Straddling the gorgeous crux of spring and summer, the scent of ‘Soft Lawn’ by Imaginary Authors is my first foray into this fragrance brand, and it’s a surprisingly impressive entry. This was a blind-buy request as an anniversary gift, and quite happily it was a raging success, fulfilling the descriptive literature that likened it to the scent of a tennis match day in a lifestyle to which I have never been accustomed, but I love the way it smells. Taking its name from an imaginary novel by Claude LeCoq (an imaginary name if ever there was one), it’s meant to be worn as a leisure scent on weekends, or days that you wish were weekends, which is pretty much every day right now.
This was a welcome addition to my cologne cabinet, lightening the load of Tom Ford and filling in for the lackluster latest from the Hermes Jardin line. ‘Soft Lawn’ lists the tennis ball as one of its notes, but I find that may mostly be for the image it conjures instead of the actual scent. The other notes are more what I detect and adore, starting with the lovely linden tree, whose blossoms are just now coming on to perfume the local air. Some grapefruit helps open things up, before ripening quickly into something greener with oak moss, vetiver, and laurel and ivy leaves lending the dappled light of a forest to the proceedings.
It’s an ideal scent for this time of the year, and it is courteous enough not to stick around for more than a couple of hours. I don’t always admire that in a fragrance, but at $95 for 50ml, this is practically a steal. The packaging is exquisitely whimsical, conjured to perfectly resemble a book, and the bottle art is the sort of art-deco beauty that suits its lofty literary references. I’m going to order a sample set to see which one will see us through mid-to-late summer.
