Musc & Jasmin

For Jean-Claude Ellena, jasmine is bound up with childhood. On summer-holiday mornings, Ellena went along with a grandmother who would go to "pick the Flower," the phrase used for jasmine.

Ellena remembers terraced gardens where the women picked, talked and laughed while their children ran around. Sun-warmed skin, beads of sweat, baskets filling on the ground: the musk of that sweat and the narcotic bloom of jasmine became tangled together and left the young Ellena unsettled.

The composition is just four notes. Jasmine opens, cassis bud and clove add a green, spiced edge at the heart, and white musk settles underneath, keeping the scent close to the skin, somewhere between flower and body.