The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Green Tea & Black Currant comes from Arina Franzén, a certified perfumer. It was released in 2025 as part of her Botanical Perfumery Volume II collection. The composition plays with contrast: the cooling astringency of green tea set against the tart, almost wine-like snap of blackcurrant. Franzén translates that into two natural materials working in tandem, letting resin and spruce hold everything together as the volatile green notes fade. The result is a study in restraint, a fragrance that asks what green actually smells like when you strip away the obvious citrus shortcuts and let the leaf do the talking. There's a deliberateness here, a sense that every material earned its place. The blackcurrant isn't decoration; it's structural, giving the composition its dark, fruity backbone.
Green tea as a concept is almost impossible to render in fragrance. The actual tea leaf carries an aroma, but the impression of green tea in a bottle is something constructed. This composition builds the cooling feeling from elemi resin's peppery brightness, then lets clary sage and maté carry the herbal weight through the heart. Blackcurrant delivers a dark, slightly animal fruitiness that grounds the whole composition. The fruit note arrives with a quick intensity, almost jammy in its density, then settles into something more transparent as the herbs rise.
The evolution
The first ten minutes belong to elemi and green mandarin, a bright, almost lemony lift that reads clean but carries warmth underneath. The blackcurrant arrives fast, tart and almost jammy, before the green tea impression sets in through clary sage and maté, both of which carry that dry, slightly bitter leaf quality that signals brewed tea rather than flavored water. As the composition moves forward, the fruit softens. The herbs recede into something more diffuse, their sharpness mellowing into a green haze that hovers above the skin. Black spruce takes over, dry and resinous, with that cool, sappy character of fresh-cut conifer. Copaiba balsam rounds the base with a creamy, slightly vanilla-adjacent warmth that prevents the drydown from going sharp or medicinal.
Cultural impact
Green Tea & Black Currant is part of the Botanical Perfumery Volume II series in the Arina Franzén catalog, a collection that explores common scent concepts through her particular material approach. The composition tackles one of perfumery's familiar pairings, tea and fruit, and renders it in a way that distinguishes it from typical commercial interpretations. Early response from those who've worn it has focused on the convincing green tea impression, with wearers noting the herbal notes read as genuine steeped botanicals rather than as flavoring.
