Daily delight: discovering The Beautiful Mind

One of my favourite scents to wear is the cult classic Escentric Molecule, which has been stocked at Karen Walker stores for a few years now. So naturally I was most excited to hear that Karen will also now be offering The Beautiful Mind, the new smarter than smart fragrance from the creators of my old fave.
This time around Berlin-based Geza Schoen and London’s MeCompany collaborated with Christiane Stenger who, at the age of 12, became a Grandmaster of Memory and the Junior World Memory Champion at the World Memory Championships. She subsequently won the competition four more times. Schoen was interested in celebrating in scent women who had a truly special skill, and came across a magazine article about Stenger, now 22 and a political science student in Munich. Several months later, she came to Berlin, and the duo spent the month of July 2007 working together on what would eventually become The Beautiful Mind.
The goal was a scent that would appeal to head and heart, by connecting the mobility of the mind with the depth of memory. “An ode to summer and its memories,” is Schoen’s description. “A refreshing sparkle followed by tropic flowers, luscious woods and musk.” Topnotes include magnolia bud, bergamot, mandarin, schinus molle and freesia. The heart is composed of osmanthus, rose oil, hedione and, most critically, notes of tiare absolute, extracted from a rare and expensive Tahitian flower. These floral absolutes give the scent a wonderful richness. The base of the fragrance is cedar, musk, sandalwood and cashmeran. Think of the way your mind edits the past into a series of vivid sense impressions.
MeCompany’s packaging is naturally fabulous, with the bottle wrapped in a lenticular foil depicting Stenger’s face morphing into abstraction. “The Beautiful Mind is meant to remind us that a smart woman is a sexy woman”, says Schoen, and there is no way I’m arguing with that.