Marissa Zappas Perfume Smoked Jasmine Black Tea collage using flacon from the brand and a detail from an image from pxhere by Michelyn
Dad’s gone inside to fetch my brothers from the train. It’s sometime in the mid-70s. I am sitting in my dad’s red TR6, double parked by the back entrance of Grand Central Station. Simon and Garfunkel are playing on the car stereo while insistent rain streaks the windows and colours the city grey and silver. It’s quiet despite the mid-morning hour. I watch the rain and listen, pretending to read my book. For these eternal moments, I feel wrapped in the arms of my childhood.
Girl in Green by Sara Shewell Hayden (1899)
This memory often washes over me like a sun shadow when the rain falls in a certain way or haphazardly, the way recollections come and go. And now, as I spray on Marissa Zappas Perfume Smoked Jasmine Black Tea, it comes back to me. I hear a lyric from “The Dangling Conversation”:
And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with book markers
That measure what we’ve lost -Paul Simon
In creating Smoked Jasmine Black Tea, part of the brand’s Garden Collection, perfumer Marissa Zappas was inspired “by the scent of black tea spilled over an old book … (it) harkens back to Emily Dickinson, her dried flowers and poetry.” For me, though, this is the fragrance those years, of falling city rain, wet jasmine flowers spilling from the Upper Westside bodegas, tendrils of steam from a cup of hot tea sitting on the low coffee table as I read about opera singers in one of my father’s music history books.
Marissa Zappas, photo by Julia Comita
It was around this time that I discovered jasmine tea. I was fascinated by the idea of drinking flowers and loved the way the dried blossoms would unfurl in the cup, adding their creamy exoticism to the unremarkable Lipton tea we always had around. My first impression of Marissa Zappas Perfume Smoked Jasmine Black Tea reminds me of that: indolic jasmine girded by Ceylon tea: floral, sensual, tannic, smoky-edged. Bergamot and bitter orange appear right at the top, quieter than usual in a tea fragrance, but distinct. Soon after, the jasmine and bitter citrus are joined by the complementary aroma of dried sage, together adding a linger of the kitchen. The perfume’s beauty, both comforting and poignant, start to wrap around me gently like a muslin blanket.
Old book and jasmine, image via pxhere
As Smoked Jasmine Black Tea unfolds, I begin to smell different facets of the dominant notes. The jasmine has a duality I have not encountered before: the pearlescent, animal smell of the fresh flower dominates, but gradually there is also the delicate needlepoint aroma of the dried bud. This unusual juxtaposition is just lovely.
In the heart, black tea adds a neatly tannic counterbalance to all that indolic creaminess and acts as a partner with the bergamot and sage to keep equilibrium. Ceylon tea often has an astringent, orangey aroma, and this is what the tea note comes across as in Smoked Jasmine Black Tea. Incense is a canny choice to elicit an indefinable smokiness with falling into the heavier lapsang souchong or Russian tea territory. There’s an olfactory likeness in the bite of the citrus and tea notes that combined apes the sensation of tannins over the back of the tongue. I can almost taste Smoked Jasmine Black tea in these moments.
Antique Tea Kettle By Window whisperofvintage, tumblr
I am not sure what is in Smoked Jasmine Black Tea that telegraphs as rain to me, though I think it is orris. It is present from the early stages growing more pervasive until the dry-down, when it fades in favour of when a damp cedar note. This is the scent of inside on rainy days; the grassy smell of swollen old paperbacks combined with wood, crayons and dried herbs. As I inhale Smoked Jasmine Black Tea over and over, I remember reading Emily Bronte in the old school library at recess; the dust-and-vanilla smell of the old green volumes of Dickens my mom gave me one birthday, drinking jasmine tea as I watched rain fall from the front window. Smoked Jasmine Black Tea smells, somehow, of all of this.
A perfumer can give us no greater gift than to strike a responsive chord that moves us, comforts or provokes us. Smoked Jasmine Black Tea may just give Masque Milano’s Lost Alice a run for my favourite tea scent of all time.
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow, I cannot feel your hand
You’re a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs
In the borders of our lives- Paul Simon, The Dangling Conversation
Notes: Bergamot, orange bitter, clary sage, jasmine, black tea, orris, cedarwood, incense.
Disclaimer: Sample of Smoked Jasmine Black Tea kindly given to me by Marissa Zappas Perfume. My opinions, as always, are my own.
Lauryn Beer, Senior Editor
Marissa Zappas Perfume Smoked Jasmine Black Tea via the Perfumer
Thanks to the generosity of Marissa Zappas Perfume, we have a 30 bottle of Smoked Jasmine Black tea for one registered reader in the U.S. only. To be eligible, please leave a comment saying what strikes you about Marissa Zappas Perfume Smoked Jasmine Black Tea based on Lauryn’s review, whether you have tried any of the brand’s fragrances. Draw closes 8/10/2022.
Available at Marissa Zappas.com and Luckyscent
Please read Marissa Zappas Profile in American Perfumery here
Former Sr. Contributor Marianne Butler’s review of Paradise Edition here
Lauryn’s reviews of Violette Hay here, Queen Nzinga here (one of Michelyn Best of 2019 ) and Ching Shi here
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