Synthetic Jungle fragrance: woman for the green

If one could fill the jungle dream landscapes of the painter Henri Rousseau into a bottle, the result would be a perfume like Synthetic Jungle;

a moist, green scent that reminds one of the color of the jungle, but does not break out into the wild, but builds up in well-structured splendor just like Rousseau's pictures.

The perfumer Anne Flipo designed this fragrance for Frédéric Malle and was inspired by the post-impressionist's paintings during the creative process.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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Synthetic Jungle rises from the bottle with the fresh green of basil in the beginning.

Light, bright accords of ylang-ylang, jasmine and lily of the valley spread out like a clearing in moist green, only to be grounded after a few minutes by patchouli.

Anne Flipo once said that she likes to create her fragrances around an idea.

She found one for Synthetic Jungle by looking into perfume history.

On the trail of the green scents

Together with Frédéric Malle, she went on the trail of the so-called green scents.

“There is only a small perfume family of these,” says Malle.

"It started with

at Balmain in the early 1950s, then two decades later there was Chanel's

and finally Estée Lauder's

1973, that was the perfect green perfume."

However, the green scents had a hard time asserting themselves against the opulent competition in the 1970s.

Between the oil crisis and the sexual revolution, people were looking for security and sensuality, Yves Saint Laurent hit the zeitgeist with his oriental fragrance

.

Great longing for freshness and nature

The fact that it is precisely the green niche fragrances that appealed to Anne Flipo has a current effect today, pandemic-stricken and with a great longing for freshness and nature. Flipo took Lauder's composition as a template, freed it from everything that would now be considered clumsy and out of fashion, and broke it down to the basic chord of galbanum.

Green scents seem to be a specialty of the female “noses”. Germaine Cellier made the first foray into this fragrance direction with the aforementioned

for Balmain. Cellier was one of the first women to prevail in the male-dominated business. “Our perfume industry has its roots in Grasse in the south of France, an area where women traditionally do not work,” says Malle. “When the first perfume school was opened in Paris, the business opened up to the female talent. Today women make up more than half of perfumers. "

Born in 1963 in Laon, France, Anne Flipo is the third woman to publish a perfume in Malles' collection.

The cooperation has to go particularly well.

During the conversation via Zoom, Malle kept sniffing his wrists.

That is the next project that he is working on with the perfumer.