Well, there's a story that goes along with this fragrance…and what a story it is! Sometime around 1996, I sent away for a bunch of essential oils and fragrance oils from a company in California. Back then, the internet was so young that I might have seen an advertisement for this company in a magazine and ordered the items by mail, not online. They were an up-and-coming company run by essential oil enthusiasts, and I placed an order for a bunch of things, including essential oils and some floral single note fragrance oils, which I'm always willing to try. As a kind gift, they slipped in a glass vial of a very nice-smelling fragrance oil. Someone took a slip of paper, and with a pen wrote "Spring Rain," and then drew a picture of a flower and some raindrops falling from the sky. They taped it onto the vial and filled it with perfumed oil. That was it -- no formal label on the bottle or any other information. Whatever the scent was, it slowly grew on me over time. It has musk in it, which I really can't stand, but the musk was in the background and it seemed to mellow after an hour or two. I could smell this scent all day long, and it was so fresh and clean and spring-like. I think the thing that I liked most about it was that it was somehow a 50:50 mix of fresh clean florals and also fresh clean "green notes," maybe mossy could also describe it. I'm thinking of a huge field of dewy clover or spring wheat in the springtime, or something to that effect. Not only was it an interesting combination, but the green notes didn't seem masculine or aftershave-like at all, which is why I used it for years. The bottle I was given was about twice the size of the sample vials sold here, and you only needed a few drops, so it took me years to use it up. But finally, the level was going down, down, and I stopped using it because I was afraid it would be gone forever and I had no way to replace it. I finally got up the courage to start shopping around, somehow searching for a needle in a haystack, trying all sorts of "Rain" perfumes that I could find to see if a match could be made. I still wasn't sure if it was actually a China Rain, but it got whimsically labeled as "Spring Rain." So I tested China Rains, Spring Rains, and Rains. No luck, but I kept on trying. Totally by chance, I ended up at The Fragrance Shop website because someone highly recommended the gardenia single note as being very realistic. I was in the middle of a monoi project with coconut oil and planned to fragrance the oil with gardenia. Of course, I ordered a sample of that plus a whole bunch of samples, everything and anything with the name "Rain" in it. I was totally shocked and in awe when my nose realized that there was a PERFECT MATCH between the mystery vial that I had for so many years and this fragrance -- Sweet Summer Rain. Yep, after 18 years (!), I finally figured out what that awesome Rain fragrance is really called, that was given to me so many years ago on a lark…and I'm buying the HUGE bottle of it so that I never run out again. :-) [And P.S., the newly received Sweet Summer Rain smells exactly like the sample I received 18 years ago, with no change in scent whatsoever!]
