Eau Moheli is this summer’s entry from French niche line Diptyque; it joins Eau Rose in their Les Florales collection. The name comes from Mohéli, one of the three Comores islands, and it’s “about” ylang ylang, or as Diptyque puts it, Eau Moheli “approaches the scent of this exotic flower from another point of view, capturing the journey from its remote island home in the Indian Ocean”.

If you’ve kept up with Diptyque’s recent releases, from 2005’s Do Son on through to last year’s Volutes,¹ you were presumably already prepared not to expect anything heady, much less a traditional exotic floral, and in that sense, Moheli delivers: after a brief punch of ylang ylang and citrus and fruit and peppery ginger in the opening, it calms into something closer to the house’s modern sheer style, and into something that you might not immediately think of as primarily a ylang ylang perfume at all…

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