Best Gardenia Perfumes are like the holy grail!  So many out there, so many that fall short of being the best gardenia perfume.

Gardenia are small, usually a shrub or tree, they produce maybe 3-4 flowers per plant, and their leaves are pretty gorgeous, dark green and shiney.  And they smell amazing in the wild - which is your backyard if you live in the South.  Gardenia is part of the coffee family of plants!  I know, surprised me too.  The best time to smell gardenia is at night, that's when all of its lushness unfurls. Trust me, put a gardenia in a glass of water by your bed, set your alarm for about 1 a.m., wake up and smell it.  Chances are it will wake you up with its smell before the alarm goes off.

I know for a fact they are difficult to grow indoors unless you live in a sauna, then it should be easy.

Gardenia perfumes are not exactly easy to make since until recently, it was technically difficult to get a gardenia extract - it's still complicated and expensive, but it can be done now, it just takes an extraordinary amount of gardenia flowers to create it about 5,000 kilos of flowers to get 1 kilo of absolute - so usually, for reasons of economy, they would make a chord, which were other notes arranged to approximate the gardenia scent.  Most often, jasmine and tuberose would dominate the perfume. so that's mostly what you would get.

In its rawest form, gardenia is a little, well, bleu cheesy smelling, which often comes as a surprise to people when they've been smelling gardenia perfumes for years and think they  know what it smells like. So do my suggestion above, get the real thing, then you'll know!

What makes the best gardenia perfume? It depends.  If you want your gardenia to smell like a pretty version of a gardenia or not so much of the gardenia, the answer is Annick Goutal Gardenia Passion, Illuminium White Gardenia Petals or Jo Malone Vintage Gardenia - both lovely scents, but they don't register at all on the sultry scale. If you want your gardenia to smell like gardenia, then you would look to JAR Jardenia, Tom Ford Velvet Gardenia or Tuvache Jungle Gardenia (vintage and now discontinued). Those have some bleu cheese and sultry, they would make Billie Holiday think she was going on stage with her signature gardenia tucked in her hair.

Try some of the best gardenia perfumes with one of our gardenia perfume sample sets.

This category will have all the perfumes that use gardenia as a major note, without judgment on how successfully they did that.  You might find this Perfume Posse gardenia perfume comprehensive post and the comments helpful as well!