Sun Card

The Garden Collection - The Sun Card

Marissa Zappas 2021

An earnest, angelic, sunshine-yellow floral. Both pollen-y and nectary. The heart of The Sun Card is breathy, powdery, and so aggressively innocent you could never get angry at it. The star of the show – the plumeria/frangipani – smells true to life and adds a tropical-toned, creamy sweetness. If you are a member of the ylang-ylang gang, I expect this’ll be a hit. Zappas does a mean hay, but I can’t detect it here. Plays like the G-rated version of Universal Flowering’s Heliotrope Milkbath.

Mental Snapshot: A memory box, sun-faded and tender with memories. A handknit baby blanket, dried blooms from a holiday abroad, scented stationery from grade school crushes. You lay in your childhood bed, basking in the afternoon sunshine, drifting back in time.

tl;dr: precious petals

Sunblock on your skin after a fresh shower, body lotion unscented, and a floral hand soap. Very vintage and ‘fancy soap’ scent to me. Feels like a warm summer day in an old beach home owned by your grandma and her 5 cats. I could see me wearing this when i’m visiting my grandmas home, or out at a fancy restaurant at the beach. Not really the scent profile for me, but I can appreciate what it does. After drying for a few, it has a cool note that feels like a night time summer breeze. Overall this is what i imagine a cold, older beach town to smell like in the winter when tourists are long gone. Dry down is much sweeter.

After reading notes: The frangipani is quite strong, giving off a slight coconut note. The heliotrope leans into the floral warm scent

This is probably the only Marissa Zappas fragrance that has a cheerful vibe (I mean that as a compliment as someone who mostly enjoys moody fragrances!), but it also has enough whimsy and unusual qualities that it’s interesting, and something I like wearing.

Sun Card smells of sun beams on fresh laundry, oversized yellow flowers, and thick layers of suncream. It’s photorealistic and creamy, with a vintage cosmetics quality, and although it’s solar, it’s not very beachy. The yellow florals are slightly indolic in the open, having a bodily funk to them, but it ultimately dries down into this sepia tinged celestial sunscreen scent. Beautiful!

I love this lady. She's so bright, and from experience I've learned that citrus sits on my skin quite well (I come from a citrus-loving family so I believe it's hereditary?). It felt like this bottle was sitting on my shoulder all day, and I got so many compliments :~) And this is my first brush with Marissa Zappas, too!

I blind-tested this with twelve other niche perfumes and I was absolutely crazy for it on paper. It smelled like a honey-sweetened, pollen-filled meadow with an undercurrent of tropical creaminess. Like a fantasy version of a yellow flower made out of different parts of nature, with a touch of sunscreen. Swoon-worthy!

It does smell nice on my skin, but for whatever reason, a lot of the nuances don't really translate and it's more one-dimensional. The hay didn't really come out until four or five hours in, after everything else was more or less gone. It's still lovely to wear and creates a gentle, sweet floral cloud around me for about four hours.

I don't get a lot of the orange either on paper or my skin, but I do think It must add to the bright and sunny feeling it creates. It is a bit old-fashioned and doesn't have an 'edge' like most of the others in this house, but it definitely makes you happy.