Menthe Fraîche Heeley 2006

At our local weekly market, there is a plant vendor who buys whatever he can get cheaply at the wholesale market to then sell it at ridiculous prices. He knows his regular customers well. For example, my wife and me. Over a few years, during the phase when we transformed our garden from Böcklin-esque coniferous dreariness into a kind of blooming mini-park, we became quite the big customers. As the area filled up (and the protests from the kids increased), this gradually dwindled.

But he still knows how to get us. There was once a whole cart full of mint. Dozens of potted plants that he just wanted to get rid of late in the morning and offered to my wife for maybe five euros. Five euros for the entire load, of course.

That meant: Mint everywhere - next to the driveway, on the small terrace, on the large terrace, in the former sandbox. Lemon mint, peppermint, chocolate mint(!), Hugo mint(!!), standing rum mint… This was the year before last, and to this day not everything has been planted.

This is to explain why I am so sure about my opinion (see below).

Menthe Fraîche is rather green than minty right after spraying, with a splash of bergamot. But within seconds, a minty freshness clears the nose. The biting sensation quickly subsides and takes on the character of a gentle sniff of the plant.

Green tea, specifically the ethereal, hay-like green veil that hovers over a freshly brewed cup, along with a lingering hint of bergamot, provides that hard-to-describe botanical whiff that surrounds the "real" plants. Because they smell - as long as you leave them intact - not primarily like the chewing gum-like misstep of human product ideas, but green with a minty fresh aura around them.

That's it. Menthe Fraîche offers nothing more and nothing less than an almost perfect representation of the original scent of mint, which I - see above - have had the opportunity to study occasionally for some time now. The fact that the fun ends after about four hours, leaving behind a weak residue of freesia (if you will) and cedar, does not diminish my impressed "Wow." That such a mint scent is suitable as a perfume is beyond question. One (and of course, a woman) just has to reapply in between.

Conclusion: In my opinion, the issue of short longevity takes a back seat here. Menthe Fraîche is simply a masterpiece of Nature-Osmopimplie (Osmo-Pimplie = 'filling scent'; analogously formed to photo-graphy = 'writing with light').

I thank Gerdi for the sample.