Lilac by Air & Weather captures an ethereal bouquet of fresh, dew-kissed lilac blossoms. The fragrance opens with bright coastal air that lifts and energizes before revealing its stunning floral heart: rich lilac blooms intertwined with flowering gourd, delicate acacia, crisp lily-of-the-valley, garden roses, and sultry jasmine. This mesmerizing blend settles into an elegant base where powdery orris and vanilla harmonizes with smooth cedar and soft musk to create an effortlessly wearable and quietly sophisticated finish.
The Ottomans were the first to discover Syringa vulgaris growing along the rocky hills of the Balkan Peninsula. These delicate clusters of white-to-deep-purple fragrant flowers derive from the olive family and were initially named “fox tail” for their shape upon the branch as they became promptly introduced to the Sultan’s gardens in Constantinople during the 1500s.
My favorite story about lilacs involves an Alsatian painter, architect and gardener extraordinaire named Antoine-Ignace Melling, famed for his beautiful, detailed engravings of Constantinople in his Voyage Pittoresque de Constantinople et des Rives du Bosphore (1807). At age 19, during the 1790s, Melling was hired by one of Potemkin’s protégés who served as the Russian ambassador in Pera. Melling, a young artist, eagerly followed the fashionable trend of traveling to Constantinople to see its exotic sights.
When Sultan Selim III’s half-sister, Sultana Hatice, toured the amazing gardens at the Büyükdere home of former Danish merchant and diplomat Baron Frederic de Hübsch, he told her, in so many words, “Hire this kid, Melling.”
Melling quickly found himself working for Sultan Selim and Sultana Hatice, creating with his ornamental, European-style paintings in the Sultan’s summer residence on the Bosphorus. For Sultana Hatice, he designed a garden maze of acacia, lilacs, and roses at her palace in Ortaköy—fragrant plants which could be pruned into any shape. He designed maze curves so that all the garden paths led back to the center, with exits that were especially challenging to find. This type of maze was called a dédale, after the original Cretan labyrinth builder, Daedalus.
Typically, we think of labyrinths as mazes, but there’s a distinct difference: labyrinths draw visitors toward their center, whereas mazes have multiple paths that do not necessarily lead toward a center.
When the ladies of Sultan Selim III’s harem were let loose to explore inside this garden, they quickly found themselves drawn toward its center, lost inside its walls of blooms—to the point where they started to believe they were held there by a magical spell. Those who managed to find its hidden exits enjoyed the others’ confusion. And once they all emerged from the labyrinth, they wished to return and experience it all over again. (But doesn’t that describe life, in a nutshell?)
Above all, labyrinths exist to quiet the mind, calm anxieties, recover one’s balance, enhance creativity, and encourage self-reflection. So when you wear Air & Weather’s Lilac, imagine the delight of these ladies for being surrounded by the scent of dewy, fresh lilacs—purple fox tails!—as you, too, can now carry the joy and mystique of this magical oasis into your own life.
Melling’s engraving of Sultana Hatice’s Palace circa 1795.
Image credit: Public domain, Turkish Wikipedia.
For more about lilacs and Melling…
The Lilac: A Monograph by Susan Delano McKelvey, 1928, MacMillan.
- Observations, by Pierre Belon, 1552. A Paris: Chez Guillaume Cauellat.
Engaging the Ottoman Empire by Daniel O’Quinn, University of Pennsylvania Press.