Solsequium, the sun’s own flower: Ffern Summer 25

A fragrance house rewriting the codes of perfumery, where scarcity is the new abundance and a summer sunset an eternal dream.

Ffern Summer 25 – A Subscription Reconsidered

The subscription model has become the blueprint of our time: sneakers delivered monthly, a new phone every twelve – discarded after time in pursuit of the next release. Applying the model to fragrance might sound like another marketing ploy. But Ffern’s approach and Summer 25 stands out. The British fragrance house has found a way to give the system meaning.

The model is simple: four perfumes a year, released in limited runs, each in a 32ml bottle. By joining the waitlist on their website, you enter a private members’ club. Subscribers receive one fragrance per season, each created as an ode to its moment in time. Exclusivity and sustainability, for Ffern, are not just parallel narratives – they are the same story. True luxury is not volume but scarcity: raw materials of quality, crafted by hand, and available only in quantities nature can provide.

What usually signals excess becomes here a filter – a way to exclude the merely curious and include only those who share the brand’s philosophy. Which is why Summer 25 is not on perfumery stores – no shelves, no instant one-click checkout.

A visual prompt – a summer sketched in an image

Limited raw materials, artisan craft, certifications chased down to the detail, continuous research and, yes, clever storytelling packed into targeted marketing. Like other niche perfumes, Summer 25 is not just the outcome of designing a scent, but also the desire to recreate an evocative image – a fragrance as an edition. 

“The setting sun leaves a blush on the sky’s cheek. Potter’s pink, vermilion, ochre, magenta – and the promise of a golden day tomorrow.”

The nuances in the introduction to Summer 25 have been studied, researched, and distilled. The blood-red sun at the horizon finds its voice in the opening notes of ripe blood orange: a multisensory consonance between colour and scent. White peach water softens the transition as a soft, creamy blush where the red fades into evening blue – the bridge between the fire of sunset and the cool breath of dusk.

Herbaceous marigold, the sun’s own flower – Ffern Summer 25 reaches the cool breath of dusk in 18 natural ingredients

The sky cools further, glinting with sparks, expressed through a cold extraction of grapefruit zest – bittersweet and sparkling cold. At the line where the sun touches the earth, turmeric oil enters the composition: yellow-gold, peppered, rooted, which sketches out the idea of a landscape. Then inland: dried leaves, scorched underbrush, the resinous burn of spice and flower. Cardamom lends warmth, hay suggests the memory of fields, while marigold – known since classical antiquity as the solsequium, the sun’s own flower –  follows the sun from when it rises to when it sets, and dies with it after dusk, recalling the cycle of day and night. Nothing is incidental: every note in Ffern Summer 25 carries the weight of symbolism.

The imagery is precise, the research meticulous. Summer 25 mirrors the nature of the sunset it evokes – ephemeral. Projection is modest, about an arm’s length for half an hour; then the perfume folds into the skin, remaining close for barely another hour. In conventional terms of perfumery – where longevity and sillage are treated as proofs of quality – this would be a flaw. But perhaps here, it is part of the statement –  as a trail of scent that lingers in the cold air after the sun has untouched the sky. 

A sunset moves us precisely because it cannot be preserved. To bottle it would be to betray it. Ffern offers a fleeting sketch, a sensory apparition that fades before it becomes ordinary. It leaves behind a trace of craving more, Shakespeare, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, reminds us that visions dissolve like dreams, leaving only their aftertaste.

“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.”

So it is with Summer 25: a midsummer dream in perfume form, fleeting and deceptive, a scent that leaves behind the longing for more: its vanishing act is its truth. Perhaps a sunset moves us so deeply because it cannot last. Ephemerality is not weakness; it is raw beauty.