Ormonde Jayne
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Pink pepper crackles across your skin like static electricity, immediately joined by a crisp neroli-bamboo accord that feels almost herbal in its greenness. The initial effect is brisk and slightly aldehydic—you'd mistake it for a crisp cologne were the florals not already emerging.
The bamboo fades and champaca begins its slow unfurling, its creamy magnolia notes settling into conversation with the basmati rice's dusty sweetness. Freesia adds a faint dairy creaminess that rounds out the composition's sharper edges, and here the fragrance achieves its true character: a soft, powdery floral that's oddly comforting despite its restraint.
Myrrh introduces a subtle resinous warmth beneath fading florals, whilst green tea and musk create a barely-there skin scent that hovers in intimate proximity only. What remains feels more like a memory of fragrance than fragrance itself—pale, serene, and rather lovely if you lean in close.
Champaca is a fragrance that whispers rather than shouts—a meditation on restraint dressed in silk rather than satin. Geza Schön has crafted something genuinely unusual here: a floral that refuses the honeyed trap of conventional beauty, instead offering the austere grace of a Japanese tea ceremony.
The champaca absolute—that creamy, slightly honeyed magnolia-adjacent flower—sits at the composition's heart but never dominates. Instead, it's tempered by the unexpected presence of basmati rice, which lends a powdery, almost chalky dryness that prevents any cloying sweetness from taking hold. This rice-flower pairing is the fragrance's masterstroke; it creates an interplay between creamy softness and mineral grain, like wearing a silk charmeuse shirt lined with linen. The neroli in the opening provides a citric snap that keeps everything verdant and bracing, whilst the pink pepper adds a subtle bite—never aggressive, but enough to prevent the composition from becoming wallflower-soft.
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3.9/5 (99)