Agua Lavanda

The parcel arrived a few days ago. A surprisingly large box, and buried in green plastic bubbles inside, the bottle of Antonio Puig’s fabled Agua Lavanda.

I knew it came in a plastic bottle, that this is a fragrance splashed on daily with abandon in Spanish bathrooms by both men and women. At £7.50 plus p&p this is not by any means an expensive purchase. But the size of it – the size of a wine bottle! And so, the moment of truth…could the scent possibly live up to expectations?

The answer is a resounding yes. Forget any ideas that cheap lavender scent will be thin, sharp and unpleasant (as, I’m sorry to say, too many English lavenders are). This is sweet and mellow from the first contact with your skin, and surprisingly deep. Its advocates are right when they say that the balance of the different elements is perfect: the dominant note is sweet lavender but the presence of rosemary, bergamot and geranium give it some zest too. There’s a slight zing of ginger too, at least that’s what the chemistry smells like to me.

Then, after ten minutes or so, the base notes of tonka (vanilla), cedarwood, moss and a tiny hint of musk begin to assert themselves. From then on it’s fresh and clean, but slightly dreamy too, redolent of the fields and hills of the Catalan region where it was first made.

From what I read, Agua Lavanda has been part of Spanish life for more than seventy years. For that to happen, the perfumier has to achieve a special alchemy, a magical element. If that’s there, the perfume will grow ever more powerfully down the years, in part due to the sense of history surrounding it. Imagine all the sensory memories it carries, for so many people.

So yes, too, to the notion that Agua Lavanda could be a real Lavande de Nuit. Not in every element of scent, but in the sense that it is a perfume made of the simple country fragrances of southern Europe, so beautifully made that it has never gone out of fashion and has captured the imagination of generations. Coincidentally, and yet crucially, it was created near Barcelona in 1940 when the war in Europe and the political situation in Spain necessitated manufacturing companies to be self-sufficient in the raw materials they used – just like my Distillerie Musset in Provence.

I couldn’t resist an experiment though. I decanted some Agua Lavanda into an old Annick Goutal spray bottle and added just a few drops of Hypnôse by Lancôme which I thought might bring some bright white flowers into the mix, along with vetiver and more woody vanilla. Then – very, very carefully as it’s so overpowering – I squeezed a tiny drop of Serge Luten’s Un Bois Vanille onto my arm to get the vital smoky element I was looking for and then sprayed the mix into that. Five minutes later, I think I came very close to smelling the fictional Lavande de Nuit.

Lavande de Nuit II

Lavande de Nuit starts as a winter white scent, and turns into summer on the skin. The first burst of powdery sweet heliotrope and white iris develops a sharper note of wild cherry, drying down to a milky almond base with a signature flourish of the unexpected, in this case a bracing dash of hawthorn. After a few hours of warmth it pulsates with wild herbs and lavender in sunlight. A faint mist of caramelised hazelnut and vanilla emerges, and finally a deep smoky lavender. It is one of those scents that seem alive on the skin, subtly incubating, insinuating its personality and leaving a mesmerising trail.

Ever since The Lantern was published I’ve been getting inquiries through my website about the fictional Lavande de Nuit perfume. Then I wrote a Lavande de Nuit post on this blog and it began to get a surprising number of hits through google searches.

I too have been intrigued by the possibility of finding a fragrance that matches some of these imaginary elements and the same spirit. So far the closest is Absinthe Vert in Kilian’s A Taste of Heaven range. But then my old friend Josine (who has always been passionate and very knowledgeable about perfume) wrote a blog post about perfume and I knew that I had to have some Agua Lavanda, a Spanish cologne created in 1940 by Antonio Puig. “A drier Mediterranean scorching countryside smell…with very dry lavender and aromatic herbs such as thyme,” she wrote here.

Styles and tastes in perfume change over time, so it is an added fascination that Agua Lavanda is the right era for Marthe Lincel’s Lavande de Nuit. As I wait for my order to be processed and posted, and I am travelling very hopefully indeed towards the moment I open the parcel.

Perhaps it will be the case, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it originally (and the words rang so true that a simple allusion to them now suffices): “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

But meanwhile, I’m enjoying the pleasure of the wait, the possibility that this might contain that delicious je ne sais quoi that would make this special. Along with top notes of lavender, rosemary, bergamot and petitgrain (made from citrus leaves and twigs) there are promised middle notes of clary sage and geranium, followed by musk, cedarwood, tonka and moss.

I’ve been reading various online reviews of Agua Lavanda and letting the senses expand in the imagination. Wouldn’t you, reading these from Basenotes.com?

‘…the perfect fragrance. Agua Lavanda is the smell of daydreams. A lovely breeze of soapy lavender that will magically make you look more elegant in the perception of those who cross your path. One shouldn't overanalyze but simply enjoy spells like these.’

‘Agua Lavanda tells its story calmly…What is remarkable to me about this scent is the return of middle and even top notes that never really vanished but are again seemingly renewed. This accounts for the surprising longevity of this cologne.’

There are many more reviews that you can read in their entirety here. And if anyone knows it well already, please do tell me what you think.