I am amused. I have some hand cream that was gifted to me and its name is ‘Kyoto in Bloom’ by Glasshouse Fragrances. Glasshouse came to my attention when we were approached to use the garden for filming a promo for the brand and very charming the result was. I failed to keep the link, I am sorry, but it was a pretty, young woman holding products as she merrily tripped her way around various flowery locations here. Very Instagramish.

Randomly, I read the print on the back of my tube of hand cream. There I found the following paragraph in very small font but full caps as shown below:

“YOU HAVE ARRIVED IN THE FULL BLOOM OF SPRING, ON A PATH OF CAMELLIA, LOTUS AND AMBER, TO CHERRY BLOSSOMS, PINK AS PAINTED OVAL LIPS, TO THE ZEN TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION WHERE YOU FEEL CALMED, INSPIRED BY SIMPLICITY AND FOCUSED BY RESTRAINT TO SEE BEAUTY IN EVERYTHING.”

Shall we unpack that a little? Were it more recent, I would assume it was written by Artificial Intelligence but I have had it over a year so I think it is a human producing this word salad. Elder daughter is currently home for a visit and her comment was that if it wasn’t Glasshouse, she would assume it was simply one of those bad Google translate examples we all like to read aloud with amusement. But Glasshouse is a reputable Australian brand so I think it must be a flight of fancy from the design department.

Yes, Japan has camellias but very few camellias have scent. The varieties native to Japan are the sasanqua group which have a sort of mossy, earthy aroma that is not perhaps what a cosmetics company regards as scent.

The sacred lotus has some fairly particular requirements when it comes to cultivation and, while prized in Japan, is not native and is more likely to be found inside the temple and probably never as a woodland plant beside a path.

Amber has a comma after it which makes it a noun. It is fossilized tree resin so I am not sure what it is doing in there.

I looked up the most popular cherry trees that dominate Kyoto’s famous blossom season and it seems that the Yoshino Cherry or Prunus x yedoensis is by far the most widely grown. It at least is scented although ‘pink as painted oval lips’ may be over-stating the case as they are commonly white or palest pink. I have never been to see the cherry blossom in Japan and I am pretty sure that the Glasshouse copy writer hasn’t either.

Expecting me to find the state of Zen and beauty in the simplicity of my hand cream might be a tad ambitious. Besides, while strongly scented, my olfactory system (aka: sense of smell) can detect nary a hint of either blossom or camellia scent and I am familiar with both.

It all rather reminded me of the Sydney creatives who set about marketing air freshener based on the beauty (but not necessarily fragrance) of magnolias.

Botanical accuracy matters more to some of us than others.

Postscript: It gets worse. Quite a bit worse, really. A reader has alerted me to the Golden Temple reference – a pre-1400 national monument that was deliberately burned down in 1950 and became the subject of a bleak novel, ‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’. At least it is in Kyoto so that bit is accurate. But wait, there is more: the author of the novel, Yukio Mishima, met a particularly gruesome end that, frankly, is not Zen at all. Even my hand cream is more Zen than that, albeit encased in gold plastic, not gold leaf.