More Conversation with Ineke Ruhland and Perfume Review -- Balmy Days and Sundays

Balmy Days and Sundays is Ineke's greenest scent.

A cool, sweet air of freesia and rustling greenery makes Balmy Days and Sundays a secret garden of a perfume. Once inside the scent's leaf-covered walls, a floral heart of honeysuckle, rose and mimosa is revealed. The floral accord is suggestive rather than bold, with Ineke's signature delicacy. The rose and honeysuckle float by with a green soap bubble of mimosa that complements the grass and leaf notes in the opening. Mimosa here has the watery sweetness of cucumber and melon without becoming too fresh or fruity. Balmy Days and Sundays is anchored by a very subtle chypre accent and a quiet musk. There's just a suggestion of flowers and greens that in its terseness sings a thousand notes.

Of the four scents now available from Ineke, Balmy Days and Sundays is the sleeper. It is the most restrained of the four fragrances yet it conveys the sense of nature in its sweetness and time at its most expansive. It is a very wearable scent that would be heartbreaking smelled at the nape of the neck. Balmy Days and Sundays is a poem to green tendrils and blossoms. After just a few sniffs, I became curious to know

How Ineke's Birthplace and Travels Have Influenced Her Style of Perfumery ...

Since the late 90s, Ineke Ruhland has moved from the highly perfumed streets of Paris to the green spaces and city gardens of San Francisco with grace, yet her perfumes are still marked by her Canadian roots. A glance at the packaging for Ineke Perfume suggests that place and the natural environment is an important inspiration in Ineke's perfumery. Intimate yet elemental photography of a woman looking out to sea adorns After My Own Heart. Balmy Days and Sundays sports a grassy lawn strewn with shadows. In these images with their closeup focus, there is sensual particularity as well as universality.

When I asked Ineke how a sense of home and place inspires her perfumery, she said,"I think place influences every perfumer, and every perfume wearer for that matter, although for me it’s more subconscious than studied. I always think of Canada as being very crisp and clean, from the air around you to the natural vegetation and even the types of flowers that thrive in gardens there. Perfumers’ environmental smells growing up are often traceable to the raw materials they tend to favor in their perfumery palettes later on."

Although the influence of a Canadian upbringing on the perfume palette may be unconscious, Ineke pinpointed the influence of her fellow Canadians' respect for one another's air space on her work: "Canadians also have an inherent civility and gentility, not unlike what you find in San Francisco, the city where I now live. People are conscious not to impede on other people’s air space. Again, this isn’t something I consciously think about when creating fragrances, but I think I have absorbed it, and it keeps me from using a heavy hand with rich, diffusive raw materials."

Such a light touch might seem anathema to a perfumer like Ineke with a French training. Yet, Ineke has taken the best of French olfactory intelligence and style and combined it with a delicate restraint in making her own fragrances.

She expressed a fondness for the French bravado with scent. "The French are much more individualistic, and if you don’t like their cigarette smoke or heavy perfume, well that’s not their problem. I appreciate that attitude more when it comes to perfume than cigarette smoke, of course. In fact, I was recently in Paris again, and I love the fact that you constantly catch little trails of fragrance when walking around. I find that very alluring."

After living in Paris for several years, Ineke and her partner Bill O'Such moved to San Francisco, a coastal city with lots of green space. Ineke mentioned "very fresh ocean air" and "the smell of plants that do well in our Mediterranean climate"
among her favorite smells of San Francisco.

Gardening in the city by the bay has fed Ineke's passion for rare scented botanicals. "This finds its way into my perfumery, and I plan on doing a candle collection next year that’s directly related to the rare, scented botanicals in our garden."

Said Ineke, "Mother Nature is by far the most talented perfumer I’ve come across, without even trying." While there is modesty and some truth to that statement, Ineke makes me glad for artifice with her thoughtful creations.