Goldfield & Banks Ingenious Ginger, image via the brand

It all started with ginger. One of my favourite aromas in the kitchen, once I found that its exotic aroma turned up in perfume, that was it. Down the fragrance rabbit hole I went like a ginger-drunk bunny, swapping vials with MUA-ers, buying samples from online frag boutiques, devouring fragrance blogs and reading about every perfume I could find that featured this spicy number. And here I am now, some 20 years later, with an armoire stuffed to the gills with samples, sprayers, decanters, vials and bottles. They spill onto my dresser. I even bought a vitrine – a vitrine, for heaven’s sake – to house more. Granted, most of these perfumes don’t have a drop of ginger in them, but my whole perfume journey can be traced to my love of that nose-tickling, knobby, sassy, root. Ginger, I just can’t quit you.

Dimitri Weber via Goldfield & Banks and Hamid Merati-Kashani, image Firmenich

Thankfully, there are others in the fragrance world who share my adoration of this unmistakable, uniquely beautiful scent. Early favourites include Serge Lutens Five O’Clock Gingembre, Lentheric Shanghai, and DSH Perfumes Indochine. But, of course, obsessive that I am, new gingers always pique my interest. I have sampled many ginger perfumes over the years, but many were bitter disappointments: too sweet, too brash, too rooty, too … not ginger. That singular spectrum of zingy, sweet-sharp, spicy, fresh, green, lily-ish aromas that rush at you all at once: it’s a high bar that not many fragrances have reached. But here I needn’t have worried. Goldfield & Banks Ingenious Ginger, a verve-y, aromatic, sophisticate, lives up to its name.

Alpina caerulea, creative commons image

The fragrance is inspired by the unscented flowers of Australian Native Ginger (Alpinia Caerulia). Also known as Red Back Ginger, the blossoms grow in profusion around Goldfield & Banks creative director Dmitri Weber’s tropical summer house. Weber wanted to create a fragrance that captured the bloom’s lush beauty and evocative name and worked with Firmenich perfumer Hamid Merati-Kashani to invent a scent. The result is a fresh, sparkling ginger cocktail that is fruity, dry, and so fizzy that I am tempted to drink it.

Fresh ginger could have no better introduction than here. On first spray, brightness explodes like a sudden glare of sun from puckery lemon and juicy, sweet mandarin. The citruses play off each other’s contrasting sharpness and sweetness, suggestive of things to come. But the ginger doesn’t hang about: just as soon as the citrus sets the stage, in it hurtles: effervescent, sharp, dry, like old school Canada Dry. The next few minutes, the ginger unfolds like its many-petaled stalks with facets that kaleidoscope from sweet and tickly to arid and austere and back again. The flowery heart of rose, magnolia and jasmine play a key role in developing the fragrance’s multidimensional quality. While the lemon continues to zip along the side-lines like a self-propelled pinball, magnolia, which always smells like lemon crema to me, opens and sidles up to the citrus, cutting into the sharpness just enough to make calm it down. Jasmine, possibly in the form of hedione©, adds a fresh, breezy quality, and rose complements and enlarges the ginger’s flowery aspect.

Goldfield & Banks Ingenious Ginger via the brand

Over the next half hour or so, Goldfield & Banks Ingenious Ginger ping pongs between brisk and brilliant and huggingly balmy. A sensation of heat is cleverly conveyed by notes that augment the root’s inherent warmth: dry amber – I’m thinking Ambrox – woolly cashmeran and sandalwood. A dash of vanilla keeps things from getting too arid so that in the dry-down, Ingenious Ginger maintains its tightrope walk between pungent/bright and floral/warm from start to finish.

With the sun shining brilliantly today and the heat just edging into late spring, Ingenious Ginger is quite perfect. It’s energizing and upbeat, but so summer-stylish that it almost cries out for well-cut linen trousers and some fly shades. Even if you’re more of a sweats and sneakers fan, wearing this terrific ginger frag will make you feel sharp as a tack. Fresh without edgy, sharp without piercing, floral without heady, and just this side of tropical, this is everything a ginger scent should be.

Notes: Australian ginger flower accord, bergamot Italy, lemon Italy, magnolia China, jasmine, rose, mandarin Brazil, sandalwood Australia, patchouli Indonesia, amber, vanilla, musk, cashmeran.

Disclaimer: Sample of Goldfield & Banks Ingenious Ginger kindly provided by Luckyscent. My opinions, as always, are my own.

Lauryn Beer, Senior Editor

photo ÇaFleureBon©

Thanks to the generosity of a team member, we have a sample of Goldfield & Banks Ingenious Ginger for a registered reader in the USA only. To be eligible, please leave a comment describing what strikes you about Ingenious Ginger based on Lauryn’s review and whether you have tried Goldfield & Banks fragrances. Draw closes 5/9/2023.

Available at Luckyscent.com and other fine stockists

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Goldfield & Banks Ingenious Ginger is the newest addition to the brand’s Native Collection.

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