Five-Star Hotel: Eau d’Italie Magnolia Romana - Review

by Olfactoria When I go through my Osmoz kit of floral notes, I always stay the longest with the magnolia note. It is so beautiful, so tender. It is my favorite floral note. Strange that I do not have a single perfume featuring it. Well, no more. Enter Magnolia Romana, one of the perfumes of the Eau d’Italie line by Bertrand Duchaufour. It was created in 2008 and features notes of purple basil, lemon leaves, neroli, nutmeg, cypress, magnolia, Bulgarian rose, tuberose, lotus, ozone, aquatic notes, cedar, hay extract and white musk. Magnolia Romana smells like fresh linen at an expensive hotel, an elegant bed, with crisp and cool, high tread-count sheets. A fresh, clean – freshly laundered even – scent, that should make us hard core Perfumistas wary of what is to come. But somehow it doesn’t, this is clean scent, yes, but one done by the master. The perfume progresses into more floral territory soon, the magnolia, heavy with dew drops or rain, its affinity to water underscored by lotus, sits there, pink and pretty, enveloping me in its soft and tender embrace. Magnolia Romana is very long lasting, the drydown is pleasantly musky with vestiges of magnolia clinging on until the very end. Magnolia Romana is easy to love, a perfectly likeable scent that is pleasing and carefree and simply lovely. It smells good in an expensive way. Like someone dressed casually, but expensively. Only the best fabrics, only the best tailoring even for a jeans and t-shirt kind of day. Magnolia Romana smells like the understated elegance and quiet classiness of a really good hotel that does not approve of flashiness or overt opulence. Like a hotel I would very much like to stay in. I smell the part. Image source: fragrantica.com, capital-calling.com