Freesia

This is genuinely something special! ‘Freesia’ opens as fresh and green as a freshly snapped flower stem, completely lacking any of the off-putting chemical fizziness that you tend to get from the more commercial houses. There’s nothing here that reads as synthetic or artificial: the florals are bright and beautifully sun-dappled, with the coolness of the green notes being balanced by a delicate warmth and faint suggestion of earthiness. This isn’t a portrait of freesias in sterile insolation – rather, it replicates the experience of walking through a well-tended garden and breathing in their scent as they grow in nature. I can smell the leaves of the nearby trees, the sweetness of the pollen, and even the richness of the potting soil, but the various layers all work together, never becoming muddied or discordant, but remaining crisp, clean, and refined throughout. While I don’t always think it’s helpful to compare perfumes (and particularly not when dealing with such different floral notes), this scent is everything that I had hoped Penhaligon’s ‘Bluebell’ would be, offering a faithful recreation of a flower as it grows in its natural environment, but without allowing that flower to become lost or overpowered by its surroundings (the cloves in ‘Bluebell’ drown out the smell of bluebells for me). The dry-down gains an elegantly powdery purple note, but it’s so expertly blended with hints of pine and violet leaf that it never turns oversweet or old-fashioned. Instead, it’s like the dusky haze of a summer evening as the garden begins to cool, deepening the scent of the irises and violets that have been planted alongside our imagined freesias. I wish I could describe it better, but there’s something almost introspective about this dry-down. It’s not melancholic in the manner of ‘L’Heure Bleue’, but there’s a gentleness to the closing notes that leaves me nostalgic. I discovered ‘Freesia’ after treating myself to a sample box from SoM, but while I generally tear through samples one after the other, I’m in no rush to move on from this scent just yet. This is a garden that invites you to linger, and I’m enjoying spending time in it.

A really fresh, very recognisably freesia scent. I get many compliments whilst wearing this one.

The closest thing to an armful of freesias!

363 I am always on the hunt for the fragrance of freesia and so far I have been unlucky to find a fragrance that captures its ephemeral beauty. I will take walks in our neighborhood this time of year (when freesias bloom) and out of the blue I will swear that I can smell the fleeting fragrance of the difficult to grow freesias. Then I find myself looking around frantically until I see the freesias growing in random places in peoples front gardens. Yes, my nose is tuned to the freesia signal. Yes, I have had the experience myself, like others, trying to grow freesias from bulbs without success. I really adore how they smell yet that aroma is so familiar and haunting for some reason to me. This year the freesia bulbs I planted 9 months earlier and declared a failure, decided to rise unexpectedly from the ground. After years of not smelling freesias, I finally had a chance to smell all the colors (which smell nearly similar), and smell them over and over again as they bloomed until it finally hit me: Freesias smell like one of my favorite teas, Twinings Lady Grey plus some Earl Grey teas. It's a subtle moment when that tea aroma hits you as you sniff the freesia and then you cannot re-smell exactly the same moment again until sometime maybe later. Yet it comes the closest to LG tea aroma or when you open a wrapper of EG tea, with it's own subtleties. So experiencing the true flower, I ordered this with hope that it would smell like what I experienced in real life. To me it fails to capture Freesia. Yes, there is a citrus aspect to the flower but it's so much more that I cannot understand what it is yet, other than to compare it to LG tea. This fragrance smells like lemons and crushed lemon leaves for the most part, not Freesia. 2/10-So disappointed, doesn't smell like Freesia