Jo's Scent Notes: Chloé Atelier des Fleurs Sous Les Pins

I’m not going on holiday this summer. Or… I am, but I’m using fragrance to take me to places, rather than trains, planes and automobiles – because I am lucky enough to live by the sea and to NOT have to go away during school vacation time. So I’m staying firmly put.

However, it’s one of perfume’s many magic tricks, to be able to travel via what you spray or dab on your skin. To that end, I asked brilliant fragrance writer Suzy Nightingale to explore this in the most recent edition of On The Scent, the new magazine about fragrance that I founded and edit. You can get glimpses of her article, below (and further down), but it’s honestly worth a read. The magazine’s free online here, but we’re discovering that far more people than we initially imagined want to get their hands on the beautiful print edition, which you can find here. (Actual magazines being an excellent antidote to having to spend w-a-y too much time online, nowadays.)

So… over the next few weeks, while Sarah takes a break (also staycationing), I’ve decided to travel to various different locations via perfume, instead.

**Suzy Nightingale**’s feature from *On The Scent*

The first is the South of France, somewhere I absolutely love, and where once upon a time I used to stay with a French friend almost every summer. It’s the pine trees that get me, there – one of my favourite aromas in the world. Those tall, sometimes scruffy evergreens, whose resinous smell just fills the air – and which perfumer Quentin Bisch here captures in Chloé Atelier des Fleurs Sous Les Pins just so, so well, in a luminous, airy way.

Quentin was actually inspired for this by the island of Porquerolles, a pedestrians-only haven off the French coast that’s on my bucket (and spade?) list. Indeed, in its creation, a portable technology called Scent Trek™ was deployed to capture the air of the place itself in a fragrance accord, to become part of this composition.

Meanwhile – and I have absolutely no idea how perfumers pull off the astonishing trick of creating a sense of temperature in a fragrance – this has moments of feeling sun-drenched, in the opening, becoming cooler and shaded as it wears on skin, before warming right up again. Sous Les Pins actually feels more akin to a Cologne, at first – crisp and effervescent – later becoming resinous and aromatic, with eucalyptus, myrtle and cypress. (All scents that I absolutely love.) Then as it mellows on skin, ambery ingredients (Ambrox/Ambrofix) glow alongside benzoin, a sweet resin, making it feel warm again.

Sous Les Pins is actually one of four fragrances in this Chloé ‘Essences Méditerranéennes’ (yup, a mouthful) which also features Vert Soleil (green,citrusy, woody), Sable Lavande (a ‘solar’ lavender, again with a feel of heat), and luminous floral Plage du Figuier. (You can see them below.)

They are all absolutely worth exploring – a very interesting collection – but I find Sous Les Pins, my favourite of the four, almost aromatherapeutically calming, and have been wearing it a lot. I yearn deeply for pine trees and those sandy paths to the beach, for picnics and bathing – but I can absolutely live without the travel hassles.

And this is verily a landscape, dazzlingly bottled.

£115 for 50ml eau de parfum – buy here