New Fragrances with Tea: Part 1.

Just saw on World Tea News that Jo Malone fragrances are offering a new series of six tea-based perfumes called The Rare Tea Collection.*

Here’s the description of two of the perfumes in the Collection with my comments, with the rest coming and the next day—note that I have not smelled any of these, so my comments are a guess: 

Silver Needle Tea – White tea with musk, mimosa and rose. 

The odor profile of white tea includes rose notes, so this combination should work well, especially as there aren’t any woody smells, which would be expected to hide any tea aroma completely. Musk is the base note, and gives a  “warm” quality, as does mimosa, which is probably the middle note, and has the smell almost like baby powder. Depending on which scent version is used, the rose may either give a cool top note or a warm one. 

Darjeeling Tea – Black tea with notes of jasmine, freesia and davana. 

This is a fascinating combination. As you probably know, Darjeeling is one of my favorite teas. It is really an oolong, rather than a black tea, and has a great deal of jasmine’s chemicals in it, so jasmine is a natural choice. Freesia provides a curious top note, with a lot of “cool” chemicals, most particularly linalool, which is also abundant in Darjeeling (and virtually all other) Camilla sinensis teas. In fact many consider the linalool scent to be particularly characteristic of freesia.

Davana. Image from http://www.demonchyaromatics.com/media/64463/davana.jpg

Darjeeling second flush (which they probably used) also has a grape aroma. If so, this is why the perfumers chose davana.  Davana, or Artemisia pallens, has a raisiny smell, courtesy of compounds called davanones. I'm guessing that's why it combines well with Darjeeling. Davana also contains linalool as a minor component, but has large amounts of nerol and geraniol. Together with linalool, these three are the main components of the cool rose smell. Davana also has a strange quality, namely that it smells differently on different people, so who knows what this tea perfume would smell like on your skin?

Two more perfumes from this Rare Tea Collection in my next post!

  

*http://worldteanews.com/profiles-new-products/tea-perfume-for-the-true-enthusiast?NL=WTM-001&Issue=WTM-001_20160412_WTM-001_244&sfvc4enews=42&cl=article_4_b