One of the most comforting classic desserts in the canon of French cuisine isîle flottante, a cloudlike confection of meringue floating on a sea of crème anglaise. Like a cloud on a plate, this light and airy dessert floats across your palate and down the rabbit hole into your memory bank, recalling moments of happiness marked by hot milk at bedtime and cool sheets and fragrant breezes wafting in from the window of a childhood home.
Proust had his lime tea and madeleine to carry him all the way home. With Cloud 9, one of ten eaux de parfums from the Roads Fragrance collection, it’s the fragrance of chamomile that provokes an herbal tea reverie.
© Roads Fragrance
Cloud 9 summons the warmth of happiness that marks a charmed childhood. Not unlike clean linens drying in the summer sun, the fragrance captures the quotidian pleasures of a halcyon day, which derives its potency from what it is not. Neither loud nor intrusive, Cloud 9 is the day that you recall for its simple joys. Floral notes of geranium and jasmine melt into a vanilla custard, dripping down a cone and onto the lawn.
Inspired by a feeling of floating happiness, Cloud 9 was created by Danielle Ryan, the founder of the Dublin-based Roads Luxury Group. Launched in 2013, Roads is an international lifestyle company that encompasses a publishing house, a fragrance line, and a film division. For her fragrance line, Ryan worked with a world-renowned perfumery to develop a collection of ten eaux de parfums, each inspired by a specific place, memory, person, experience, or emotion.
© Roads Fragrance
With a powdery base of musk and sandalwood, Cloud 9 evokes evenings of freshly-bathed children and parents in evening clothes, cocktails in hand. All is right with the world. Or as Nabokov wrote, “Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”
Launched at Barneys in the United States in the spring of 2014, all ten Roads fragrances are created and manufactured by hand in the United Kingdom.
