Red Roses by Jo Malone

Red Roses 1996

puddlebrigad
07/29/2025 - 03:51 PM
1
10
Pricing
9
Bottle
6
Sillage
5
Longevity
9.5
Scent

The Platonic Bouba Shape of Olfaction

Red Roses is 100% the only perfume on the market where I live that features the exact rose absolute I use to fall asleep. When I was younger, I would put a few drops of rose absolute essential oil in an ultrasonic diffuser to ensure I would drift to sleep in a dreamy haze. Every other "Rose" fragrance on the cosmetics market is either pulling their rose accord from Rose Hips, which are the developed seeds of rose flowers and smell completely different to the petals, or they are attempting to get the accord from the Tea Rose varietals which are in a different grouping of cultivars from the apothecary roses and damask roses.

I'm not a rosarian myself, but I do understand that different varieties of roses release different molecules. This particular fragrance is a soliflore based only on the Damask Rose or Bulgarian Rose, depending on your familiarity. Rosa Damascena is hybrid between the Rosa gallica and Rosa muscena - the French Rose and the Musk Rose. Both parent cultivars are among the oldest cultivated varieties of rose. Red Roses comes close to the right region in a subtle and well rounded way.

There is an almost citric note that hangs around the edge of the topnotes of this fragrance in a way that sort of dilutes the Roundness of the rose accord, which I imagine is a sort of alteration to the typical english fragrance palette. If Jo Malone produced this as an Intense, as they do with their similarly osmotically-shaped Rose and Oud, I would bathe in it.

One of my friends and my own mother personally loathe the smell of rose absolute - whereas when I smell this and the essential oil I associate with it, I cannot breathe deeply enough to satisfy my rose lust. Their loss, I love this fragrance.
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