Fanfare

Bursting, alive, bright, viscous even, tra-la-la, bells-a-ringing, as vital as a zest can be. Lemon explodes juicy, zingy, vivacious, sherbert. I’m here I’m vibrant, alive-alive-oh, I’m blinding sunshine yellow, smell me and hear me too. I arrive, I am Fanfare. I am the first in a trilogy of scents from Thameen London from the new slant on cologne called the Brtiologne collection; The meeting of British Cologne and modernity.

Lemon: A loved smell. Whether lingering from a bowl of succulent food or from the world of colognes; fresh bright scents. A fruit so common that most of us can imagine its bright yellow pithy skin; it’s sharp slightly herbal taste. In the right hands, this little oval of skin and juice had totally magical qualities.

Say for example it was in the hands of internationally renowned perfumer Bruno Jovanovic. What would this magician do? Well, to create a masterful lemon scent he would use two different styles of diffusion. After all, you want an explosive opener to a lemon perfume one that says I’m HERE.

This is exactly what Jovanovic did when creating Fanfare the new scent from Thameen London. He used two different styles of getting the scent from the fruit, giving, therefore, two different main tones with multiple facets between them to the perfume. It became a sort of ‘Superpower Cologne’

Lemons as with all citruses are notoriously fragile, volatile. They evaporate very quickly which is why they are used really only for the opening of fragrances. So this is how Christopher Chong’s Thameen new creative director worked with Bruno Jovanovic to create something that opens with yes a Fanfare, think jazz hands and loud song, but manages to carry all the way through to the end a sense of lemon, almost like a lingering taste from a lemon dessert.

So the story for Christopher began in his early days after he joined Thameen in 2022. The brand is created in Lonon and roots itself here. So the elixirs often reference the town. One place, not so often thought about, say in an everyday way, is the area Covent Garden, which was once the centre, for a fruit and vegetable market as well as of the city’s flower trade.

Peter Angelis (1685-1734) – Covent Garden (c.1726). Flemish, active in Britain (from ca. 1715), Covent Garden, ca. 1726, Oil on copper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Having been around in some form or other first known reference to the market occurred in 1654 when Thomas Cotton was described as living ‘about the new market in Covent Garden’. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, the entire square with its cobbled streets was devoted to the selling of fresh fruit, flowers and vegetables making Covent Garden London’s largest market.

Yet in 1926 the Town Clerk of Westminster presented a sixty-page report on the subject of Covent Garden Market, as the owners were then proposing to remove it to a more suitable site. The history of the market, he concluded, ‘bristles with illegality, fraud and oppression‘.

The powers by which the market was regulated had been ‘obtained by none too creditable means’, and the owners had ‘thereby established a stranglehold on a large proportion of the fruit and vegetable trade of London‘.

The notorious central area stayed a market up until the late 1960s when travel became too congested to make it a viable central fruit, vegetable and flower market and so significant redevelopments were planned. In the mid-1970s the market moved to a new site in Nine Elms. The square languished until its central building re-opened as a cool shopping and eatery centre in 1980.

But at its height, this would have been the area where toilette water makers and cologne creators would have come to collect flowers for their perfumes which had become adored by the well-to-do and fashionable in cities like London.

Long after it was a central point in London, it did become immortalised by film and musical representations and it is these smells and sounds that first caught the imagination of creative director Christopher Chong. So he decided to revisit the idea of a cologne but not one that was stuck in the past with say lavender facets. Instead, he chose lemon alongside the bouquet and silage of the flower market in its bustling original form. The perfume is now part of the ongoing history of this magical area.

Reimagined and presented Fanfare is called a  Cologne Elixir. Added facets with multiple nuances of lemon with added vermouth (with its almost medical bittersweet) flowers, water and even softwood and earth make this a powerful yet seductive scent.

Opening the notes are made up of Bergamot, Lemon, Neroli full-on brightness that explodes in a sunlight extravaganza alongside an accord of the flower market. For this facet think powdery, soft florals but with kissed hints of stems, and water in wooden floral containers or even the rain falling, falling, falling as it only does in the UK.

Move from there to its most unusual of hearts, Vermouth. Yes, that herbal bitter-sweet note that we are used to drinking (and may well have been drunk in the numerous pubs sounding the market in past days). This turned into a set of notes alongside Juniper berry (yes the Gin note) and fragrant, fresh yet woody Rosemary. These notes actually almost push the lemon forward, working to express more of the vitality in the bottle.

Its base, soft and velvety with Musk, rooty Vetiver and earthy Patchouli giving warmth and roundness to the scent as well as almost a cloud-like hug. Yet in the feel, the softest, finest silk organza, the sunlight-like veneer of lemon, by now more settled in its deep and loving sweetness. A ‘drift’ that passes through the musks and woods.

This super modern twist on a citrus cologne replicates the power and lustre of the Lemon with the perfumed flowers and the gritty streets whilst warming your very soul. Like the addiction of Londoners to their own loved streets, the fragrance calls to be worn, entices to be worn, in fact, demands to be worn. You won’t regret it when you do.

Along with the new scent comes an updated clear frosted bottle with the ribbed magnetic silver cap and a new updated logo.

Fanfare by Thameen is now available at Selfridges, Harrods, Fortnum and Mason, Liberty London and on their own site ThemeenFrgrances.com