Launched in 2000, Lys Mediteranee was created by master perfumer Edouard Fléchier for Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle.

There’s a dried lily in the gutter of one of my old journals 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 lily and the words: “Lys Mediteranee – Malle – buy it” beside it, and later, 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 clove note. Jasmine and tuberose are here, too, deepening lushness. 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’s 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.

Notes: orange blossom bergamot, jasmine, tuberose, clove, sea breeze accord, musk.