This is an interesting perfume. Banana Republic's Icon Collection fragrances have so far been total bullseyes in both quality and value, and Gardenia & Cardamom retains their winning streak in my book. At twenty bucks, you really can't beat this. I know I've said this before about their other frags, but I'll repeat myself - this could easily be priced at a hundred dollars, and nobody would complain. If you'd told me ten years ago that Banana Republic would release some of the best fragrances of the late teens and early twenties, I would have laughed in your face. It goes to show that brands can surprise people!
Gardenia is well known for being next to impossible to do perfectly, chiefly because it's a flower from which very little natural essence can be extracted, much like lilac and lily of the valley. Thus all attempts at it are usually reconstructions, i.e., accords built of ten or more chemicals that smell very similar to the gardenia flower when blended in the proper amounts. As a tropical white flower, gardenia notes are popular in feminine perfumes, but are often rendered very loosely, which is the polite way of saying they only smell of gardenia for a few minutes before other similar white floral notes take over. It's a typical bait and switch; inexpensive (non-luxury) brands like Jōvan and Dana have gardenia perfumes that they market as soliflores, but they're actually just tuberose and/or jasmine accords with enough embellishment to briefly push the eponymous note into the buyer's imagination. Chanel's rendition was lambasted by Luca Turin as being a trashy airport toilet floral, and it's an expensive fragrance, so most mainstream brands shy away from showcasing gardenia nowadays.
That's not to say the note can't be done, because it certainly can! W.A. Poucher's formulas demonstrate that gardenia reconstructions are relatively complex, and include bergamot oil, ylang oil, jasmine and tuberose bases (in hefty amounts), and methyl phenyl carbinyl acetate, for a sturdy "green" quality that is useful in upholding the expansive sweetness of the accord. Things like orange flower, methyl anthranilate (essential in Schiff bases), and indole are necessary also. Headspace analysis of living gardenia would bring a perfumer closer to the biochemical template, and with an unlimited budget and equally unlimited attempts, I would wager that a highly skilled nose could assemble a photorealistic gardenia note that would last a few hours. According to Jarubol Chaichana's 2009 study, Volatile Constituents and Biological Activities of Gardenia Jasminoides, headspace breakdowns revealed the presence of farnesene, cis-ocimene, linalool, cis-3-hexenyl tiglate, methyl tiglate, hexyl tiglate, and methyl benzoate, among several other things.
Of interest among those, to me at least, are the cis-3-hexenyl tiglate, and the other tiglates. The profile for cis-3-hexenyl tiglate is fresh, green, sweet-floral, with similarities to the smells of banana and gardenia. Farnesene and its compounds are associate with fruit skins, usually green apples, and methyl benzoate has a fruity/minty aspect. The danger of relying on every headspace element is that many of them are merely extant in organic materials without providing any distinct character to their odor. In other words, you can miss the forest for the trees and get wrapped up in trying to include things that are present in something, but which don't effect its overall scent profile. I imagine that this is the challenge for any perfumer faced with a gardenia brief and a limited budget. He or she is tasked with building a space with perhaps only the most essential materials available, and excluding several dozen materials which might help the outcome to varying degrees.
This must have been the case for Vincent Kuczinski, who also authored Peony & Peppercorn. In that scent he used whatever fruity-floral material(s) are present in the dozens of Silver Mountain Water clones floating around these days, and merely extended those fresh-sweet qualities in a distinctly floral direction to achieve a typical modern feminine. But with Gardenia & Cardamom the job was a bit more complicated. Based on what I smell, Kuczinski was interested in heeding Poucher's ideas in his reconstruction, because G&C's top note is a bracing orangey-bergamot note, with just enough sweet 'n sour juiciness to catch my attention. It's a surprisingly warm note, lucid and measured, and doesn't come across as overbearing, screechy, or cheap. Simply a wet citrus juice effect, which rapidly (within twenty seconds) morphs into the only stage where I smell what seems like a 70% successful reconstruction of gardenia, a lush, sweet, almost overripe white floral tone, with just the right balance of richness and creaminess. There's even more evidence that Kuczinski has read up on his Poucher when the gardenia begins to resemble ylang in its intense sweetness.
It doesn't last, however, and by the five minute mark it is clear that he was asked to do a white floral bouquet instead of a gardenia soliflore. The gardenia's delicate balance gives way to a more obviously fleshed-out tuberose and jasmine accord, and then the jasmine gets all creamy and powdery and summery, and suddenly I'm only two clicks away from suntan lotion territory. I'm reminded of Vanilla Fields, although the jasmine here is far better (not quite as woody) and doesn't smell nearly as chemical. But what about the cardamom? It's there, unlike the pepper note in Peony & Peppercorn, but it's very subtly integrated into the bouquet, and it's a bit green, only hinting at woodiness. This greenness seems rather obvious to me, and makes me wonder if methyl phenyl carbinyl acetate was used in a lithe dose to bring out the greener facet of these three white floral notes. Tuberose tends toward rich buttery, jasmine towards coconut creamy, and gardenia toward sweet green. Yet the retrohale on G&C evokes a soft hint of a green grape-like flavor, so methyl anthranilates seem to have been incorporated also.
How does all of this translate to the nose? After the citrus pop at the start and the initial five minute gardenia effect, the whisk of tuberose and more enduring creamy jasmine, all tied together by a slight green-woody cardamom seed, present as a very modern white floral. It's not going to blow your mind artistically, and it isn't the least bit challenging beyond the usual trappings of gender norms (again, are there any guys wearing this?), but at no stage of its drydown does G&C smell cheap, chemical, overly simplistic (no fuzzing out of notes, no gauzy-sweet musks), or juvenile (it's sugar free!). This presents are simply a basic white floral, with your familiar triad of mainstream players, all touched by a twist of non-spicy, subliminally green cardamom. I think it's a little more unisex that Peony & Peppercorn, and will have no trouble enjoying it this summer.