Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Elizabeth Arden was the professional name of Florence Nightingale Graham, who opened her Red Door salon on Fifth Avenue in 1910 and built one of the first great American beauty businesses. Green Tea, launched in 1999, is by some distance the most important thing the fragrance side of that business has done in the last half-century, and it is widely credited to Francis Kurkdjian, who had created Le Male four years earlier and who now runs his own house and noses for Dior. Arden itself prints no perfumer credit anywhere on the packaging. What Green Tea did was make a whole category legitimate. Tea, mint and citrus had appeared in fragrance before, but this compressed them into something so clean, so cheap and so pleasant that department stores could not keep it in stock, and the tea-and-citrus fresh scent became a permanent fixture on every shelf that followed. Arden publishes the notes: bergamot and lemon at the top, a green tea accord with jasmine accord and celery seeds in the heart, and amber, oakmoss and musk at the base. The longer version usually reproduced adds mint, orange peel and rhubarb up top, and carnation, fennel, caraway and clove in the middle, which explains the surprising savoury edge. On skin the opening is bracingly citric, lemon and mint together, almost like a cold drink. The tea accord that follows is dry and slightly bitter, closer to actual brewed leaf than to the sweetened iced-tea version most brands use, and the celery seed gives it a strange green saltiness that keeps the whole thing from being simply pleasant. The base is soft, mossy and skin-close. For heat it is useful in the plainest possible way. On a humid coastal morning it is genuinely refreshing rather than heavy, and it is one of the few scents comfortable to wear in a stuffy room. It reads as feminine in its marketing and entirely unisex on skin. Be clear-eyed about performance: this is an eau parfumee, a light concentration, and three to five hours is the realistic expectation, bright at the start and very quiet thereafter. It is designed to be sprayed generously and reapplied, and the large bottles reflect that. Longtime wearers report the oakmoss as lighter than in early bottles, consistent with the industry restrictions on that material. Arden has spun the name into a large family of flankers, so make sure the box in front of you is the original.