Infanta
Frater Perfumes (2022)

Jamie Frater, Perfumer & Creative Director:

The home I live in has been in my family for multiple generations and my own childhood was spent there. I have vivid memories of gathering the copious plums that fell from the old damson tree in a far corner of the garden. My mother would spend hours turning the dusty spheres into blood-red jam to be poured into boiling glass jars in preparation for the dearth of fruit in the coming hibernal months. Many a wintery breakfast was punctuated by shouts of joy from my brothers, sisters, and I playing "tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor..." with the overlooked plum pits we found buried in the ruby mounds of jam atop our hot buttered toast - little nuggets of pleasure.

In the summer after my mother died I took up her jam-making tradition and in the process I struck upon the idea of a perfume that combined damson plum jam with another childhood treat: the fragrant ivory flesh of Doyenné du Comice pears which once hung in great profusion from a gnarled bough that had crept over the wall from a neighbouring property. I set to work and soon developed a combination of these two notes enhanced by Bourbon vanilla and a touch of peach which pleased my sense of food-centred nostalgia.

Ylang Ylang was the perfect floral accompaniment because of its heavy and intensely sweet odour, while pale yellow osmanthus contributed apricot and leathery nuances blending beautifully with the fruit notes and natural vanilla. Both my mother and grandmother favoured perfumes with quietly animalic musks, so ambergris and musk extractions were essential to the dry down.

Infanta is my youth, my mother, her mother, the home in which I was raised and continue to live, and so many happy memories growing up in New Zealand with a large and loving family.