Champa

Champa has a sweet bitter floral aura. Floral Aura. Say that five times fast. Like Sherapop, I can not discern a whole lot in the way of individual notes, but I can pull out geranium essential oil, palmarosa, and something like sweet orange. When I exhale, there is a strange oily note sort of like petroleum jelly. Champa is simultaneously smooth, sweet, earthy, balsamic, and sharp. It is very well blended, though in terms of its composition, it leaves me with some unanswered questions. Thank you to the lovely people at Red Flower for the sample. Champa's floral mixture conjures up a round shape and orange-yellow hue for me, but it also has a sinus-tingling potency from some of its bitter notes that makes me think it would repel insects. It reminds me of Nature's plethora of compelling warning signals, reminding potential enemies that it's as deadly as it is pretty. It lasts quite a while but it does not project very far. However, something tells me insects can somehow smell this from miles away. Champa seems like it was intended to be more of a functional fragrance than an aesthetic one. I get this sensation with quite a few (but definitely not all) essential oil-blend all natural-type fragrances. Sweet orange, earthy bitter geranium, palmarosa, and Vaseline? This is not a bad scent and it gets the job done.. What that job specifically IS remains to be seen. I'll try it again in mosquito season. I'm not joking. Mosquitoes love me.

Did I get a bad batch? I have the roll on, and upon first sniff, it was a disappointment for me because I was hoping for a pure champaca flower scent. Some years ago, when I was on vacation from university, my mother brought a couple of these delicate, tendril-y flowers home, and they smelled heavenly. I've been looking for that heady white floral fragrance since... But this was not it. Red Flower's Champa isn't necessarily bad. It doesn't totally nauseate me, but it does smell bitter, herbal, medicinal, and like tree bark and roots. Rather smoky and woody, slightly spicy. I'm not trained enough to distinguish and recognize what exactly it is that I'm smelling note-wise that's so strongly bitter, so I'm guessing it's the geranium, little bit of clove. It's a little sweet, but not flower-sweet and not sugar-sweet. It's bittersweet, the sticky, uncomfortable, and creeping sweet taste of Throat Coat herbal tea but in perfume form. The oil is a lovely golden color and rather thick. Thinner than honey, but thicker than argan oil. I hadn't been expecting an almost goopy oil. A significant amount of it also leaked out of the bottle and soaked the paper box, even before I received it. Faulty bottle? Overall, while not a nightmare, still definitely a letdown.

Another earthy offering from Red Flower, CHAMPA rolls the essences of a number of dark and dangerous flowers into one dense little oil which not only looks but also smells pretty cloudy to me. I cannot really tease out the individual components of this composition--which is not necessarily always a bad thing, but in this case, I was somewhat looking forward to a declarative champaca note. My definitive champaca-imprinting experience involved some deep magenta-colored soaps from Pier 1 Imports. They were so saturated with champaca essence that you could smell them from outside the closed drawers in which I placed them. Nice, but very, very potent. After that experience, the champa in CHAMPA seems quite tame. What I think that I am really smelling is a jumble of floral elements. This composition, like AMBRETTE, smells like a mixture of organic essential oils, which makes a lot of sense, I guess, since that is apparently what it is!

This is a tough one to review because it's so well-blended as to almost cancel out description: undeniably floral, a bit green, somewhat bitter, a little citrusy, a touch spicy, sort of sweetish. It's as though one went into a field in spring and culled just the tops of plants - fresh, robust-smelling flowers and leaves but no dirt, roots, or woody stalks. It's just a very well-rounded botanical concoction. It's not champaca-centric exactly, but those who are drawn to it for that note also won't be disappointed. This undersells how much I like it, but it's essentially a well-rounded, beautiful natural floral.

1st trial: The first sniff from the sample vial was watery weak. Then, on my skin, a quiet floral scent. Am I imagining incense because of the name association or am I recognizing the flower from Nag Champa incense? There is absolutely no smokiness so it could be either. Hours later the floral has developed the toothachy, sickly sweetness of Guerlain's Champs Elysees. Mimosa is listed for both and it dominates the heart of both for me. Uck. Conclusion: Sweet floral perfume with almost no sillage but moderate lasting power (about 7 hours on me).