When winter gives way to spring, it’s as if the entire world opens back for business. Hibernating bears emerge from their slumber and begin the forage. Fields that’ve laid barren, empty and snow-covered become stages for soccer games, kite flying and hopeful, romantic picnics. But the awakening isn’t a linear process. There are fits and starts, false hopes and setbacks. For a fragance to perfectly capture the essence of spring, it must encompass these feelings—optimism tempered by realism yet overcoming it … the earth itself coming back to life, its soils and streams unlocked from their freeze, birthing the heat and smells that come from motion renewed.
Its flaws echo spring’s
Jo Malone’s Peony & Moss is the essence of these ideas. It’s been criticized as dirty, dusty, even bitter. Is it a flawless scent? No more than spring a flawless season. In some ways, its flaws are its authenticity. Without them, it’s not a spring scent, it’s a manmade artifice.
The intense floral notes of peony unveil themselves immediately and with great confidence. The test for whether you’ll love or hate this scent is in its second act, when the floral optimism and grace is interrupted, even upstaged, by an earthy, semi-discordant forest floor. It’s nature saying, you can have my flowers but only if you respect the larger system that makes them possible.
This is a nature lover’s perfume
Those looking for perfection in the micro sense will not find it here. Peony & Moss is a big-picture scent that demands a macro perspective to be truly appreciated and loved.
Just as nature contains bitter and brutal conflicts and contradictions, so too does this scent. But it develops such a natural character as a result that it truly echoes spring’s very essence. Consider it Scent Critic approved.