New Fragrances with Tea: Part 4.

This is neither the last nor the least in my series on the Rare Tea Collection from J. Malone:

Golden Needle Tea – A special black tea with leather, spice, sandalwood and benzoin resin notes - 

One of the aspects of the golden needle tea aroma that is missing from the added chemicals is the tea’s marvelously fruity bouquet, which has a raisiny, and to my mind, mango-like, quality. It seems the perfumers wanted to emphasize the tea’s more spicy, warm, sweet, woody, resiny qualities, and left the fruit behind. 

Golden Needle Tea or Dian Hong — 

note the golden color of the buds and the hairy quality of the leaves.

Image from Wikipedia.

Which makes some degree of sense, actually, even though the perfume won’t be true to the tea. From a perfumer’s perspective, this Golden Needle Tea perfume combines woody and leather fragrances, which are heavy on base notes, in other words scents that last for hours. These scents tend to hit the hot receptors, and as a consequence give a sensation of warm sensuality. Were you to add the fruity smells of the tea, they would add a fleeting top note. As people pick their perfumes based on the top notes (what you smell in the bottle, but don’t last on the skin), the relative lack of top notes in this perfume means that you will have to sniff a lot before you sense it, but when you do you will get these warm sensations.

In my next post, I’ll explain why you might like this or prefer another of these perfumes, and also why it is that what you like in a food and a food pairing may be quite different from what you would like in a perfume.