Ramon Monegal is a perfumer based in Barcelona, a member of the fourth generation of the family that started Myrurgia. He started his eponymous fragrance brand, Ramon Monegal Parfums, after a long career with Myrurgia and Puig, where he helped to develop fragrances for brands like Adolfo Dominguez, Antonio Miró, Aigner, Ines de la Fressange, and Massimo Dutti. Lovely Day was inspired by his son’s wedding:

An olfactory poem dedicated to the value of love. A Mediterranean composition to celebrate my son Óscar’s wedding. Happiness, intensity, joy, light, glow, affection and lots of excitement. Inspired by the bride’s white rose bouquet, because roses are the flowers of love.

He describes it as an “floral rose aqueous-watery” scent. The notes are: Sambac jasmine absolute, tea rose absolute, licorice absolute, iris on cedarwood and cassis. He invokes a “tone” of opal on a golden background, which is interesting because Lovely Day does have the diffuse quality of an opal that flashes bits of different colors unpredictably, changing with the light.

Different reviewers have made wildly different comments about Lovely Day. One compared it to the smell of algae in a pond! Thankfully that is not what I smell. From LuckyScent:

Vibrant and luminous, Lovely Day is romance in a bottle. Perfectly capturing the day of our dreams, this fragrance proposes a sweet, clear, and innocent afternoon followed by a cool, dreamy, unpredictable evening. A shining soapy rose, black currant, and wafts of jasmine offer a clean and universally lovable opening. It is, however, Lovely Day’s silky notes of licorice and iris that make it unforgettable and captivating – adding powdery gourmand qualities to an otherwise clean and fruity bouquet of rose and jasmine. Lovely Day will keep you guessing, as any lovely day should: If you knew exactly what to expect, you wouldn’t have any fun at all.

It’s fun to read the reviews, because almost the only things they agree on are: that Lovely Day is hard to figure out; and that it releases a licorice note in a very unusual way, combined with cassis, flowers and cedar. Commenters on various sites either love it or hate it, so perfumistas beware — try before you buy!

I wouldn’t say that I LOVE it, but I definitely like it a lot and find it intriguing. Cassis is a somewhat unfamiliar note to me, but I think that’s the spicy/fruity note I smell at the start. I smell the floral notes but they are very blended and I don’t smell rose separate from jasmine or iris, for instance. I smell a silky floral note that is like a rose, then it deepens into a jasmine-inflected heart, and later there is a powdery feel that must come from the iris, but they shade together (again, much like an opal).

The licorice note is not like the candy, it is more like anise or even absinthe, the notorious “green fairy” that inspired and haunted the dreams and visions of nineteenth-century artists, poets and other Bohemians. Ramon Monegal’s fairy is innocent and sweet — though, as one reviewer said, she has an edge.

I like the cedar-scented drydown very much, and you can smell the cedar throughout if you put your nose to your skin. One of the intriguing qualities of Lovely Day is that it smells quite different floating past your nose from how it smells close up. The wafted notes are fruitier and sweeter; the skin notes are warmer and more aromatic. Lovely, indeed!

Have you tried any of Ramon Monegal’s scents?

Featured image from: http://www.alumtalks.org.