Imagine that you’re standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. Behind you is an acre planted thickly with pink roses. It’s the end of an August day, and the sun is setting in tones of apricot fading to purple as it bleeds into the sky. Now add a full orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing The Beatles’ “All You Need is Love”. What you get is grand, passionate, lush, and faintly cartoonish. In other words, you get Guerlain Nahéma.
Jean-Paul Guerlain created Nahéma in 1979. The Guerlain website gives it a top note of hyacinth; a heart of ylang ylang, rose, and peach; and a base of vanilla, tonka bean, and wood. Osmoz builds on this description and gives Nahéma top notes of bergamot, mandarin, and rose; a heart of rose, peach, cyclamen, and lily; and a base of vanilla, sandalwood, vetiver, and benzoin. The simplest description of Nahéma would be rose…
Last week I sat outside a bar with a friend, enjoying one of the last warm evenings of the year. My friend works Saturday afternoons at a wine store, and he told me about how he helps people find the right bottle of wine. “I ask people what they like,” he said, “But it seems like they’re always more articulate about what it is that they don’t like.”