Grass (Lush)

Fifteen years ago, I found an Adidas fragrance called Sport Field, released in 1994. It was so fresh, green, and grassy that the only thing I could compare it to was Green Valley by Creed, not because they smelled alike, but because both leaned fully into the scent of cut grass. After 2014, I stopped looking for anything similar. Most perfumes aim for balanced, layered accords, and that kind of raw simplicity is rare.

Then I discovered Grass by Lush, which is a UK-based firm founded in 1995 by Mark Constantine and Liz Weir. Lush made a pretty penny on Grass as a shower gel back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but the product line has slipped in and out of availability over the years. To my knowledge, the only thing Lush still makes today is the Grass perfume, reviewed here and launched in 2020. Well, it was actually relaunched, with the original formula issued in 2018, but I never tried that one. Constantine is the primary perfumer for Lush's scents, and you have to know what his schtick is: crude, mostly natural and "vegan" fragrances, soaps, and cosmetics. When you buy into Lush, you're not buying into Keira Knightley covered in pink veils with rounded bottles and some overlapping letter Cs. You're buying into Kate Moss with powder. Jean Rollin movies. Bottles of Slivovitz and cigarette stubs. This is Bohemian Chic to the nth power. 

Grass perfume contains natural Australian sandalwood oil, bergamot oil, and neroli oil, with violet ionone and coumarin for that familiar hay-like effect in the base. The oils feel, well, oily. The violet is a little petrol-like. And the whole affair just smells like Sport Field, if it were made with the highest quality materials possible. A niche version of Sport Field, to put it bluntly. There are no fruit notes, so that's one difference, and it's more like a field of uncut hay rather than grass (although the first five minutes are pretty green), but, hell, it smells great and lasts forever. Recommended for earthy green lovers everywhere.