Hiram Green

I first met Hiram Green over a decade ago when he had a tiny boutique called Scent Systems in near London’s famed (and now completely theme-parked) Carnaby St. He then moved to the Netherlands and set up as an independent perfumer. He sent me samples of three of his fragrances. Dilettante is an orange flower composition, sunny and straightforward, “fresh and sweet throughout” as HG himself describes it. Moon Bloom is a beautiful tuberose-jasmine accord, rich and soft in a style that reminds me of the more sentimental compositions of the ’50s, Ma Griffe’s kindly sister, so to speak. Shangri-La, named after a mythical Himalayan Liechtenstein is described as a chypre fragrance, and it is, in a way: if you took the greatest extant chypre, Guerlain’s luxuriant Mitsouko (1919) and you subtracted from it Coty’s extinct, angular Chypre (1917), you would probably end up with a pillowy-peachy-powdery confection like Shangri-La. Good, very civilised fragrances all.