It's not easy to describe iris’ smell as such, but if you smell a fragrance without it, and then with it, you understand immediately what it does. It adds a creamy powderiness. It brings a physical dimension to a fragrance.

Geza Schoen, the perfumer, has had a long-standing love affair with iris. Every Escentric fragrance has an iris note somewhere in there. To Geza, iris is luxury. The iris pallida absolue he used is one of the most expensive ingredients in perfumery. You can find iris extracts for way less than that. But they do not have the great and subtle beauty of this absolue. It’s radical to put this much in a fragrance. The sillage is fantastic. This is a bomb, but a subtle bomb.”