Eau d'Italie Signature Scent Eau de Parfum as seen on AirMail.News...

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Eau d'Italie Eau de Parfum by Eau d'Italie: Spritzing on the Ritz From the health-and-beauty lab, Linda Wells breathes in the world of hotel scents— proprietary blends used everywhere from Paris’s Ritz to Positano’s Le Sirenuse to Manhattan’s Carlyle…

Eye of the Beholder

Hotels are so rich with scent memories that, sometimes, a spritz is enough to really take you places. Isn’t it about time you tried putting’ on the Ritz, too?

Many of these fragrances don’t make it past checkout time and onto human pulse points. An exception is Eau d’Italie, the scent that originated at Le Sirenuse hotel, in Positano, in 2004. Marina Sersale, a member of the hotel family, worked with Bertrand Duchaufour, a seasoned perfumer, to try to bottle the spirit of the place. “One of my strongest memories of summers in Positano is racing my brother and sister across the terra-cotta tiles, which were scorching hot,” says Sersale.

That memory kicked the fragrance in motion starting with a warm mineral note. Duchaufour added incense, patchouli, and musk, inspired by the church down the hill, and sweet yellow clover, magnolia, a bit of tuberose, bergamot, and black-currant buds to capture the fresh Mediterranean air.

Sersale planned to spray the scent in the hotel lobby, offer it in soap, bath gel, and body lotion forms in the rooms, and sell it in the hotel’s Emporium. “We were really babes in the woods,” Sersale says. When magazines caught wind of it, the scent blew up. “It started in a very innocent and unplanned way…. We had visions of the fragrance traveling far from the hotel. I think it enriches the experience of staying [here]. It’s something intangible that you are happy to take with you.”

Eau d’Italie Eau de Parfum Spray

Designed to capture the spirit of Le Sirenuse hotel and the scent of the Amalfi Coast—without the hordes of tourists—this fragrance smells of bergamot, blackcurrant buds, and a touch of musk.

Photo by David Castillo (@espacioveintiuno)