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InsisaGam – :
Heavy indolic gardenias, so heavy you can almost feel it’s sticky weight on your wrist. But there’s still a ghost-like greenness, haunting for first couples of minutes. The animalistic aspect of gardenias taunt itself at the very beginning, and getting more obvious after one hour, as the sweetness fades away.
Well, unsurprisingly, after about four hours, what’s left is dusty musky scent. The flowers are gone, then dead bodies buried underneath reveal themselves.
UPDATE: it’s quite rubbery at the beginning.
artless89 – :
Night in the early summer, hypnotic array of hundreds of overripe gardenias on a densely laden bush. So heavy with indoles that it makes you almost drowsy. This gardenia is the corpulent, fleshy bloom that entices with it’s pale torpid gaze, then snares you with a surreal aroma that surpasses all others.
I’ve experienced this in real life, but never before in a perfume. Most gardenia perfumes are happy to simply smell like the flower. This one takes you into a life event of the bloom. Unbelievably realistic. There is an animalic quality to it, just as real blooms have when a little past their prime. They seem to exhale the last, and the most potent, of their fragrance before they expire. Or like fruit, just on the edge of being too ripe. The smell is enhanced and magnified. Like saying, enjoy me now before it’s too late.
Jardenia is the pinnacle of gardenia perfumes. An experience in the pathos of a flower, it’s dying breath. It’s last seduction.
IrinaZvezda – :
Jardenia is the creamy smell of organic decay found underneath your bare feet as you walk through a pine needle forest during the twilight of a day some time in Autumn. The initial green is sharp and mentholated, slightly resinous, honeyed and feels sticky – exactly what you’d expect to find when breaking the tip off those fresh needles and get close to inhale their aroma. Sprouting up through the underwood are yellow chanterelles, russulas and champignons with their rubbery flesh smelling as if toasted dry in a frying pan before melting a knob of salted butter over them and tossing the mixture sprinkling it with finely cut leafs of aromatic tarragon and sage. There is a sense of the fantastic and otherwordly without too much menace and I wonder what Alice would have felt about this stage of Jardenia which seems reminiscent of Wonderland’s secluded Boro Grove.
Just as the mushrooms’ stems become overly ripe and begin to turn into slush they break open and release spores and puffs of blue cheesy decay into the darkness of the woods thus taking their silent bow to salute the entrance of their Gardenia Queen; pale in radiance, softly peach-cheeked, tall and authoritative as the sole ruler of her fragrant covert without a king She allows in just about sufficient amounts of light and floralcy to avoid being too biased toward indole and cold earthy decay And this is how she rules for another day, each day, until night falls.
voloshenko79mailru – :
I tried a sample of this at Bergdorf Goodman a few years ago and was intrigued by the opening of it, but the drydown had an almost “barn yard” cast to it that was really unpleasant. It didn’t start out that way, but somewhere around the 1 hour mark it took on this strange, “unwashed” odor. I’ve since tried it again, and for some reason don’t get too much of that now. I have no way of knowing if anything has been changed ( we’re talking about a span of a few years between samplings, and I still have the first one with which to compare the recent one ), but the new sample is significantly different from that first one. This fragrance and Velvet Gardenia of Tom Ford are two that seem to be going for the “under belly” of the gardenia flower, and while this can be interesting to a collector or an enthusiast, most people wanting to smell of gardenias are thinking of that wonderful, creamy green scent that happens when the flowers are fresh. Jardenia seems to be bringing that slight mushroomy/blue cheese note to the fore that SOME gardenias have, which could be nice if it lasted for more than ten minutes. Unfortunately, it quickly goes to a dry grassy note that is not so unpleasant, but I don’t know if I like that on my skin for hours. It is strongly reminiscent of the smell of dried jasmine flowers in green tea. If you’ve ever floated cut gardenia flowers in a bowl of water, then you know that after about a week they start turning dark yellow and getting dark brown spots. Although they can still smell quite beautiful at that point, they will soon take on a “rot” smell that is still kind of sweet. If you remove them from the water and let them shrivel, they smell like sweet dead leaves. This is what Jardenia smells like, at least on my skin, and more so from this new sample. Just like gardenias that are almost dead. It never smells quite like a newly opened bloom. Of course, gardenias can smell quite different depending on the variety. Gardenia “Prostrata” smells very honey dew melon – like, where as “Belmont” smells very heavy of indole. The variety that, to me anyway, smells most like Jardenia is “Aimee Yoshioka”. This one is more Matsutake mushroom like and a lot less sweet than the others – kind of a
“suede – mushroom” gardenia, if you will. Is Jardenia worth the price? I wouldn’t buy it for myself. The tiny samples I now have are enough to last me quite a long time, but for the enthusiast or collector of curiosities, perhaps so. For my money, I want a gardenia that really comes on strong with the scent of the freshly opened flower and stays that way for a while. For that I highly recommend Dame Perfumery’s Gardenia Soliflore, which is one of the most realistic renderings of the fragrance of gardenias that I’ve ever encountered. It also lasts for quite some time on the skin, and even longer on fabric, which is an unusual thing in the world of gardenia perfumes.
On an interesting note – the gentleman who showed me the JAR line at Bergdorf said that gardenias don’t really smell like anything till they are almost dead. This is, of course, at variance with a vast body of opinion to the contrary, but it does make me wonder if he perhaps heard this from mister Rosenthal himself, or from whoever designed the fragrance. It occurs to me that this would make a great fragrance for Morticia!
Memxy243elipseskism – :
Anyone who has experienced JAR (both the fragrances and the store), knows what I’m talking about. JAR is not a perfume shop, it’s a secret club. Their compositions are far beyond being just fragrances, they’re more like the car crashes in Ballard’s Crash. Perversely fascinating, kinda morbid and definitely out of this world.
Jardenia is one of those fragrances that, unless you want to be called names, you can’t say you don’t like it. Well, I actually can’t say that I completely like it.
The opening accord is absolutely stunning in its simple complexity. A huge indolic gardenia note of immense beauty strikes as a pyrotechnical effect. It initially kisses you then shakes your head to finally leave you speechless for its unquestionable charme. Almost an hologram in it’s vibrant/vivid reproduction of the real flower. The opening phase endures for almost one hour to then introduce a mushroom note that smells a whole lot like “funghi porcini”. Yes, fresh cut funghi porcini. The fragrance still works and morphes into a challenging phase that’s typical of many other deliveries from the house. At the three hours mark, the gardenia slightly recedes while the mushroom note slowly takes over to the point of becoming absolutely dominating for the rest of the fragrance’ evolution. After ten plus hours it gets definitely exasperating and, at least to me, nausea inducing. Scrub time.
Ok, Jardenia definitely makes a strong impression and it’s one of those fragrances that you encounter every once in 100 years but I would wear it? No. This stuff is not for me but, if you like unique fragrances, this is something to surely check out.
In the end, I loved the opening and detested the drydown.
One more point: I strongly believe that in this specific case the “exclusivity aurea” of the brand plays a particularly relevant part. I’d be genuinely curious to play the blind game with Jardenia and see if most of the people who love this fragrance, would have the same impressions if they smelled this stuff blind. Don’t get me wrong, the quality is there, that’s unquestionable but I’d really love to know other’s people reactions to a blind test…
Rating: 9/10 (for the audacity)
6.5/10 (final result)