness complicated with tart astringency, but certainly in possession of the glistening quiver that has long contributed to fruit’s role as an erotic trope. Jo Malone’s Grapefruit isn’t full, bouncy, bikini-top grapefruit, nor is it a lurid, lobotomized, part-of-a-complete-breakfast grapefruit hothouse cultivated by Floridian farmers for supermarket appeal. Instead, the fruit suggested here is a wild, white, windfall citrus sitting in the papery blue-green tropical grass at the foot of its gnarly, jade tree. It’s got an honest character of organic pith and acid, evoking segments of sub-ripe, seed-studded, bitter, greenish-clear flesh. On the skin, the scent melds youth and sophistication – it’s bright and sparkling without being cheaply fruity. Interestingly, those who wear grapefruit notes are purportedly perceived as younger than their years. I can’t speak to that, but if this scent were to be personified, it wouldn’t be as someone concerned with age, anyway. Rather, it conveys an ageless sophistication, an “old soul” timelessness. The rosemary mid-notes and lingering, oakmoss dry down capture a calm, wide-eyed intensity and an appetite for life, and the central albedo conveys a certain serene elegance, washed in Ivory soap bars and dried with clean white towels. You can almost hear the skin being peeled back off the pith.
Blackberry & Bay: I’d never given serious thought to the notion of having a “happy place,” so it surprised me when, being asked to incur one during an experiment with hypnosis, I automatically apparated to a patch of blackberries. They grow like the invasive species they are in my city, and as a teenager I wandered endless summer suburban streets watching sunlight beam through their permeable leaves. I’d stain my hands picking them, and developed a pretty awesome cobbler tradition. I even have a 1800s botanical print of fat blackberries on my bedroom wall, because of course I do. However, the real reason I think my subconscious has limpeted on to the soothing presence of blackberry shrubs is their smell. I’ve rubbed blackberry leaves on my hands, and they’re not responsible, nor are the berries or blossoms, though the latter’s sweet-hay scent is lovely and warm. Whatever wafts out of those thick, dark briar patches is mysterious, but it’s feasibly something that happens when all that vegetation bakes in the sun, then cools slowly over a countertop of pavement in falling twilight. Green, dark and rocky, it’s an olfactory hit of ineffable poignancy. I was hoping that smell would be captured in Blackberry & Bay, but like most things for which souls inarticulately yearn, the perfect blackberry waft proved evasive. What I found is a deft ripe-berry juice note. While not too sweet, the berry lacks a light mold-pang, the quality of being immediately on the turn upon reaching full maturity that Semus Heaney captures in his poem, Blackberry Picking, wherein references to rat-grey rot and berries as “dark clots of summerblood” capture a musty complexity this jelly-berry lacks. An accord of spicy bay and the cool, green aroma of summer at dusk temper the bright top note. Tart, charming, and subtly gourmet, it reminds me of fetching things from the garden and bringing them to the kitchen. It’s a lovely scent, but the fact that it almost-but-not-quite evokes my blackberry ideal leaves me wanting, all Tantulus, but swap the fruit for an elusive smell.
Wild Bluebell: Wild Bluebell is like reading Alice in Wonderland. It’s like remembering a time in your life where you believed that fairies existed and were just choosing to conceal themselves. I can’t help but be really excited about a fragrance like this, because it captures some very abstract concepts successfully (I guess you could say that where Blackberry & Bay left me hanging, Wild Bluebell came along to pull me back up). To start, an exuberant note of watermelon rind splashes out—the refreshing crunchy whiteness of those last scrapings. Watermelon rind is totally odd and unpredictable scent that is as exhilaratingly welcome as someone you never realized you loved until a serendipitous encounter brought your feelings to the fore. Wet, bright, green, and fresh. Then comes bluebell. Like watermelon rinds, bluebells just aren’t something one associates with heavy scent – but they do conjure the image of an early spring meadow (white birch trunks, mint grass, and a prolific carpeting of dazzling hyperblue). It’s a neck of the woods you want to nuzzle into, and Jo Malone Bluebell responds to that desire, delicately plucking the subtle, underlying element of scent from the scene. What it hones in on is dewy optimism and the bright, vegetal tang of freshly snapped wildflower stems, the watery residue they leave on your hands. Lily of the Valley adroitly provides spring-meadow, Age of Innocence associations and a base of white musk perfectly contributes to a long and enchanting character development as Wild Bluebell lingers on (watermelony to the end). While it veers “spring,” I know Wild Bluebell is going to enter my year-round rotation – it’s just so clean, sweet, and earnest. The whole bottle is a picnic; I want to upend it into my bathwater.
Jo Malone’s scents are unparalleled in their ability to turn every note they alight on into a love letter.