Bvlgari Bottles Its Signature Hotel Scent
It’s official. Bvlgari has whisked its signature hotel scent out of the presidential suite, bottled it up in a chic flacon, made it spritzable and most importantly, wearable. Welcome Eau Parfumée Thé Impérial, to your fragrance cabinet.
Thé Impérial, as the name suggests, is firmly rooted in tea culture – specifically the meeting point between Chinese black tea and Italian citrus. Originally created in 2017 by master perfumer Jacques Cavallier exclusively for guests staying at Bvlgari Hotels & Resorts, the fragrance has spent the better part of a decade drifting through marble-clad suites, cavernous lobbies and hushed spas before finally making its worldwide debut as part of the maison’s Eau Parfumée collection. Out of the hotel room and into your home, then.
And yes, if you’ve ever stayed at a Bvlgari hotel and found yourself wondering why the corridors smelled so impossibly expensive, this is that scent. Heady, warm and softly citrusy, it opens with bergamot, lemon and mandarin before settling into the smokier, almost pod-like depth of black tea extracted using supercritical fluid extraction – a low-temperature CO2 process that preserves the ingredient’s natural complexity. The result is addictive without being saccharine in the slightest. Clean but not soapy. Comforting without tipping into anything overly powdery. Frankly, it smells like the sort of life where someone else fluffs your pillows.
The fragrance also arrives with a bath and body line – a shower gel and lightweight lotion designed to stretch the scent further into your day. It makes sense given Thé Impérial’s origins. It’s the scent Bvlgari uses in its spas too, so when I went in for a personalised massage after being introduced to the new bottled version, I could smell it wafting through the air of the blissful Knightsbridge destination.
Visually, the bottle leans into the same polished restraint. The signature flacon returns in glowing amber-orange tones inspired by sunlit citrus and steeped tea leaves, topped with a cap engraved with the Bvlgari Bvlgari logo. There are nods to Chinese celadon ceramics and Roman columns too, though thankfully the fragrance itself is far less ornamental. Instead, Thé Impérial works because it smells genuinely transportive – like warm skin, expensive soap, freshly sliced citrus and the lingering hush of a six-star hotel corridor.
