Absinthe the drink was banned in France in 1915 and did not go back on legal sale there until 2011. The perfume note borrows all of that drama and almost none of the danger.
Absinthe in a fragrance is a fantasy note, built to smell like the green spirit rather than distilled from it. The spirit itself is made with three main herbs: grande wormwood, green anise and fennel. In perfumery the note leans on wormwood, Artemisia absinthium, for its sharp, bitter, green-herbal bite.
Wormwood is where the old scare lives. It contains a compound called thujone, long blamed for the hallucinations and madness that absinthe supposedly caused. Later work showed that story was wildly overstated. The real culprit was the drink being taken at very high strength, and the 1915 ban owed as much to lobbying from the French wine trade as to any proof about thujone.
Here is the part people get wrong about the smell. Most of what you read as absinthe is actually the anise and fennel, sweet and liquorice-like. The wormwood sits behind that as a bitter, dry, faintly green shadow. Together they give a cool herbal note that feels boozy and a little rebellious without being sweet.
In a composition absinthe usually works in the heart, sharpening gourmand and aromatic blends and keeping sweetness in check.
The bitter-green flicker of absinthe sits in the heart of our Spritz, a fizzy fruit-cocktail scent and our take on Lorenzo Pazzaglia Speachless, made in the UK at 35% extrait. Browse the rest of the Lorenzo Pazzaglia collection.
