A 1.5 ml sample of Luminous Petal Tea. Enough for several proper wearings, which is what it takes to know whether you want the bottle.
Luminous Petal Tea started with Earl Grey, and it still smells like it: bergamot over tea leaves, with flowers rather than sugar.
It opens on herbs, citrus and florals together. Bright, but not sharp.
Through the middle, herbal spice and a soft musk give it weight, so the tea note has something to sit on rather than evaporating.
The base is vanilla, wood and moss. The moss is what keeps it from reading sweet, and it is the part that stays longest.
Why tea is difficult
Earl Grey is black tea scented with bergamot oil. That is the entire trick, and it is why the smell most people call tea is really a citrus smell sitting on a dry leafy one.
Tea itself is close to impossible to capture. There is no practical extract of brewed tea that survives in a fragrance, so a tea note is always assembled out of other materials: something dry and slightly bitter for the leaf, something green, something soft to round it. The quality of the assembly is the whole difference between a tea fragrance and a sweet floral wearing the word.
Here the bergamot is doing what it does in the cup, and the moss at the base is what keeps the dryness once the citrus has gone.
Wearing it
It is the most conventionally pretty of the five and the easiest to like immediately. That has a cost: it is also the one most likely to fade into the background for you after a month of wearing it daily, simply because there is less in it to argue with.
It works all year and does particularly well in the morning. One press is enough.
Wear it for a full day and pay attention at hour six. That is the part you will live with.
Composed and bottled by hand in Denmark.
