Hermes L'eau d'Orange verte

I love true citrus fragrances, and this Hermes always hits the spot for me. It has a very classic profile, and is extremely well-mannered. It opens with a lovely, extremely true, sour citrus, then quickly dries down to a lovely, gentlemanly bergamot/oakmoss. Although I love my large sample of this, I will never invest in a bottle simply because I have found it to have almost no staying power. If it were a 30 dollar bottle, this wouldn't be a problem, but at this price point, its better just to keep a little sample around to sniff from time to time.

 

That is the problem with citrus in general. Like Guerlain's Eau de Fleurs de Cedrat with its evanescent lemons, or Pacifica's Tuscan Blood Orange, it doesn't seem to hang around too long. It took me a long time to figure this out in my journey towards loving fragrance. I used to find--and still do most of the time-- the synthetic-smelling citrus topnotes in mass-marketed perfumes completely repulsive, probably mostly due to a traumatic encounter with an orange-scented colostomy bag in my formative years (the less said about that the better), and would run away from all citrus top-heavy fragrances kicking and screaming, not realizing that that was the most ephemeral of all the notes composing the fragrance, and if I only stayed around a little longer, a wholly new animal would emerge.

CREDITS:

orange blossom pic courtesy of wikimedia commons