Reviews of Un Jardin Après La Mousson (2008)
by Hermès

Un Jardin Après la Mousson: a lovely name, a beautiful bottle, an excellent concept… a failed product. This was a disappointment for me. I like its sibling scent, Un Jardin sur le Nil, very much and I looked forward to trying Mousson. The opening of peppery spices and a brief blast of melon was attractive. That lasted for about ten seconds. Then things turned unpleasant. There was a salty-stale marine chord which evoked the image of a salt-encrusted pier with barnacles and seaweed. Also, there was an odd kind of toasty note, like rancid sesame oil and dodgy old melon rinds. And that is where it stayed until I washed it off. This is a unisex scent that can be disliked by either gender.

I have had a very different experience with this fragrance than I see above. Firstly, I feel that it is far to soapy both on a testing strip and even more so on my skin. After the soapyness withdrawls after a couple of minutes on my skin, it is a bit more enjoyable but rather feminine, which is why I am confused that this is considered a unisex fragrance when I think the feminine notes are incredibly overpowering. A disappointment for me. I have heard people talk about "being transported to Tuscany", but this is supposed to recall India - therefore I think it must smell different to many different people on a considerable gradient.

I understand that some perfumers considered the concoction of the artificial marine note that was so popular in the 1990’s to be a great moment in the history of perfume-making and love using it whenever the concepts of ‘fresh’, ‘ocean’, ‘air’, ‘rain’, ‘cool’, and all those other charming and perfectly harmless natural occurrences give them an excuse to do so. I was hoping that it was a fad because to me it’s not ‘morning dew’ as much as, ‘I guess you don’t want this honeydew melon that’s been sitting on the counter for the past coupla weeks’. This is loaded with enough of that marine note to snuff the fires of hell. Getting past it and finding anything else requires hard labour and heavy breathing, but there is a little spice at the opening, and a heavy synthetic and generic fruit along with a hint of dry earth that comes and goes. But the killer, and heaven knows it was already dead, is that at the far drydown there’s freshly caught fish. I swear. On the positive side, with this on my hand getting the cat to take the bit of cream that has his pill cleverly crushed into it is no problem.