The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Carlos Benaïm designed Ôver The Top as a study in unexpected contrast. The name itself, a tennis term for an audacious, unnecessary shot, tells you everything: this is a fragrance that wants to be noticed, and wants you to notice. Set within Lancôme's Le Monde des Ô collection, the brief was clear: take something familiar and tilt it sideways. The jasmine absolute at the heart comes from Le Domaine de la Rose in Grasse, a region that has defined French perfumery for generations. But Benaïm didn't build around the jasmine. He built around the green that would challenge it, tomato leaf, a note that reads as garden-fresh and distinctly unharmonious with traditional floral structure. The idea is to make jasmine feel new by giving it something rough to lean against. The composition doesn't try to smooth out the contrast. It lets the green and the floral argue, and that argument is the point.
The tomato leaf in Ôver The Top is worth pausing on. It's not a standard green accord, it's a specific vegetable note that behaves differently than mint, basil, or galbanum. The effect is a green that smells alive, slightly humid, like the air after a summer rain. It's the kind of note perfumers reach for when they want to avoid the obvious. The jasmine absolute anchors the heart with warmth and depth, this isn't a bright, sharp jasmine but something rounder, more enveloping. Together, the two materials create a tension: green against floral, fresh against warm, immediate against lingering.
The evolution
Ôver The Top opens with a jolt of green, tomato leaf cutting through like the first smell when you crush a leaf between your fingers. The green is immediate and vegetable-fresh, not herbal or medicinal. Fruity notes hover in the background, adding sweetness without softening the effect. For the first 20 minutes, this is a garden that hasn't been landscaped, raw, growing, alive. At around 30 minutes, the jasmine arrives. It doesn't storm in, it drifts, settling over the green like warm air moving through an open window. The floral is creamy and slightly indolic, the kind of jasmine that smells like late afternoon sun on petals. The green doesn't disappear. It becomes the ground the jasmine is growing from, still present underneath. This is the phase that defines the fragrance: green and floral, occupying the same space. By the third hour, the woody base arrives quietly. Not heavy, not loud, just enough to shift the structure from green-floral to green-floral-woody. The jasmine is still there, a warm hum beneath the green and wood.
Cultural impact
Launched in 2025 as part of Lancôme's Le Monde des Ô collection, Ôver The Top arrives at a moment when luxury fragrance is being redefined. The choice of tomato leaf as a hero note is deliberate and subversive, taking a ingredient most people associate with garden stakes and kitchen scraps and placing it at the center of a 100ml EDP priced for premium retail. This represents a broader shift in perfumery where unexpected botanical elements are being elevated into luxury status, driven partly by the farm-to-table movement and partly by younger consumers who value novelty over tradition. The tennis term origin adds another layer, positioning the fragrance as an audacious move within a house known for accessible femininity.
