Reviewing one of my top 10 summer favourites today - Wulong Cha from the Turkish house of Nishane.
Wulong cha essentially smells like exactly the name would suggest, a fresh tea fragrance. But for a fresh tea-forward fragrance that was first launched in 2015, it hasn’t really lost its charm (or hype) even a decade later and that speaks volumes. The scent profile reads very complicated on paper, so here’s the Fragrantica page for whoever wants to read.
Wulong cha opens with a very green, almost vegetal accord that pretty much smells like freshly cut grass. That may not sound very appealing to the uninitiated, but for enthusiasts of green fragrances - summer doesn’t get any fresher than that. There’s a lot of citrusy notes listed, but they follow a tad bit later with some barely-there florals, and a lot of fresh tea.
The tea is very, very evident this one - staying true to the name. There’s some musk in the base, along with a listed note of fig that sort of rounds up the otherwise sharp green profile. The X flanker has a lot more Fig, and feels less sharp - just for the record.
Wulong Cha is somewhat similar to Elizabeth Arden Green Tea, only in terms of being a green tea scent. Not only the EA Green Tea a lot more easygoing (on the nose and the pocket), it also has a lot more florals that tone down the greenness, whereas Wulong Cha is making no excuses - it’s like inhaling a handful of freshly plucked tea leaves, vibrant green in colour.
The sharpness in Wulong Cha is what helps it cut through even the brutally humid Indian summers. Most Nishane perfumes have excellent performance as per the extraits they are marketed to be - I get a solid 8/10 hours on clothes from this one, along with a beautiful sillage that has quite literally had people sniff the air around me.
TLDR: Somewhat expensive for the scent profile but otherwise very beautiful fresh green tea scent that smells like passing by a tea estate on summer day. Not like LV Imagination. Scentedelic and Scentrix have decent clones.