Why Fragrances With Green Notes Are Going to Be Everywhere in 2023
Imagine, if you will: A path winding through a dense verdant forest, damp after rain. A geranium leaf crushed between your fingers. A freshly cut lawn, where blades of grass create a carpet underfoot as plush as fur. A greenhouse jammed with plants, practically pulsing with photosynthesis. Now inhale—that’s the scent of green. Would you wear it on your wrists?
Green-smelling perfumes, like all fragrance genres from ambers to chypres to ouds, have historically swung in and out of fashion with the zeitgeist. Green notes first sprouted in perfumes in the 1940s—the original Miss Dior, which launched in 1947, was as crisply herbaceous as it was floral, and Carven’s Ma Griffe, which was unleashed with considerable fanfare when an airplane flying over Paris dropped thousands of tiny parachutes carrying samples of it in 1946, was also notably green, with notes of clary sage and grassy vetiver. But the true landmark was Pierre Balmain’s Vent Vert, created by maverick female perfumer Germaine Cellier (also the mastermind behind Robert Piguet’s showstopping Fracas) in 1947. Characterized by a bombshell dose of galbanum, a raw material distilled from the resin of a flowering plant native to Iran that smells intensely vegetal, Vent Vert—which translates as green wind—was brazenly unique, and its springtime-evoking vibrancy resonated perfectly with the optimistic spirit of post-War Europe.
The next gust of green arrived in the 1970s, the same decade that gave us Earth Day, the rise of eco-consciousness, and, in interior decorating, a major houseplant boom. As with so many things, Coco Chanel was ahead of the game: Chanel No. 19, now considered one of the great masterpieces of 20th century perfumery, arrived in 1971, when she was 87 years old (the 19 is a nod to August 19, her birthdate). Its masterstroke was to contrast vivid green notes with earthy, powdery florals, including a whopping amount of extremely pricey, and distinctive, orris. In its wake came Estée Lauder Alliage, a green chypre with artemisia, oakmoss and vetiver; Sisley Eau de Campagne, a composition by famed perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena replete with wild herbs, basil, tomato leaf and geranium that whisks you to the countryside with a single whiff; Halston by Halston, which in its original 1975 formulation spritzed a salvo of green leaves and fresh mint; and Chanel Cristalle (tag line: “A Brilliant Burst of Fragrant Energy”), which opens with a gorgeous, transparent wash of basil and petitgrain that Chanel perfumer Olivier Polge says “bring complexity to the floralcy of hyacinth” blooming at the scent’s heart.
Green notes, in Polge’s esteemed estimation, “bring sparkle to a perfume, as well as a feeling of joyfulness.” Perhaps that’s why they are beginning to burgeon in fine fragrance once again. During the height of Covid, industry trackers reported an upswing in more intense, concentrated perfumes—spicy, smoky, amber-y clouds that could find their way to nostrils obscured by masks or that had been temporarily robbed of their ability to smell anything at all. But the Covid era also gave us a renewed appreciation for nature, and while it was logical that for a time we would want to cocoon ourselves in warm, comforting scents, it follows that we should now be ready to shed those layers, and emerge from the chrysalis into something fresh and bright and very much alive.
“The scent of green connects us straight away to plants, to mother nature,” says D.S. & Durga founder and perfumer David Seth Moltz, who concocted the brand’s lively and aromatic Bistro Waters with an array of vegetal notes including an extraction of fresh bell pepper, pea flower, lime water and basil. “Green is earth, grass, stems and leaves. It’s freshness. It’s vitality. That's why we're attracted to it.” There is, he notes, “a wellness angle, too, in that our connection to the plant kingdom is one of safety and calmness and repose.” Indeed, this is the basis of the concept of forest bathing, or Shinrin-Yoku, which has been practiced as medical therapy in Japan since the 1980s: it has been proven that inhaling phytoncides, airborne chemicals released by trees and plants, and terpenes, which are found in their essential oils, can reduce blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones. The smell of green, in other words, is good for us. UK wellness brand The Nue. Co’s fragrance Forest Lungs presents itself as an “anti-stress fragrance supplement,” utilizing notes such as vetiver, pine, and patchouli that studies show can reduce anxiety, and Understory, the limited-edition fragrance from Vintner’s Daughter that came and went earlier this year also invoked a restorative venture into woodland, with notes of conifer, bay, moss, and violet leaf.
A myriad of raw materials—both natural and synthetic—can provide green notes in a fragrance composition, just as many different instruments can play a C sharp in a symphony, but the most frequent headliners be the aforementioned galbanum, violet leaf, vetiver, petitgrain, geranium and oakmoss (the last two of which are key to the Fougere, or fern, accord that characterized 19th-century gentleman’s fragrances), as well as herbaceous notes such as rosemary and sage, or even balsamic evergreens such as pine. Cartier perfumer Mathilde Laurent, who is revered for her ability to capture the verisimilitude of plants and flowers in her work, is especially fond of the wild, forest-y scent of lentiscus, or mastic, a shrub that grows in her native Corsica. “I have worked with it in many of my perfumes,” she says, “but it is especially important in Luxuriance Riviere, which was inspired by my favorite river in my Corsican village. Every time I go there with my family and friends, I pick lentiscus leaves and give them to everyone so that they can experience this incredibly fresh, green, watery, even almost garlic-y, scent. It is very dear to me.”
Among the reasons that a discerning nose may be detecting an array of greenhouse-worthy fragrance notes these days, theorizes Carlos Huber, the founder of nice fragrance house Arquiste (home of the incredibly lush wet-jungle-grass candle Nocturnal Green), is that more shades of green are becoming available for perfumers’ palettes. “As perfumery continues to evolve and technology keeps improving, there are better extractions, which opens up access to notes that haven’t been used before. Like, all of the sudden, everyone is talking about tomato leaf. And there are new citrus extractions that fractionate the essential oils into green notes—for example, green mandarin, green orange, or green lemon.” This ability to splice scent and isolate specific olfactive aspects of raw materials enables perfumers to approach them from new angles, like lapidaries faceting jewels.
Flowers can smell green, too—narcissus, hyacinth, lily-of-the-valley and mimosa especially so. For Laurent, green notes “are the difference between a living flower and a cut flower—they are the smell of life.” The scent of snapped-stem freshness disappears during the process of distillation because the green molecules are too fragile, too fugitive, to survive, so a perfumer must bring them back in in order construct a realistic portrait of a living bloom. In Arquiste’s gorgeous Boutonniere No. 7, for example—a fragrance that smells so exactly like a fresh-cut gardenia that you practically feel your nose pressing into its soft white petals and waxy foliage—perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux created the lush effect by couching the flower in notes of Spanish broom, violet leaf, and vetiver.
Because of their airy, animated nature, green fragrances are traditionally associated with sporty, casual spritzes to be worn in spring and summer. But they are perhaps even more resonant in the colder months, when much of the world’s green is sleeping. Isn’t it now that we most long for the miracle of opening buds and unfurling leaves? Green, the color of promise and renewal, reminds us that life will stir again, full of possibility. Spanish natural perfume line Bravanariz, conjures the scent of Catalan woods in winter with notes of pine, juniper, rosemary, and oakmoss in Bosc; Winter 23, from niche British natural perfumery Ffern conjures the season with a swirl of tarragon, peppermint, patchouli, and fir; Krigler's ultra-sophisticated Good Fir sparkles with the crispness of evergreen branches meeting the minerality of cold air.
There is also something thrillingly modern about green scents. They are inherently genderless, and, because they still seem revelatory and sometimes even downright strange when smelled on skin, to wear one can be an act of daring. Frederic Malle, who worked with perfumer Ann Flipo to create the explosively green Editions de Parfum Frederic Malle Synthetic Jungle in 2021, says that vegetal perfumes can be tricky, because “without a connection to the human world, they are just Avatar.” Synthetic Jungle, which drew inspiration from the legendarily uncompromising Vent Vert and from a basil, tarragon, and galbanum accord that Malle found intriguing in Estée Lauder’s 1973 Private Collection, presents a green world so amplified it seems hyper-real, like a Henri Rousseau jungle painting, but it still turns sensual and skin-loving in its patchouli-chypre drydown. “Green fragrances are always tempting for perfumers,” says Malle. “They sort of play with them and then run away. Green is rarely successful; it can be very polarizing. So, it was an interesting territory to enter. You know not everyone is going to love it, but who cares? Sometimes those are the things that take on a life of their own and become classics.”
Laurent’s hope is that green will become more common—and more understood—as the fragrance world finally moves away from sickly sweet florals and borderline-cliché gourmands. “We have been through an era when people had the idea the green notes were not sensual enough or sexy enough. Femininity has been made a caricature with vanilla and sugar, which I’ve always thought was so silly. People are now beginning to understand that femininity and masculinity are not these caricatures. It would be wonderful to smell more green in perfumes because I believe it would bring a lot of happiness and serenity. In the end, perfumery is an art that comes from nature, and humans are connected to nature. It is something that has a strong effect on our bodies and minds.”
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