Mezel Parfums Menthe Enivrante courtesy of the brand
Traditionally, with all its resolutions and forward thinking, January is a month for reinvention. And I’m well aware that it’s a bit of a clumsy and inelegant segue to apply that same resolute thinking to perfumery, but for a lot of smaller scale, niche brands, reinventing – or at least approaching the form differently – is what creates products that stand out; so I’m rolling with it. Take Mezel Parfums, a Franco-Moroccan brand launched in 2024, for instance. Their five fragrances all do something unique and unexpected, breathing life into concepts we thought we already knew.
Cuir de Pasteque is an ever-wet floral that somehow stays permanently breathy with its astoundingly natural smelling watermelon facets (a finalist in The Fragrance Foundation Awards France 2025). Their Cafe Defendu combines cannabis with ‘three beans’ (coffee, tonka and cacao) to make a wood fragrance that feels wonderfully foreign and dusty and their out-and-out gourmand, Datte Opaline, delivers a date accord that should be studied for providing a date’s characteristic sweetness without ever delivering too much body. In essence, each existing ‘genre’ they’ve approached, they’ve managed to manipulate.
Mezel Parfums Menthe Enivrante courtesy of the brand
The brand’s amber fragrance, Menthe Enivrante, is inspired by a clandestine royal tradition of serving mint tea infused with ambergris. It’s one that reportedly left their residences smelling incredible and with such decadent origins it allowed the perfumers Julie Massé and Jérôme di Marino to “play around” with overdosing materials like absinthe, the titular Moroccan mint and the mineral amber accord, which was undoubtedly created to represent the multifaceted nature of natural ambergris.
I find mint can be a pretty demanding material to work with. On the one hand its bracing nature and uplift is a super desirable effect, but add too much and it can make even the most beastly compositions just smell like toothpaste. Here though, mint is very much part of the focus of the perfume, so the perfumers have embraced its chaotic nature, pairing it with the addictive, ambery herbal tones of wormwood and somehow making it all smell warm just like mint leaves do when they’re steeping in boiling water. That golden mint smell pervades too, living long into the drydown of Mezel Parfums Menthe Enivrante, creating a sort of a eccentric herbal and fresh amber that still has real molecular weight to it.
Moroccan mint tea, beach-cast ambergris on display in Jovoy Mayfair
The tension between the cooling, fresh properties of mint and the warmth of the amber dimension is unique, adding a properly inspired twist to a mineral amber perfume. In the wider context of the rest of the brand’s perfumes it’s indicative of their approach, but in isolation it’s a composition that is quite brazen and remarkably evocative of its ostentatious Moroccan mint inspiration.
Notes: absinthe, Moroccan mint, violet leaves, mineral amber, myrrh, benzoin, cypriol, signature musk accord
Disclaimer: a sample set of Mezel’s five perfumes was provided by the brand.
–Oli Marlow, Senior Contributor
All images used courtesy of the brand unless otherwise noted.
Mezel Parfums discovery set
Thanks to the generosity of Mezel Parfums we have a discovery set of their 5 fragrances available in the EU & US only. You must register or your entry will not count. To be eligible, please leave a comment saying what sparks your interest based on Oli’s review, his overview of the brand and where you live. Draw closes 1/22/2026
Please read more about young perfumers Jerome di Marino here and Julie Masse here
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