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Post by FeralJasmine
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In my last column I talked about my current obsession with realistic gardenia scents and my search for a new one now that (I can’t resist throwing this in again) the corporate jackals at Tom Ford have discontinued Velvet Gardenia, the best photorealistic gardenia fragrance ever bottled. There, now that the bashing is out of my system I can proceed more constructively.
Photo Stolen DeviantArt
While I have always loved gardenias, my obsession stems from the day after my father’s death in hospice care, when I was packing to go home and on some impulse I can’t explain broke a lot of gardenia flowers off my mother’s bush and put them in the top of my suitcase. Back home, the rush of pure scent when I opened my suitcase is something I will never forget. I think of it every time I think about gardenias, or grief, or joy. I have spent a small fortune on samples to try to duplicate that experience, and have learned a lot about how gardenia scents are put together in the process.
Fleur Blanche Ajne
My Gardenia Fetish, Part 2
Photo Stolen Fragrantica
Fragrantica gives these featured accords in one line:
Gardenia, white flowers, woody notes, fruity notes
Today’s find is Fleur Blanche, by Ajne perfumers in Carmel, California. It’s available as an oil or an extrait. I have only sampled the extrait. This is described by the maker as a pure gardenia scent, but to my nose it’s a complex walk through a garden of white flowers. The open is pure lovely jasmine. Clouds of jasmine, indolic enough to make this a complete sensual experience. You pause under the jasmine arbor, intoxicated, your skin quivering. Slowly you drift on past tuberoses, maybe a little white rose, an orange tree blossoming in the background. And then, gradually, you realize that gardenia has emerged and taken over. Not a fleshly gardenia with its faintly fungal undertone of the earth from which it sprung, but a dream-gardenia, floating above its origin. The very earthly beginning comes to an angelic conclusion.
The garden of white flowers is the primal garden, the origin and center, the place where Goddess meets God or two gods or two goddesses merge and everything else ceases to matter and love begins anew. We may never completely enter it, mundane concerns may seem to shut us out of it, but stand at the threshold and sniff and, if you don’t exactly enter that shimmering world, surely you will be lifted out of your own for a while.
Photo Stolen juantiagues Flickr
As with any other blissfully sensual experience, choose your occasion. These scents are not for the office, unless your office is a lot more liberal than mine.
Further reading: ScentHive and That Smell
Ajne has Fleur Blanc from $40/15ml Roll On Oil to $195/30ml Parfum Spray
Ajne makes a lot of other interesting 100% natural and organic oils that I’m happily testing my way through. The oils can be shipped anywhere. They do have a special permit to ship the extraits overseas, but it’s expensive. It might be more practical if a group of friends ordered together.
FeralJasmine
Australian Perfume Junkies 
FJ, what a moving story. I have many vivid memories of my father’s death, but none that would inspire a quest for beauty. Yet I find that grief is transformative, whether we like it or not, and so it is a kind of quest, and does seem to inspire other quests. One of mine was to recite the Kaddish, the prayer that Jews are expected to recite in memory of their parents and others, each day for one year, in a community of people. (For a ‘community,’ Jewish law requires a quorum of ten male Jews, but I rejected the particularist and sexist and quantitative dimensions of this law.) This practice brought me to a lot of synagogues I would never have visited otherwise, and in this way I received support from hundreds or maybe thousands of strangers over the course of that year. I was in no state, at that time, to devise my own way of seeking out what grief required, and so I leaned on tradition. You have shared a way of your own creation to walk the path of grief with purpose, and with beauty. And in sharing this with us, you have created an opportunity to receive the support of strangers. You have mine.
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Bless you and thank you! I love the way that you were able to use your faith tradition to heal your grief while transcending the parts of it that would have been confining rather than helpful.
And community moves in mysterious ways. The many kindly people who chatted with me online about gardenia scents, helped clarify for me the complications in making a gardenia scent, and sent me samples of some that I couldn’t got hold of otherwise had no idea what my gardenia quest was about, but they all played a role in healing.
Along the way, I learned that it is possible to deal directly with a wholesale florist and buy a box of 12 dozen fresh gardenias. The cost is high, but I find myself thinking what a tribute it would be. Candles and gardenias everywhere…it may need to happen.
Thanks so much for joining me here, Leathermountain! Our little fragrance community offers kinds of support that we might never have anticipated when we got started
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Hey there FeralJasmine,
You tell a good story, from the heart and beautiful. I have 2 new gardenia plants that I will be putting in the ground this weekend. I will thing of you and your Dad whenever I smell their flowers.
Portia xx
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Hi Portia, may they grow quickly and bloom abundantly! Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it.
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The name Ajne rang a bell, so I checked out the natural perfume sites I was saving, but haven’t followed up on. Sure enough,there was Ajne and the page it opened up to was about Fleur Blanche – the one I wanted to try. Now I know it’s a must try. Thanks so much for this heartfelt review!
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