Floramye L.T. Piver 1905

Released in 1905, Floramye is from a time when perfumers moved away from nature and started to use chemical compounds.
As a result they were less reliant on natural products, and - just as crucially - their imaginations were no longer tied to the garden.

Floramye is a green iris bouquet, a natural type of subject, but there's amber, and a hard fizzy overtone that clearly isn't natural.
Like the name : Flora - which is flower in Latin, with the fantasy suffix mye, Floramye is a hybrid - largely natural and a bit synthetic.
This is not a soft, rounded, romantic bouquet - as the label would have you believe. There is a certain sweetness, but it's also dry, and slightly angular; breaking with the naturalistic mould - even if it's rather timid in doing so.
It reads quite unisex to the modern nose, but then perfume was less hung up on gender codes in those days; Guerlain's crossover hit Jicky would appear seven years later.

Floramye is all good, but there is a problem.
I have an old, or even vintage sample which comes from a mini flacon sealed with a metal plate over the neck. Not a modern issue.
The problem is, I've put on nearly three ml over the course of a day - and now I can barely smell it.
It smells good; but no matter how good it smells, if you can't really smell it, it can't be that good.