Welcome to Ormonde Jayne Perfumery’s new blog. We are here to give you a look into the world of perfume making and also some daily snapshots inside the life of the London’s Old Bond Street and The Royal Arcade, where Ormonde Jayne’s flagship store awaits you.

Approaching Ormonde Jayne’s eighth birthday this autumn we are creating some spellbinding additions to our fragrance collection and we will be showing the long & exciting process from the first twinkling of an idea of a new scent to the finished bottle on the shelf.

We will also be keeping you posted about the new Ormonde Jayne
Perfumery in Dubai’s Boutique 1 in Jumeirah Beach that opened in autumn last year.

But first, I have just returned from a fantastic tour of the South of France staying a while in St Jean Cap Ferrat.  The Riviera is one of the best places to combine perfume and a holiday– and very early spring with electric yellow bursts of mimosa everywhere and empty clean beaches, the best time!

The evocative smells of pine forests, spring flowers mixed up with fresh pain bagnat, and of course the exhilarating odour of a sparkling Mediterranean sea.  Just thinking about it makes me want to grab my bikini and leapfrog back there…

The history of perfume in Nice and Grasse began five hundred years ago when Catherine de Medici started a fashion for wearing perfumed leather gloves and now 20 tonnes of jasmine are produced from the fields of Provence solely to manufacture the ubiquitous Chanel no°5. Ormonde Jayne’s purpose during this trip as you can imagine was much more select.

A moment that shows the incredibly effective transporting power of smell came to me on our last afternoon wandering along Plage Paloma in Cap Ferrat, a hidden beach fringed by pine trees. I was immersed in my toddler Rafi’s merry game of chasing the tide when I was suddenly beamed back to The Royal Arcade for an instant a catching an unmistakable trace of Champaca. When I took in what had happened I glanced a very elegant Ormonde Jayne customer!

The day after I got back, The Royal Arcade transformed itself into a pink-carpeted, peony strewn, Champagne party decked with a thousand fairy lights. The dazzling Claudia Schiffer and radiant Sadie Frost were dressed in their finest to help our newest neighbour John Calleija launch Calleija Jewellers and we toast his success in The Royal Arcade.