Reviews of Un Jardin sur le Nil (2005)
by Hermès

After all of Ellena's journeying through Egypt for lotuses and green mangoes, I was anxious to try this scent. It was a disappointment, then, to discover that, on me, it smelled like the urine of someone who has eaten a large quantity of grapefruit--rind and all. I waited, and a half-hour or so later, a marshmallowy note (the lotus, maybe?) replaced the stinky grapefruit--and promptly disappeared.

I have a difficult time believing that Hermès would put out a scent like this. I think it’s gaudy and cheap smelling right from the start, and waiting for the mid and base notes to replace the top notes doesn’t pay because it gets no better. Un Jardin Sur Le Nil opens with a citrus (grapefruit) and fruit (green mango) accord that, to be honest, surprised me with its sharpness, syntheticness, and thinness. It’s the kind of accord I would expect from a drug store fragrance for a preteen girl. I find the scent rather linear — that fruity note hangs around well into the heart notes where it joins with the middle florals and green to keep the cheapness going. The floral is nondescript as far as I am concerned, and here and there I get another whiff of artificiality. A subtle wood note creeps into the dry down but the initial sweet note is still part of the accord. After that I wait patiently for the frankincense. And wait and wait… It never introduces itself to my nose. No. I don’t like this one at all — about the only positive thing that I can say about it is that it has good longevity.

Extremely sharp lemon and tart green notes introduce Un Jardin sur le Nil, as if it might be some sort of steroid-boosted Eau de Cologne. There is a very harsh chemical note that is both bitter and sour underneath that I find outright repellent. This note becomes progressively more strident as the citrus top notes mellow.

After roughly a half an hour the unique and mysterious floral note of lotus rises up out of the heart, but it seems entirely at odds with the shrill, sour accord that dominates the scent’s middle. Utterly horrible, but I force myself to wait out the development and see if anything remotely pleasant will emerge.

Nothing does, but the whole nasty experience is over in little more than an hour, so I don’t have to scrub myself down to get rid of it. Not, I think, one of Mr. Ellena's more succussful outings.

I received a sample of this and I decided to give it a test run today. Bad idea. This fragrance is terrible! It is so citrus-heavy that I not only reeked of Lemon Pledge or Orange Glo, but it left me feeling uncomfortable (which has never happened to me before)... Never again...

HUGE disappointment. Too fruity to be appreciated outside a fruit salad. Something sickly lurking among the fruity notes, possibly the lotus? very nauseating and headach inducing, and smells like a cheap supermarket toilet cleaner. YUCK.

Another ‘predictable’ and ‘clean’ Hermès fragrance, which lacks decent longevity. This one also turned on my skin.

I wouldn’t even buy it for a quarter of its retail price.

Not my cup of tea. Too fresh and aquatic for me. Almost melon-y, although it is lotus and mango. It might be well done in it's genre, it just doesn't do anything for me. Too perfumey. I don't want my scents to smell "clean".

I did not like this at all. It was sickly sweet. I am not a mango fan in fragrances. There was no need in this creation. Even worse, I hate papaya in fragrances as well.

no staying power, smells like hairspray or cheap bodyspray, definatley a "green" lollipop note in here somehwere... The scent from my collection which comes closest to this one is Diptyque Oyedo which is FAR better so I am going to sell off my Jardin Du Nil

sorry, no staying power AT ALL, better as a scent to spray your linen with in the summer, i was hoping for something similar to its sister fragrance "jardin mediteranne" but sadly it was not to be