Our “Recommend Me a Perfume” thread is open this week. You can use this space to find perfume recommendations, to share your discoveries and favorite scents, and to ask any questions about scents, aromas and flavors. Or you can just tell us what perfume you are wearing!

How does it work: 1. Please post your requests or questions as comments here. You can also use this space to ask any fragrance related questions. To receive recommendations that are better tailored to your tastes, you can include details on what you like and don’t like, your signature perfumes, and your budget. And please let us know what you end up sampling. 2. Then please check the thread to see if there are other requests you can answer. Your responses are really valuable for navigating the big and sometimes confusing world of perfume, so let’s help each other!

To make this thread easier to read, when you reply to someone, please click on the blue “reply” link under their comment.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

It was a few days before Easter when I arrived in Ukraine in 2014 to stay with my grandmother, Valentina. Taking advantage of being together for the first time in years for this holiday, we prepared a large feast, colored eggs with onion peels and baked paska, a brioche-like Easter bread.  I became obsessed with photographing every part of our preparations, making my grandmother laugh. She didn’t understand what was interesting about recording everything. I didn’t understand it myself at the time, but I felt that I had to capture as many of my impressions as possible. Ukraine was going through a painful period as Russia had annexed Crimea and was also supporting various separatist movements in the eastern part of the country. We lived with the sounds of gunfire from the military training grounds nearby and with bitter news from the front.

Yet, as we celebrated Easter with its powerful message of renewal and rebirth, we felt hopeful. We planted vegetables and flowers in the garden. We whitewashed our cherry trees. We waited for the blossoms to burst.

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Stepping inside the Princess of Wales Conservatory during Kew Gardens’ annual orchid festival—it usually runs from February to March—is a chance to discover how beautiful the fragrance of these opulent tropical flowers can be. While the most popular orchids sold by florists are unscented, there are also many perfumed varieties, with their aromas spanning the full olfactory spectrum from effervescent lemon to dark chocolate.

One such scented orchid is vanilla planifolia. Perhaps it’s not surprising, since this plant produces one of the world’s most fragrant spices. The flowers have a delicious aroma reminiscent of creamy jasmine and green grape. Although more subtle than the scent of vanilla pods, it has inspired perfumers to create fragrances around vanilla flowers relying on the recent studies of orchids and their aromas.

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I started this morning with a stroll through a bluebell forest, continued to a Japanese peony orchard, and got lost in an Italian garden before falling asleep in a cypress grove somewhere in Greece. I never left my room. I only changed home fragrances.  Perfumes uplift our mood, satisfy wanderlust and inspire daydreams, and selecting the right scents for the interior achieves the same effect.

Floris’s Hyacinth & Bluebell Room Fragrance is inspired by its iconic Bluebell fragrance, with a stronger emphasis on green, earthy notes.  It lingers gently and makes the space feel brighter and fresher. If I close my eyes, I can envision the vivid blue of wild hyacinths and the rustle of trees in their springtime verdancy.

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