Jo's Scent Notes: Van Cleef & Arpels Néroli Amara

Last week, I was lucky enough to be taken away for 24 hours to a favourite hotel (Heckfield Place), to be immersed in the fragrances that will be launched throughout 2025 by Kenneth Green Associates. (Yes. Lucky, lucky me.)

‘KGA’, as they’re known in the business, may not be a name on your radar. But they’re responsible for distributing all manner of gorgeous perfume brands, ranging from spiffy and exotic Amouage through to good old Roger & Gallet. In other words, covering the whole scent price spectrum.

Price is a matter of ongoing discussion among the perfume writer colleagues who assembled there, as those edge sky-wards. As an aside, you’ll no doubt be as astonished as we’ve been lately to discover the phenomenon of teenage boys, in particular, who’ve become obsessed with fragrance via TikTok’s ‘PerfumeTok’, and seemingly think nothing of dropping £300+ on a fragrance. It begs the question: where are they getting the money… But also: what else is out there that doesn’t cost three arms and a leg, but is really quite exquisite?

I point you in the direction of Van Cleef & Arpels. Now, at around £150 for 75ml, these aren’t high street prices – but neither are they taking-the-p*ss price-tags, either, and the quality is sublime. And the one I’ve been longing to add to my fragrance wardrobe is Néroli Amara, which I smelled in John Lewis, I think, and which has been haunting me, ever since.

Now, once upon a time, I owned a little orange grove up a mountain in in Spain (a brief foray into foreign property ownership, and we definitely won’t be doing that again). Strictly, I owned half the orange grove (with my husband) – but the very best thing about that fleeting second home phase in our lives was the scent of the orange blossom, breathed through the open windows in the chill mountain mornings. Heady yet fresh, all-enveloping, it’s a smell I’ve associated with holidays ever since.

To me, orange blossom (neroli) is liquid sunshine. Nothing has quite its power to imagine sunlight shafting through an open window, days that demand a straw hat and a shady spot to escape the heat, summer frocks and chilled white wine. And of course, all of those have been in punishingly short supply of late, which is where, for me, Néroli Amara comes in. I have literally been craving sunlight – and this fragrance has slaked my thirst.

What I love at first hit is the green mandarin note (reminiscent of the much-mourned Goya Aqua Manda – three words which will make some of you come over extremely nostalgic, I know). It’s fresh, it is indeed green, as zesty as scraping your nail over an unripe tangerine skin – and I’m mad for it. There are other citrusy notes, too – lemon, for sure – as well as aromatic cypress and a nose-tingle of black pepper. But it’s the base which has bewitched me: a cloud of orange blossom absolute. So sophisticated. So… well, ‘solar’, and warm. And so bewitching that I can’t stop spraying this, to enjoy its different stages and phases over and over.

Thanks to my kind and generous friends at KGA, I returned home with a bottle of Van Cleef & Arpels Néroli Amara, the level of which is going down worryingly fast, with all that re-spritzing. But when it’s grey outside, when the sky feels so low that it feels (as a friend puts it) ‘like the lid’s on’, and when there’s nothing but rain forecast for as far as the weather forecast can see, I now just how to switch on the sunshine.

Just one of perfume’s many magic tricks – but impressive, no?

£153 for 75ml eau de parfum – buy here