L'Ile au Thé
Goutal (2015)

The opening combines a lovely mandarin notes urge a tea impression that is equally nice. The tea is somewhat light, but of intensive enough flavour to impart a very good tea impression to the opening notes. It is a gentle Darjeeling style tea, not complex enough for a first flush and not very tippy, but it is working very well with the citrus.

In the drydown I get a flowery bend, with an equally restrained osmanthus in the centre of the olfactory stage, with faint touches of white jasmine and transient whiffs of a very light ylang-ylang making transient appearances. In the later stages white musks take over. Agin, all these notes are quite discreet, and nothing in this mix is heavy or cloying.

I get soft sillage, adequate projection and seven hours of longevity on my skin.

This spring creation is a lovely restrained and subtle tea scent. It lacks the complexity of, for instance, Gucci Pour Homme II, but in combination with the mandarin and the well-matched floral contributions it makes a refined enough tea blend to make it enjoyable in spite of its poor sillage. 3.25/5.

It is easy to imagine oneself sipping an elegant cup of scented tea on some far-flung island, with this blend in the air. The mandarin note is evident even without reading the official description, together with neroli I would say. In one sense it is akin to a white flowers perfume based on jasmine (for example, Ysatis), like hundreds of others, but the freshness of tea and mountain air and no doubt a judicious amount of osmanthus gives it something special. A certain crispness reminds me of the effect you get with traces of aldehyde TMH or similar molecules.

Infini (below) finds a similarity to the mens fragrance Duel, an interesting observation though Duel is much less floral. Though positioned as a feminine fragrance L'ile au The could easily be unisex.

Regarding the general presentation I preferred the old 'doorknob' gold caps to the present simplified design. There is a quote from Annick Goutal on the side of the box: "J'ai nomme parfum le reve qui me porte". Which even my schoolboy French tells me means something like "I call perfume the dream which transports me". But they have translated it as "perfume is the music of my dream", a bit less accurate. Hardly of major importance to be fair, except this product is supposed to embody perfection.

L'Ile au The is one of my favourite Annick Goutal fragrances, though when I first smelled it, I was surprised how similar it is to Duel. If you already know Duel, L'Ile au The is almost identical, but with added mandarin top notes; the tea notes in Duel are emphasised in L'Ile au The, and are greener and a little more floral. However, the way these two fragrances behave on my skin at least, they are essentially variations of the same perfume.

Is it perverse to like a perfume because it's "unmemorable?" That is how I find L'Île au Thé, refreshingly dry and citrusy, interwoven with tea and osmanthus, somewhat vague and difficult to pinpoint. Crossing paths with another person wearing it, I'm not sure I could identify it, even though I were wearing it myself. I like perfumes like that--elusive. They make me feel like I could go anywhere unimpeded. Despite an elusive quality, LIAT with a few sprays lasts all day on me. One day recently, after applying it in the morning, I received a compliment on it around 8pm.