Bancha and O-Cha - Spring Tea perfumes

There is a transparent, lightly caffeinated energy to tea perfumes that has a warmer season association. Spring's been sunny and cool with even cooler evenings this time, so tea itself, drunk from a flowered or Japanese patterned cup, feels right. Having the essence of particular teas captured and enhanced as a ornamental veil for the skin intensifies all that tea is about, especially the tea experience of sipping a fragrant liquid slowly. These scents rise up from your skin into your face in similar way as when tasting the liquid itself. Both of these are very true tea scents.

Two perfumers, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz with Bancha, and Maria McElroy of Aroma M with O-Cha, have new scents this Spring, interpreting green tea to become expressive of a specific scent-flavor of "tea". Green teas range so widely in type and effect and in use, and these scents are at either end of the spectrum. Tea perfumes are a genre that are now referencing the subtleties of wide range of types of tea, and tea cultures around the world and even within each type.

I know that Maria has been a student of the tea ceremony in Japan, and I know that Dawn has been living in the American West for some time, where tea drinking as a beneficial habit beginning with the sixties and seventies has flourished and expanded.

Bancha tea is made from the larger, older leaves that are pruned at the end of the season, and therefore have become more concentrated and healthfully beneficial over the growing season. The DSH Bancha perfume is very like the lightly toasty, woody tea with a very subtle sweetness in its air. There is a stems-and-twigs quality to the perfume that gives a warm golden tone to the green tea effect. This is very realistic green tea, and an all botanical scent that would be worn well by a range of ages and both men and women. The holy basil has an anise tone that keeps it from being too plain in its beauty. It has been composed with certain ayurvedic qualities to render it a beneficial experience, similar to the drinking of bancha tea itself. The notes of mandarin, lime, mint, yuzu, holy basil, centifolia rose, sambac jasmine, pine needle, sandalwood and cedar, are so blended that each one does not individually register but settle together completely, in a quiet calmness that emanates a quality of peaceful innocence.

The Aroma M new fragrance O-Cha is the Japanese term for tea, which is basically defined as always green, and this scent is like the Spring tea made of the first young leaves and sprouts gathered in April and May. Densely green, clean, with a floral layer that is honeyed with citrus, it radiates out from the skin with a strong throw and an invigorating quality. This one is also very representational, reminding me of cool sweetened summer teas, combined with the very feminine aura that is part of the Geisha line of Aroma M. It is long lasting and stays true over the course of the day, when it is meant to be worn. The notes of green tea, sweet orange, and bois de rose of vanilla keep together in the proportion in which they begin over the course of wear.

I like having both such different types of green tea fragrances on hand this Spring. Both have their highly appealing qualities, and it's like collecting teas in the cupboard so that we can have the right one for the mood we're in.

Instructions on brewing green tea
Above image from Tea Guy Speaks, an extensive and informative site on tea.
The Aroma M site gives more information on O-Cha
DSH Perfumes' site gives access to Bancha and sampler sets of related perfumes