Midnight in the Palace Garden Sample

The scent The artist The inspiration This is a 2 ml spray sample. Find the full bottle here.  Picture a hot night in an Eastern palace. The moon shines into the courtyard, where a fountain burbles. Jasmine, orange blossom, and frangipani scent the air. A cedar tree grows in the corner, and there's a silver tray with strong coffee, fresh blood orange juice, and vanilla sweets. There's a divan covered in silk and cashmere shawls, to rest on and stare at the stars. Do we even have to ask whether you want to go there? Midnight in the Palace Garden is part of perfumer Sarah McCartney's Crimes of Passion series, and it was nominated for Best Indie Scent of 2015 by the Fragrance Foundation. Notes include blood orange, frangipani, jasmine, neroli, vanilla, coffee, cedarwood, and sandalwood.    We've met a lot of people in the perfume world, and Sarah McCartney of 4160 Tuesdays is one of our very favorites. Want to know why? Sarah, in her own words: "As a little girl, I did not make perfumes from rose petals. That was for softies. I made magic spells and wanted to be a witch when I grew up. When I was 16 I bought a bottle of Diorella. I studied maths and sciences, practised music and French, wrote books on brands and their evil twin—counterfeiting—and online marketing, and learned to dance Argentinean tango. For 14 years I was the head writer for Lush while the company grew from four shops—one in Poole and three in London—to 700 worldwide. I was writing 50,000 words every three months for the Lush Times, aiming to encapsulate the products' scents in their descriptions. During that time, I bought and read 200 books on essential oils and herbalism and learned the essential oils the founders gave me to educate myself. At the end of the 14 years, I took some time off to write a novel featuring a problem-solving perfumer. In it, I described the scents that she made and I wanted to have them available for people to smell. So I set off on a quest to see if I could buy them. This turned out to be impossible - and pretty expensive - because no one was making exactly what I wanted, so I started another quest to see of I could make them instead. Of course that turned out to be even more difficult, but once I'd started, I just kept going. 4160 Tuesdays perfumes is the result." When the perfumer is also a writer, you let her tell the story herself. "As extravagant scents go, this is one of our most outrageous: three kinds of cedarwood, sandalwood, coffee, vanilla, blood orange, davana--an artemesia that smells like mulled wine--jasmine, neroli, and frangipani. I made five accords: the tree of knowledge, the flowers of love, the sheikh, sweetmeats, and the fruits of temptation. I wanted sensuality with subtlety. The strange thing about it is that it also works--for me--as great sleep remedy. (I am not making any medical claims here; I'm just saying that it works for me.)"