Pear in perfume

How to make a fruity-floral fragrance new? Why with pear of course.

Fresh, green, ripe, juicy: Pear feels modern and perfectly in step with our wishing-for-summer mindset. It’s more surprising than apple and clearer than the berries that have juiced up the scent scene as of late. No wonder it’s trending.

The fruit recently caught our attention, given its inclusion in a range of scents from Issey Miyake’s new Pleats Please spritz via Asian pear, to Kenzo’s Madly Kenzo tropical-leaning perfume of pear and litchi, heliotrope and jasmine, cedar and musk.

We’re also re-visiting a few other scents such as No.3 The Free-Spirited fragrance in the Ralph Lauren Big Pony Collection For Her. Its pear and mimosa personality smells crisp and bright.

We posed the why-pear question to master perfumer Olivier Cresp recently while in Paris on the occasion of one of his fragrance launches.

“To me, pear is nice,” he said. “I use quite a lot because they link very well with musk. Musk is rather heavy. If you use pear on top—pear is a natural green—it’s going to be light. As soon as you use some pear, you have pear and musk working very well together. Pear, apple, watermelon, raspberries as well—but they shouldn’t be too strong, because if they are too strong then they’re covering the whole fragrance.

“[Pear] should warm the flowers,” Cresp explained. “The flowers are the actresses and then underneath the flowers you have the fruitiness.”

Fruit is perhaps like accessories, we offer.
“Yes, exactly,” says Cresp. “The stars in order to shine, you have the fruits.”

PEAR FOR THE PRESENT

Kenzo Madly Kenzo EDT, $92 (80 ml), www.sephora.com
Jo Malone English Pear & Freesia Cologne, $125 (100 ml), www.jomalone.com
Ralph Lauren Big Pony Collection No.3 The Free-Spirited Fragrance EDT, $85 (100 ml), www.ralphlauren.com
Issey Miyake Pleats Please EDT, $106 (100 ml), www.thebay.com