I heard a wild flower singing a song. Review on Flower

*One day a poppy writes.

A stem made of words, red and shiny.

No one plants me, no one singles me out, I just grow.

Anywhere, a delicate flower, scattered here and there;

I bring delight to those who pick me, I bloom when I am left alone,

I whisper to the mind, to the body; that is so beautiful, inside, outside.

I stand upright, I lean, I lie down.

Place me on a heart and I'll make it throb.

*Brush me across lips and I'll make them blush.

It was a lovely, sunny June morning in Milano, Italy when I was walking down the airport terminal with some colleagues. We were sleepy, tired but very excited – we had fallen asleep the moment we had boarded the Alitalia flight at 2 AM in New Delhi and we had woken up hours later with the Milano morning sun beckoning and teasing our sleepy eyelids.

Now rushing through the airport, I found myself wishing I could stop awhile and just feel this wonderful moment but there was no time to smell the roses – or the perfumes lining the walls around me.   I tell you, it was not easy. Rushing through an inviting sunbeam is difficult but rushing through a shopping arcade with thousands of perfumes lined on all sides is nearly impossible. My senses were almost intoxicated as I took a deep breath and fought hard not to stop. I should not have worried too much - All my colleagues are aware of my obsession with perfumes and they were already on their guard. They knew that if I stopped ‘just for a moment’, that moment would become an hour and they might have to miss their flight. So, they were eyeing me warily and almost dragging me to the terminal.

While allowing myself to be dragged away by my determined colleagues, I could not help but notice a lovely Italian girl who was standing and smiling sweetly at me. She was holding an elegant, slim perfume bottle with a red poppy flower etched on it and beckoning me.

‘Sorry guys!’ I called back at my pals and moved towards that temptation, in a trance, as if hypnotized.

That was my first encounter with ‘Flower’. Since then, me and Flower have been inseparable.

Flower by Kenzo is a subtle floral perfume that combines the scents of wild hawthorn, bulgarian rose, cassie flower, parma violet, boubon vanilla, oppoponax, white musk… And to think that I had not even heard of many of these flowers before I found Flower!  Don’t let the names of exotic sounding flowers scare you away – because the scent is very subtle – and I assure you that you will not be smelling like a summer hot house if you wear it. It is feminine but not sickly sweet. It teases your senses – it does not overpower. It is soft and yet very elegant. You could wear it to a date and you could wear it to work.

The packaging of this perfume is as poetic as its scent. It comes in a slim and slender clear glass bottle with a long, thin stem that runs through the length of the bottle and ends with a stunning, scarlet poppy flower on the cap. So when you remove the cap to spray the perfume, in effect, you remove the poppy flower from the stem. It is simple and yet – beautiful. The bottle is graceful and is slightly curved, and reminds one of a long stemmed, delicate flower that bends elegantly with the spring breeze.

There is an irony behind Flower- the red poppy flower, in nature, does not have any  fragrance. It is entirely odourless – so it’s a surprise to see it etched on a perfume bottle. But this just adds to the element of intrigue and mystery around this perfume.  This fragrance is available in three sizes(30ml, 50ml and 100ml) and with a reason too! The bottles are not identical – on each size is a different stage in the blooming of a poppy flower.

Poppy is a wild flower – its free spirit cannot be tied down. Not even in perfume bottles. But with ‘Flower’ on my table, I feel as if I have a little patch of sunshine from the spring meadows in my hands.