The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Mint Leaf arrived in 2025 from Alia Raza, the former filmmaker and visual artist who co-founded Régime des Fleurs with Ezra Woods in New York a decade earlier. The brief seems simple: take mint seriously. Not as a top-note novelty or a breath-freshener gimmick, but as the organizing principle of an entire fragrance. Raza, whose early collections at the house centered on narcotic white florals and unexpected green pairings, turned here to something more elemental, the smell of the leaf itself, before it becomes anything else.
What makes Mint Leaf unusual is the structure it builds around that mint. Most fragrances use mint as punctuation, a flash of cool in an otherwise warm sentence. Here, spearmint is the subject. It opens the fragrance, anchors the heart, and even lingers into the drydown as a memory rather than a statement. The jasmine tea accord gives it something to rest against: floral but quiet, slightly tannic, bridging the freshness of the opening into the warmth of the base without ever letting go of the cool thread running through the whole thing. Clary sage adds an herbal dimension that prevents the mint from reading as toothpaste or gum.
The evolution
The opening hits fast: bergamot and eucalyptus together, cool and bright, with a translucent quality that smells like glass. The iced tea note reads less as a literal drink and more as a temperature, that slight bitterness of cold tea, the way it catches the light. Within fifteen minutes, the mint moves front and center, but it's spearmint, not peppermint, rounder, greener, with none of the sharpness that makes some mint fragrances feel clinical. The clary sage arrives next, softening the mint into something herbal and almost floral. The jasmine tea doesn't announce itself so much as emerge, a quiet sweetness underneath the herbs that keeps everything from sharpening. By the second hour, the base takes over: cardamom and cedar wood, warm and slightly spiced, but the musk holds everything at skin level. The drydown isn't loud. It's the smell of someone who was here, hours ago, and left something behind.
Cultural impact
Mint Leaf sits comfortably in Régime des Fleurs' tradition of unexpected green compositions, alongside earlier work like Willows and Gold Leaves. The house has built a following among collectors who value experimentation over safety, and Mint Leaf continues that thread, a fragrance that earns its name without relying on the synthetic cool of menthol or the toothpaste associations that plague mint-forward scents.
