Ylang ylang & pear, in a body wash

Ylang ylang does not announce itself. It arrives — sweet, slightly green, a little heady, familiar before you know why. In the older perfumeries of Southeast Asia it was the flower reached for at the end of the day, carried on evening air across Bali and Java, folded quietly into bridal baths and jasmine garlands.

We paired it with pear because the pear is the breath — a cool, green, unhurried note that moves just beneath the floral sweetness and steadies the composition, so the scent carries from the hour after dressing through to the hour before sleep.

The base is our Mango Butter Hand & Body Cleanser — the same formula across all three Belantara fragrances. Sulphate-free, paraben-free, silicone-free. Mango butter pressed, with quiet reverence, from the kernels inside the mango seeds the fruit industry discards, worked into a base that emulsifies on contact with water and rinses clean — leaving skin soft rather than stripped.

On skin, ylang ylang reads more softly than it does in a bottle. The green edge eases. The sweetness settles. By the time you step out of the shower, what remains is the pear — and the faint warmth ylang ylang is known to carry into the hour after. A scent that lingers past the cologne, noticed quietly by the person beside you before you have thought to mention it.

We make this body wash in Singapore, in small runs, in recyclable aluminium bottles.

Ylang ylang has been called the flower of romance for as long as anyone has written about perfume.

It is one of the few florals that reads warm and youthful at once — sweet without being sugared, composed without being prim. In Southeast Asia it has been worn at weddings in the Philippines, folded into bridal offerings across Indonesia, carried on night breezes for as long as the flower has bloomed.

In the cleanser, it is held beside pear so the sweetness never settles too heavily. The result is a body wash soft enough for a weekday morning and considered enough for an evening — a register rather than a mood, and one that travels softly from hour to hour.

A body wash carries more than clean skin. Used each day, it becomes the scent of the first minute of the morning — or the scent of the last twenty before sleep. Choosing one is a small, real decision, and worth the unhurried thought.

If ylang ylang is a note you have always been drawn to, this is the body wash composed around it. If you are meeting the scent for the first time, the 250ml is the gentler entry — a month of mornings with it, and you will know.