When I read the press releases on Tommy Girl, I was filled with curiosity. This scent is a modern tea floral, a well-organized construct of green tea and floral notes that form a thoroughly enjoyable fragrance. Since its inception in 1996, young and middle-aged women have adored it, and in more recent times, men of all persuasions have taken to it also. Having worn the masculine Tommy back in high school, I was familiar with the level of quality this brand is capable of, but had qualms about buying its feminine counterpart blind. After lengthy consideration, I did, expecting something affable, nondescript, pretty, and totally unwearable. I was in for a real surprise.
Tommy Girl opens with a kick of potent aldehydes and camellia tea, which is a very crisp, sheer, green-hued tea note with a subtly sweet edge. For the first minute of wear, this tea note is central. Eventually sweet black currant, apple tree blossom, honeysuckle, and jasmine notes bubble out from under the camellia, forming a fairly linear floral perfume of considerable strength. The floral notes coalesce into a prominent jasmine and tea accord, with a watery calamus underpinning it. Calamus lends the scent an aquatic dimension, although it's worth noting that isoeugenol is the chemical component at work here.
You would think with all those fruity floral notes that it would strictly be a young girl's fragrance. Amazingly, the camellia and calamus propel things in another direction entirely. The tea is a supporting player to the central roles of the flowers, but it tinges the sweets with a strident crispness. The scent of tea, with its uniquely Eastern flavor, is very specific, and an acquired taste, something considerably beyond the mores of teeny-bopper sensibilities. Furthermore, the floral elements are darkened by black currant, a note that for whatever reason denies gender classification. Tommy Girl's currants are sheer, but they help to anchor things to the middle of the spectrum. It's the jasmine that keeps this scent on the women's counter at department stores. That buoyant jasmine is so rich and wet that even the homeliest woman could benefit by having its grace on her skin.
But it's not alone. Surprisingly, it's not even unmatched. Considering the dearth of interest in tea scents, one would suppose that Tommy Girl has a monopoly on the mass market. After all, how many people want a tea smell wafting from their personage? What company could compete with such a well-crafted and well-timed perfume? Why, Elizabeth Arden, of course. Conspicuously missing from all the positive press that surrounds Tommy Girl is a reference to a terrific fragrance that emerged only three years after it: Green Tea.
Herein lies the rub for Tommy Girl. While it offers a splendid composition through synthetics, it lacks any natural infusions, and natural tea infusions in particular are nowhere to be found. One might suppose this is understandable, considering how expensive such an infusion would be, right? I mean, after all, natural elements are relegated to top-shelf stuff, things by Creed, Czech & Speake, Frederic Malle, Guerlain. No mass-market scent could successfully employ the same standards held by such companies to their own little tea floral, could they? Well, as it turns out, Arden's scent contains a generous amount of camellia sinensis leaf extract. When you smell it, you're smelling real tea. You're smelling the sort of thing normally found in those $285 Creeds. It smells really, really good. Oh, and by the way - it only costs $5 an ounce.