FASHION Magazine

Ineke Rühland

What: Evening Edged in Gold ($85, at select Holt Renfrew stores), with key notes of angel’s trumpet and midnight candy. Background Notes: Two or three streetcar clangs south of Haight-Ashbury on a hill overlooking the city of San Francisco sits an ornate little house spangled in flowers. This is where Ineke Rühland, an Ottawa-raised, Paris-trained perfumer, lives and invents the artisanal scents that have swiftly earned her line cult status with beauty junkies since debuting two years ago.

For her fifth and latest fragrance, a woody Oriental called Evening Edged in Gold, Rühland turned to her own garden, one bursting with sun-loving fragrant plants like angel’s trumpet, midnight candy and heliotropes in the front, and jasmine, boronias, roses and honeysuckle in the back. And if Rühland had to isolate one note that gives this fragrance its soul, “it would have to be the angel’s trumpet,” she says. Native to South America, with golden horn-shaped blossoms, the flowers are scent-free during the day, but at night… “That’s when they give off a heady citrus and lily-like scent that catches on the breeze and attracts night-flying insects,” says Rühland. It’s nature’s way of propagating the species, and the inspiration for her seductive, night-themed scent. To recreate this flower—since there were no distillations of angel’s trumpet in perfumery’s raw materials—Rühland let her nose be her guide. “I kept running back and forth between my entranceway and my lab, smelling the plant and comparing it to my trials to make my adjustments.”

Shown: Ineke Rühland Evening Edged in Gold, $85. Visit select Holt Renfrew stores.

By Alison Garwood-Jones

Photography by Tracy Shumate