Jo's Scent Notes: Hair by Sam McKnight The Fragrance With Benefits

My job is not to make hairdressers’ juniors happy, but it’s a nice side benefit. And since I started using Sam McKnight’s haircare – keeping it backstage at John Frieda (ssssshhh), for blow-dries and cuts, as well as travelling with it – I’ve never sat at the backwash without one of the young apprentices commenting, ‘God, I LOVE the scent of your haircare.’

Well, so do I. It is, quite simply, the best-smelling haircare I’ve ever used. (And I’ve used a LOT.) I would stick my neck out and go so far as to say it’s the best-smelling haircare on the planet, actually.

That comes as no surprise to me, because the ‘nose’ is Lyn Harris, whose fragrances I’ve written about here and here and here in this column, and who I think is among the most talented perfumers working in the world today, now with her own fragrance house Perfumer H, but before that, as founder and perfumer at Miller Harris. There’s a signature to Lyn’s work, an airiness, a transparency, sometimes a crispness, even when the fragrances are dark and woody (Patchouli) or warm and comforting (Feast).

So, Sam’s brief to Lyn was in part to transport the user to his back garden in north-west London – most precisely, his garden after the rain. This flower-filled sanctuary, completely private and with roses and clematis scampering up every surface it can cling to, is Sam’s pride and joy. I’m lucky enough to have visited a couple of times, for a cuppa (Sam and I go all the way back to the 1980s, when I was Editor of Honey, and Sam made up half the ‘dream team’ that I sent on trips all over the world, with his friend Mary Greenwell), and I’ve included a couple of pics below so you can see the #inspo for the scent of his haircare.

Ever since I first got a whiff of this, I’ve been one of the legions of fans who’ve said to Sam: ‘You need to bring this out as a perfume.’ And now he has. Well, technically a hair fragrance rather than a skin fragrance, but to be honest, you’ll perceive it on yourself all the more for that. It was Estée Lauder who first started advising women to ‘spray fragrance and walk through it,’ but the problem with that is that perfumes designed for skin often feature high levels of alcohol, which can prove drying to hair. (The philosophy was sound, however: hair is a great carrier of fragrance, and it’s somehow time-released when you move your head.)

By contrast – and it’s summed up in the name for this, ‘Fragrance With Benefits’ – Sam’s formula features lashings of hair-friendly ingredients, so it actually enhances condition rather than damaging, with Pro-Vitamin B5, UVA/UVB protection and softening, conditioning agents. My hair is certainly in even better nick, since using this, despite the ravages of sea water and a LOT of sun, this summer.

The reason I’ll be using this spray, though, is for that truly exquisite perfume, with the shine a mere bonus: a transporting blend of green notes, damp and mossy elements, herbs, a tingle of pepper and a drift of incense, tethered by the woodiness of cedarwood and juniper. There are flowers in there, for sure – roses, I get, but overall, honestly, for me it nails the moment stepping into the garden first thing in the morning, bare feet drenched in dew, drinking a cup of tea while drinking in the tranquillity, and enjoying all the early morning wafts in the air. Gardening in my nightie, in other words. (I wouldn’t mind betting that Sam gardens in his PJs.)

An incredible peony, grown by Sam McKnight (and photographed for scale against Jo’s hand!)

It actually reminds me very much of another fragrance I fell for at Perfumer H, by the name of Magnolia Leaf, which Lyn gave me a bottle of for a Very Significant Birthday, a few years ago. That greenness, that freshness, that airy quality. Sadly, Magnolia Leaf is no longer in the main collection, but Lyn archives her fragrances, so that fans can order them to be specially made up. I was considering doing just that, but Hair by Sam McKnight The Fragrance With Benefits has me thinking twice.

Meanwhile, if you see me swishing my hair around like Miss Piggy, you’ll know why…

£44 for 75ml – buy here