Green Lightning: Revisiting A Scent by Issey Miyake (2009) by Daphné Bugey

If your idea of clean is cotton sheets, A Scent by Issey Miyake might shock you in the best way. This is clean with nerve. The kind that arrives like a cut stem held to the nose, bright and sappy and unapologetically green. In 2009, Daphné Bugey gave us a chypre stripped to its bones and polished until it gleamed.

The opening is all verdant snap. Think crushed leaves, a citrus-tinged sparkle, that peppery-green rush you get when you break a twig. It never screeches. It shines. The heart softens into a transparent floral veil that reads like hyacinth and jasmine on a spring morning, more light and shade than bouquet. Underneath, a dry cedar-musky frame keeps everything linear and breathable, the way a perfectly tailored white shirt sits on the body without shouting.

Call it an elegant chypre if you like. I call it a green line drawn with a ruler. A Scent by Issey Miyake doesn’t rely on syrupy fruits or vanilla distractions. It’s cool, almost glassy, yet still very human. I wore it through a long office day and then on a rain-washed walk home. It never turned sour. It never got muddy. It stayed crisp and quietly assertive, like good posture.

Performance is better than its airy character suggests. Expect soft to moderate sillage that feels close but present. Longevity lands in the six to eight hour zone on my skin, with that cedar-clean base holding steady. The bottle mirrors the juice perfectly, a clear block with a whisper of green that looks like a piece of minimalist architecture on the shelf. No frills. No drama. Just clarity.

Who will love it? Anyone bored of sugar and desperate for a green that feels modern rather than nostalgic. Daphné Bugey threads a needle here, honoring the chypre idea without heavy moss, giving us freshness with spine. Fifteen years on, A Scent by Issey Miyake still smells like the future of green. It’s the quiet one in the room that somehow owns it.