CLEAN

Sometimes, after the perfect rain shower, comes a certain peace. For a moment, everything is still and a certain scent wafts through the air. It’s hard to describe but it smells fresh, clean, and comfortable. It’s only fitting, then, that CLEAN should try to bottle it up and make it available (without the frizzy hair and wet feet!)

CLEAN, perhaps best known for their crisp scents, worked with perfumer Harry Frémont of Firmenich to create yet another crisp scent to the brand’s repertoire. I spoke to Frémont who was able to give me the back story and walk me through the notes f the fragrance: said that the hardest part of creating this scent:

“As a perfumer, what we do is really try to translate things and by things I mean it could be emotions, colors, lifestyles, places — anything you can think of. And here the job was a little bit more specific because it was really clean rain; this feeling of pure, good feeling after a spring shower. I am, personally, a big outdoors guy; I love gardening and being outside so really it translated for me,” Frémont told me.

He wanted the fragrance to feel joyful so he created a watery floral.

“Its a mixture of fruity dewy melon, some daffodils, and very important water mint - mint that fresh not overtly minty. Very dewy. And I mix that with the key of the fragrance, the water lily which is a watery accord I did. That is the driving force of the fragrance; it’s what gives character to the fragrance,” Frémont continued. “And I mixed it with some daisies and violet leaves. Violet leaves are important because they’re extracted from violet leaves and it’s kind of very natural, green note.”

What you’re mostly smelling, however, is a lot of the lily making this one of the freshest florals you can find.

“The challenge of this fragrance was really to try to find the back - what we call the base note - that would blend with the top and mid, without fighting with it because it’s so sheer and transparent you want a back that would sustain and make the fragrance long lasting but without killing the sheerness of the fragrance.

As a matter of fact, for a very long time, we had a note in this fragrance that was making it more opaque. It was a woody note. It was kind of a sleek woody note and it was making the fragrance not as natural and open and breezy as she was supposed to be and one day I took it out, and that’s the back. Musk, sheer musk. White woods. Not dark. Once I took out this woody note, the fragrance kind of came together.”

CLEAN Rain ($69) is available at Sephora online now and will be available in store, ULTA, and Dilliards in October.