A delicious whiff of tea

From workshops to specialty stores, and even it's own "university" tea has never been so hot! In the world of fine perfume, it joins the revival of all that's fresh.

by Justine Hossano . 20/07/01

Grown in over forty countries, tea comes in a rainbow of different colors: Japanese green tea, Chinese white and red, Indian black, Taiwanese semi-fermented. It possesses an incredible range of flavors all by itself, without even mentioning fruit- or flower-flavoured teas! Tea was long regarded as a typically Oriental or oh-so-British beverage, but it is starting to gain ground everywhere... thanks to the trend for all things Zen!

China, the cradle of tea

The most beautiful tea gardens, as carefully tended as vineyards, are found in China, the country of origin of both green and black tea. The latter has in fact undergone a fermentation process. Later, convoys of yaks transported compressed blocks of tea to Tibet, then to Georgia, near Russia. Delighted by this new beverage, the English started to build up the famous Darjeeling tea plantations in northern India, on the slopes of the Himalayas, while the Dutch acclimated the shrub in Indonesia, mainly on the island of Java, in the 17th century.

A new wave of freshness

It would be hard not to recognize how interesting tea is in terms of flavor. But how did this steeped drink go from the teacup to the perfumer's testing strip? "It all started with the introduction of light and aquatic perfumes," replies Jean-Michel Duriez, a perfumer-composer at the Patou House. "After the classic sparkling citrus notes and very particular marine notes, tea was, from the outset, the ideal material to renovate the "fresh" family of perfumes, because it evokes water and also because of the light, transparent idea most people have of its smell. L'Eau de Bulgari, with its green tea note, started the trend.

The tea note? Absolute Maté!

Natural tea extract is hard to use because of its rather powerful smell and its marked photosensibilizing properties, so absolute of Maté, also known as Paraguayan tea, combined with hedione is used in its place. The rest is up to the perfumer's inventiveness. So, Jean-Michel Duriez has imagined the "Iced tea" concept in Lacoste for Woman and Yojhi Essential. But the tea theme still has a long way to go before it is played out.