Menton, Côte d'Azur, France - Wikipedia - Gerard Cohen, 2003
I am a memory hoarder. I like remembering people, places and events in my life that are meaningful to me. I journal often and like to place small mementos near an entry to spark a deeper memory. There’s a sprig of spruce from a canoe trip in Northern Ontario, when we canoed every day - even though it rained every day - skinny-dipped in cool, clear lakes and ended each day with the deep, sound sleep that comes from sheer physical exhaustion. There too, is the invitation to my niece’s wedding. A beautiful young woman marrying her one and only, in front of family and so many friends that I wondered if the room could hold all the love that was in it. The invitation is so ‘them’ and each time I come across it, it reminds me of her distinctive style and loving spirit. And there’s a dried lily in the gutter of the journal, beside an entry about a romantic dinner on a restaurant terrace on the promenade in Menton on a late summer’s evening years ago. There’s a stain on the page with an arrow pointing to the the lily and the words: “Lys Mediteranee – Malle – buy it” beside it.
I must have come across the fragrance and been impressed enough with it that I made a note to myself to buy it. Clever. Very clever. Except I didn’t buy it. I got busy, I got distracted, I moved on to the next thing. Besides, just because I write in my journal often doesn’t mean I go back and read it often. Duh.
A couple of years later, I rediscovered Lys Mediteranee. Smelling it on my skin again, I remembered its serene beauty and how the fragrance of a spiced lily, gently kissed by a salty sea breeze, made me feel. I remembered the notation in my journal to buy it and this time, I did.
Lys Mediteranee opens with a note of sweet, fresh smelling orange blossom. Bergamot adds a nose-tingling tartness that corrals the sweetness and gives the fragrance a green backbone. Quietly, the flowers start to bloom. I smell the heady, rich scent of lilies, waxy and green, their spicy aspect heightened with a note of clove. Jasmine and tuberose are here too, deepening richness. Add to this the smell of a salty sea breeze - not the smell of the beach so much as the clean, fresh, aquatic smell of the sea and I am back on that restaurant terrace in Menton.
Lys Mediteranee dries down to a soft, airy skin scent that is heady, floral, and fresh. It’s just a gorgeous fragrance to wear in summer.
With Lys Mediteranee perfumer Edouard Fléchier has created a fragrance with an elegant minimalism so haunting and evocative, that it reawakens a time and place in me like no other fragrance ever has. I think this is what I’ve come to like most about it.
Keeping a journal is important to me, not just to records events, but to track motional breakthroughs, lessons and insights that, I hope, make me a better person. For example, here’s a lesson I just learned: read journals more often.
Lys Mediteranee is listed in our Decant Store. Decants are $8.00 for 1 ml.