Jiuzhaigou's Blue Does Not Wait

Jiuzhaigou’s lake water is a certain blue.

It does not belong to any blue you have seen. Not sky blue, not swimming pool blue, not any blue in any paint box. It is a blue that seeps from the ground, carrying the concentration of minerals, carrying the weight of millennium-deep sediment.

Wuhua Sea’s blue, before nine in the morning, is dark green. By ten, sunlight slants from the direction of Pearl Beach, through the fir forest, through rhododendron bushes, onto the water’s surface. That angle coincides completely only forty-five days per year. The technicians recorded this. They used the word “angle,” not “light.”

The word angle is more precise.

The perfumer’s first trip to Jiuzhaigou, he brought a spectrophotometer. He did not measure smell, he measured the water’s refractive index at different depths. Then he went back, spent five months blending a molecular combination: top note is extremely low concentration black currant leaves, that greenness with dewy edges; heart note is calcium nitrate — synthetic, but the molecular structure simulates the scent skeleton of calcium flower sediments; base note is wet stone, something very difficult to recreate in the lab, because wet stone’s scent comes from the biological film on stone walls, not from the stone itself.

Jiuzhaigou has ninety-nine haizis.

The word haizi refers to lakes formed by glacier melt in depressions. Each haizi in Jiuzhaigou is different, not just different shades of blue, but different “characters” of blue. Wuhua Sea’s blue is thick, Mirror Sea’s blue is flat, Panda Sea’s blue is shimmering. The perfumer said he could not recreate every haizi, he could only recreate the concept of “Jiuzhaigou’s water” itself.

He recreated that light.

The path of light refracting through water is an angle that took calcium flower sediments many years to arrange. This angle cannot be replicated. This angle is the cost.

So Jiuzhaigou, the fragrance: top note is short, only three minutes. Heart note is stable, like a mirror lying flat. Base note is extremely light — the last second of light falling on stone.

After three minutes, it becomes a mirror.

Associated Notes: [Aquatic] [Floral]