Note Pyramid
White Tea
White Iris
Mate
White Tea
The quietest fragrance the house sells is also one of its best known, and Elizabeth Arden White Tea Eau de Toilette has spent years proving that a scent does not need to shout to find an audience. It opens on fern, mandarin orange and clary sage, which is a more interesting trio than the bottle lets on. Fern is cool, green and slightly damp, clary sage is herbal and faintly nutty with a hay dry edge, and the mandarin keeps the pair of them from reading as a garden shed. Nothing in the first ten minutes is sweet.
White tea is the centre and it is used with restraint, soft and clean and barely bitter, more the smell of warm water over leaves than of a strong brew. White iris gives it a cool, powdery body, and mate runs underneath with a bitter, hay like herbal roughness that stops the whole thing turning into soap.
The base is where it becomes comfortable. Ambrette adds a nutty musky softness, tonka bean a sweetness closer to icing sugar than to dessert, and amber a low resinous warmth. Caroline Sabas, Guillaume Flavigny and Rodrigo Flores-Roux are credited with the composition, which dates from 2017.
As an eau de toilette it is deliberately light, four or five hours, settling against the skin once the opening hour is done. That is the point of it. This is a fragrance for offices, hospitals, hot weather, long flights and anywhere that a strong scent would be unwelcome, and it reads entirely unisex.
An American beauty company built outwards from a New York salon, Elizabeth Arden sells skincare and cosmetics as well as perfume. Blue Grass is its oldest scent, while this range is among the most popular things it makes. Revlon completed the acquisition in September 2016 and manufactures the fragrances.
Please note: images are a guide only. Packaging and bottle design may occasionally differ from those shown due to manufacturer updates or promotions.
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