The Soft Lawn
Imaginary Authors (2012)

The Soft Lawn, 2.0 is a wet, green grass scent with a hint of florals and something slightly chalky (maybe tennis ball?) underneath. On initial opening it immediately made me think of Green Irish Tweed, but not as bright and then it quickly faded towards something more arboricultural with a leafy green accord. It's pleasant but not anything I want to wear for very long. Neutral for me.

This is a borderline neutral / positive.

It does capture the idea of an early summer tennis court, and the “tennis ball accord” does work. All fairly muted and quite pleasant, but not special enough for a full bottle.

I was looking forward to sampling this one based on all the years I spent playing tennis growing up. Hard courts, clay courts, tennis ball cans...all the smells, I know them well. I even tried to make a grass court of my own at one point in a very large, open part of the side yard growing up. A friend helped me and we actually did complete it and played a few games on it. Amateur court, yes, but still, the experience counts.

The Soft Lawn smells like Falling into the Sea, also by Imaginary Authors, but less beachy, suntan lotion and more of an earthy, grassy note in the opening. Later, it is all still very, very similar to Falling into the Sea with its airy, beachy florals but just a hint of extra sweetness. I was expecting more grass/earthiness. It still smells decent but just not like tennis or anything they were shooting for.

Also, where's the tennis ball accord? I liken a fresh tennis ball out of the can to a dead fish or cat food smell, so that would have been interesting if it would have come through.

Projection is average but longevity is 8-9 hours.

Ugh. Its a dusty fougere. Smells like a potted plastic fern in the worst way. The ones with the fake crumbly moss glued to styrofoam in the pot. It is dry, so thats good. It doesnt overly sweeten itself to acheive its structure, and is completely devoid of moss or anything approximating. I understand where this was going. Just a failed execution to me.

I love the Imaginary Authors brand. But sadly this is not a winner for me. I sprayed my wrists and my chest. On my wrists I get some vague greenery. Could give off a grass clippings vibe, which is what they were going for, but overall my wrists were pretty subtle.

My chest however, was a different story. Right out the gate my chest starts with the "clay court" accord. It wasn't bad, just funky. But then after 30 minutes things took a turn for the worse. Some of the green notes warmed up and combined in a weird way and my chest started to emanate two things: dill and mustard. Neither are in the notes. But whenever I got a whiff. I could not stop thinking "I am not a posh tennis court. I am a walking hamburger". I got a good laugh out of it while doing my shopping, but this one just didn't work for me. Everyone's body chemistry is different though, so I'd say give it a shot if you're interested.

Pleasant, green floral fragrance with linden blossom as a principal component - the honey and beeswax type of character like you find in D'Orsay's Tilleul is less pronounced and in its place is a fresh aldehydic peach similar to that in "Falling into the Sea".

Overall however it could be said to suggest a soft lawn, though the tennis balls are almost certainly added by the marketers, rather than the perfumers.

And talking of marketing, the backstory of an enterprising young man called Josh Meyer with no prior experience putting the successful perfumes together on his kitchen table fits nicely with 'the American dream' but is, I suspect, a lot of old baloney. If I claimed to have built a fighter jet in my backyard from old tin cans, nobody would believe me, but you can get away with almost anything in the fantasy land of perfumery.

A sour opening with lemon/lime and lots of green notes. 15 minutes in and the sour citrus is nicely combined with sweet notes; some vetiver appears with a grassy aspect. It's a pleasant warm weather scent.

Uh, "tennis balls"? Should be kind of fun and easy to get a rubber smell, no? Yeah, well you have to sit through a lot of nonsense before you get to the joke with this, but then you sort of laugh, politely. First comes an intense, synthetic chamomile followed by the smell of zested generic citrus peel, if you only zested the soft part of the skin rather than the rind. Then some orange, something from the entire cast of The Jersey Shore, getting table service in Vegas. Grey Goose, cranberry, orange, diet RedBull belches. Finale of white candle, well: at least it evolves.

I am just getting around to Imaginary Authors and bought the Short Stories sampler collection. First out of the box was Soft Lawn. For me it was linear with a soft hay note and a soft floral accord compromising the main body of the scent. The floral is not sweet nor is it artificial. In my mind it seemed like the a lawn in need of mowing that had flowers like buttercups and daisies growing along the margins. Twenty minutes in a rubber note appears which is closer to rubber bands than the acrid rubber usually found in perfumes. The note hangs around at the edges of the hay/floral accord then fades away. The whole thing disappears in two to three hours. No clay court is ever in evidence. Soft Lawn is literally soft hay and soft florals. No sillage and poor projection. It might make a good spring scent. Leans a bit feminine for my taste and will be passed on to my wife. She says it smells like something she wore in the 70's but, couldn't pin down which one.

Very nice, soft, fragrant imagery comes to mind when wearing the Soft Lawn. That sounds pretty funny actually...I feel like Pistachio Disguisey in one of the worst films ever made, the Master of Disguise. In this horrific film, Pistachio, played by Dana Carvey disguises himself as a section of lawn at one point...so he's wearing lawn. Today, I'm wearing the Soft Lawn, but it is infinitely better than Pistachio's lawn...that he's wearing...

Okay, anyway, this fragrance is actually quite enjoyable. The listed notes intrigued me greatly. I love green scents, and this definitely has them. The lime blossom is quite strong in the opening and is one of my favorite parts of this fragrance.

This wears well, is unique, and has very good longevity and sillage. I'd like to get a bottle.

I just got this today- the day before Halloween. With the temperature here in the 80s....this is actually pretty good. I remember being up in the air over this and Falling Into The Sea, but I still had this one on my mind. That was four months ago and the memory of this fragrance lingered on. As you might already know and love about this house is the use of unique and different notes.....Tennis Balls, Vetiver and Oak Moss. You're not going to run into anyone that has this on unless they're into fragrances or just plain cool. That's why I like this house so much. Niche quality without the incredible markup.

Great for the office....that's what I predict and will soon see Monday morning. Use this one all year round- I think it would be refreshing in the winter. The dominant notes of Tennis Balls and Vetiver give it the flexibility that a woman or man could easily wear this.

Bottle worthy.

I am suspicious–make that incredulous–of storytelling in perfumery. The minute the exposition or the plot commences, I tune out. Perfume evokes ideas and states, and reflects trains of thought that no other art-form can. Trying to make perfumes tell stories reminds me of those tiny dogs in circus acts, dressed in clown-like costumes, jumping up and down on their hind legs.

So why do I enjoy the perfume fictions of Imaginary Authors so much? Maybe it's because they get at stories through imaginations of memory. Perhaps the stories are simply imagistic and evocative. The stories are a stepping-off point into the perfumes rather than a scented repetition of the plot and have a nostalgic quality– part pulp melodrama, part noir detective movie. They riff on very specific references and provide instant entry into the stories. A City on Fire is a deadpan, urban graphic novel. Bull's Blood is a Hemingway-gestalt of ex-pat thrill-seeking and machismo. The Cobra and the Canary is equal parts On the Road and Thelma and Louise.

In the Imaginary Authors line, stories and perfumes are closely aligned, but Meyer smartly puts some breathing room between them. The plots have the pattern of conflict and consequence found in fables and use symbolism like campfire stories. They are synopses of archetypal stories and we recognize their meaning instantly even if the plots themselves are new to us.

The Soft Lawn is particularly ripe with suggestion. It imagines a prequel to JD Salinger's own story of a young author's successful first novel whose protagonist is a disaffected private school brat. The 1920s dashing, tennis-playing author of the fictional novel, Claude leCoq, is a play on 1920s dashing tennis player René Lacoste (Le Crocodile.)

The perfume itself recreates the image of a 1920s tennis club through scent. Green grass and leaves, old-fashioned rubber-soled tennis shoes, tennis balls and starched tennis whites. The note that ties it together is linden blossom. Its green-lemon side could garnish a post-match gin and tonic while its laundry powder musky side maintains the image of dazzling white tennis trousers and skirts. The Soft Lawn is the scent of a location, a scenario, a setting. It gives equal weight to the living (grass, flowers) and the inanimate (tennis balls and cotton fabric) and wears like an olfactory snapshot of post WW I New England WASP culture. Like an antiquated photo that captured a moment but has faded, The Soft Lawn starts strong and eventually ebbs to a faint but coherent reflection of its topnotes. It stays in your nose the way the echoing sounds of tennis balls being struck in the distance stays in your ear. The rhythm can be a pleasant background when your thoughts are elsewhere, but at others times the the clarity of the sound/scent captures your attention with its satisfying simplicity.

Despite the story surrounding the perfume, The Soft Lawn is evocative, not narrative. It doesn't repeat the story you've already read. It creates an olfactory setting and puts you in a frame of mind to write yourself into the story, making you the author.