Sarah Jane Black / 20 June 2025 / Categories: Product and Brands, Fragrance

Beautiful Ormonde Jayne Fragrance Gone in a flash

At almost 200 euros a bottle I’d expect it to last

My sister is not a perfumer but she might as well be the amount she purchases. She is always shopping the perfume counter and when she comes to Rome it’s something we always do together, exploring the less well

Known Italian fragrance houses, like PRO FVMVM ROMA,

CAMPOMARZIO 70, Laboratorio Olfativvo and Nektar from Ale Parfum, via Leonina similar to independent French houses Maison D’etto and villa Nellcote inspired from 16 bedroom mansion built during the Belle Epoque by banker Eugene Thomas where the Rolling Stones famously stayed. It’s located on a headland above the sea at Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Côte d'Azur in Southern France where we holidayed as kids.

She does have quite a nose. She’s dragged me around the perfumers in Grasse, once I remember when I was pregnant and the scents were so over powering combined with the heat in the height of the summer I wasn’t sure whether I would throw up or pass out and in which order.

I wasn’t surprised when a box arrived from London with some English glossy magazines and a load of perfume samples she’d collected for me to try the most interesting and noteworthy were from an independent brand I’d never heard of before wholly owned and operated by fellow Brit Linda Pilkington a girl from Cheshire, close to where we grew up with stories of concocting face packs and perfumes made from rose petals with her sister. It sounded like us growing up too.

The one thing ladies in Italy expect when they drop a couple of hundred euros on a luxury fragrance is for it to last and linger.

I’ve only tried Levante by Ormonde Jayne and have sprayed the tester bottle very liberally and so far even though it does smell absolutely divine, inspired by the Lebanon, a woody, musky fragrance from the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean, with its heart firmly in the Lebanon. Levant originates from the Latin “rising” due to the sun rising in the east.

And I love it, I personally wouldn’t invest because unlike the Italian fragrances I am used to it didn’t last. By lunchtime I could barely smell it at all and by evening you’d definitely need to spray again.

May work better in a cooler climate but in hot sticky Rome in the summer it wasn’t long enough lasting for me.

My favourite that will hold and hold, laboratoria Olfativvo is difficult to find but you won’t get the same issue and much cheaper at €120 euros for 100ml.