Void

空境研茶

to summer | 观夏 2022 Eau de Parfum

This is not simply a tea scent; it's the green leaves from China whispering to the wind.
It's s ci, in a bottle. Sage and yerba mate - with its slightly tartness -, courting each other.
Exactly as November in the Temperate Deciduous Forest Perfume Oil , it's one of the few tea scents that smell like tea indeed.
Serious - meditative, even, and green and herbaceous - yet the jasmine in it manages to sweeten it up a bit, without excess. This is not a sugar coated cup of tea, it feels incredibly natural, and at the same time also a bit dampy, but differently from absolute petrichor scents or soily-decaying kind of perfumes, this one gives me the feeling of drinking pure tea in freshly wet grass, gentle rain still lingering in the air.
Plus, the bottle is really cool.

I absolutely adore this. It really smells like tea. Not the "perfumery" tea smell that you get in something like Imagination or Green Tea. I know the notes listed oolong but to me it smells like brewed Pu er tea. It's woody, bitter, earthy, wet, and like tea leaves. It's very yummy; it wraps you in that warm feeling of a cup of tea. As you go further in, the roses and musks start to come out, but it is through and through a realistic tea scent. It's a must have for tea lovers. I got around 6 hours of it on skin?

I love everything about this. Calming, meditative, sort of shady, but alive and surprisingly fresh, very earthy, green, slight lovely funk in the drydown. It's damp autumn leaves on the forest floor, ancient Pu'er.

Western tea fragrances suffer of exoticism and I feel like most brands don't trust tea fragrances to smell like T E A without reaching for citrus, ginger, cardamom, and the god-forsaken fig which I personally cannot stand in fragrances. The result is a genre of fragrances that smell like a romanticized idea of a tea ceremony rather than actual tea, slapped with a Chinese or Japanese name for marketing.

Void avoids all mentioned and does so much more. It is magical how photorealistic the Pu'er feels like here that it is hard for me to believe that any of the notes, bergamot, sage, "green", mate, sri lankan tea, jasmine, rose, amber, musks, were even present. It is so perfectly blended. 10 out of 10. Melancholy and meditation in a bottle.

I was recently able to get samples of 5 different scents from this brand so I have been testing them out this week. Yesterday I tried Void. With a name like Void, I went into the test expecting a dark mysterious scent, but this is the polar opposite. This is a light, green, herbal scent that is perfect for spring and summer. It has decent projection and longevity and leans slightly feminine. It's an easy, likable daytime wear that would be good for work, errands, or lunch with your family & friends. It's nice, but as a guy, I would get Triple Tea over this.

This tea feels dark and moody. The jasmine and bergamot offer a little bit of brightness at the opening, but it primarily feels like a very dark and grey-green colour with very earthy and bitter undertones. There’s a slight nutty and roasted green quality as well thanks to the sage.

As it settles, the green brightens a little bit and the florals become a bit more prominent; mainly jasmine with a touch of a soapy rose. These lighter notes sit on the backdrop of dark green mystery and dank earthiness.

After the first hour, it becomes a bit muskier and gains a mild sweetness. The green quality is now more vegetal and savoury. Together with the sweetness, my nose picks up on something like curry leaf or fenugreek. It becomes a little bit more fresh compared with the dark opening.

After two hours, the scent is much more dry and sweet. It smells less like tea and more like a powdery tobacco. The soapiness returns, but now it reads more like incense than rose. It stays in this phase of vegetal tobacco (mate?) and clean incense for the remainder of the wear.