Black Gardenia

She expresses herself boozy and proudly: breath full of brandy vapours, a loud shout, then laughter then singing. While she approaches you crossing the dancefloor crouded with slightly drank dancers, she step by step looses her push and when comes near almost whispers something banal and pleasant. You smell jasmine she wears as a broch, sense that she was in the open before becausу there is some rich sweetly-smelling soil left on her shoes. Her dress and hair smell of warm wood bark, obviously because she spent hours leaning back to a tree in a tight embrace (and probably not only embrace) of somebody who was before you. Little by little you realize you should keep away from her, away from sin... That was a picture the perfume draw me. In russian Fragrantica people argue if there is a gardenia or not. What can I say? It is not a perfume about the flower, it is (as I see it) about passion and hate, about love, about Billy Holiday and her time, about jazz, boozy parties, sex, seduction and life at it’s fullest. And I like the perfume very much, though would like a bigger bunch of flowers in there. As to gardenia as a flower, it seems all people tend to see it from different points. Someone thinks it all sweet, the other thinks it’s salty, the third mushroomy etc. To me the smell of a life gardenia flower is a controversive but somehow harmonic mixture of milk butter (a lot !), cocoa butter, sweetnes of jasmine and tuberose, some salt, obvious mushroomy note and indole as well as a little of blood and raw beef. So I’ll answer yes, there is a gardenia flower in there, elusive, constructed of different notes, mixed in a bouquet, it is still there.