Luckyscent Videos: Parfums de Nicolai - Fig Tea Eau de Toilette

So it's summertime at Scentbar and we've been talking about figs and the fig genre in perfume. Steven even brought in a branch from his fig tree in his backyard and it's been fun to get a whiff of the real thing, the real natural fig. It's such an interesting category in perfumery and Steven discusses in another video Olivia Giacobetti's contribution where she single-handedly created a fig accord that had never been done before and it had this green, woody, creamy, lactic style and then a lot of figs that followed were really basically kind of doing what she had done with her accord.

So I want to discuss another take on fig and I think a very playful, whimsical take on it and it was done in 2007 by Patricia Nicolai. It's called Fig Tea and I love what it does and the direction she took. This is not the fig tree in the sun. It's not a woody, green, creamy fig. It's actually a very sweet, mouth-watering, juicy, fruity fig that dries into a floral tea. It's really fun to wear and it reminds me more of actually a black tea infused with bits of dried fruit and almost like a plum, a plum-y freshness along with the figginess.

She achieves this with a composition of osmanthes and jasmine flowers and then an orange note at the top, and orange is really the only fruit note in the composition. There's also mate tea in the base, amber and gaiak wood.

I had the chance to speak with the representative from Nicolai perfume a couple weeks ago and I asked him some questions about her inspiration and the development of this perfume. He said that two very important notes in this accord for her were the devana note and the osmanthes. The devana is an herbal note and the green, bitter, creamy leaves of the devana reminded her of the sort of leatheriness of the fig fruit. And then the osmanthes is a very