A well-composed fragrance takes you places: a journey via olfactory memory. And if you are truly fortunate, you arrive in a sanctuary redolent with flora, evocative of a halcyon epoch.
Such is the case with Joya’s Foxglove, which takes as its inspiration the herbaceous perennial that once blanketed 19th-century New York. Named for the flower’s ability to slip over the fingertip, foxglove has a history of toxicity when ingested (or brewed), thereby making it a perfect symbol for Manhattan’s addictive temptations.
© Joya
Equally so is Joya’s fragrance, which arrives in the fragrance design studio’s signature porcelain vessel (with 22-karat-gold-dipped applicator wand), slip cast by hand at the Joya studio. Foxglove is the Brooklyn-based company’s fourth perfume – and with this incarnation, the vessel is presented in a seductive British racing green, which evokes both the bounty of a Central Park spring as well as the allure of absinthe on a bed of moss velvet.
In creating Foxglove, Joya founder Frederick Bouchardy and his team researched the botanical history of New York City, including the archives of Henry Hope Reed who was Central Park’s first curator and the author of its history.
It’s telling that the accompanying booklet also includes a quote from Andrew Jackson Downing, the foremost landscape architect in American history, who, in speaking about Central Park rhapsodized about the “beauty of green fields, the perfume and freshness of nature.”
An ode to the horticultural profusion of Central Park at its prime, Foxglove offers the equivalent of wading waist-deep through a meadow fragrant with tomato leaf and freshly-cut salt grass. Notes of jasmine and camellia float in the breeze, recalling the flutter of open curtains at Daisy Buchanan’s East Egg estate in The Great Gatsby, another literary antecedent cited in Foxglove’s provenance.
© Joya
A vibrantly green fragrance with hypnotic allure, Foxglove is, in Bouchardy’s words, “a soft green explosion,” a phrase that also connotes Daisy and her impact upon Jay Gatsby. With a honeylike creaminess, Foxglove lingers – on the skin, in the mind, evoking an era marked by the “capacity for wonder,” as Fitzgerald wrote in the poignant peroration of his elegiac novel.
Joya Foxglove perfume oil is available at Net-A-Porter.
