Marks & Spencer Sweet Bergamot Pot Pourri Bag

I have reviewed several products from Marks & Spencer’s Sweet Bergamot home fragrance range including scented candles and refresher oil. I have been buying their pot pourri range for a couple of years now and love to have it on display in a bowl in my living room, enjoying the delicate bergamot aroma.

The Pot Pourri

Marks & Spencer have recently changed the packaging for the Sweet Bergamot range so this now comes in a bag which is predominantly pink in colour.

You get enough pot pourri in a bag to fill one regular sized bowl and each bag costs £4. You used to be able to purchase larger boxes of the product but I have only seen Sweet Bergamot available in bags recently.

My Thoughts

Pot Pourri is probably one of the most basic ways of scenting a room but I like it for several reasons. Firstly, I think it looks nice with dried botanicals forming the main, green base of this pot pourri and rounded off with some beautiful hand crafted toppers. Secondly it’s a pretty easy and cost effective way to fragrance your room.

Of course modern pot pourris such as the Marks & Spencer Sweet Bergamot are produced using more than just dried plant material and it’s pretty obvious when I place my pot pourri in the bowl that this stuff has been scented synthetically – the bergamot in the bowl is completely man made for instance – and a hefty amount of chemical dyes have been used to bring out some strong colours. Some of the botanicals are a deep, false green which looks nice in the bowl but is as natural as Joan Rivers’ face.

The toppers on this pot pourri comprise a few small bergamot oranges, a large, very fake looking lemon, some pink berries and a dried and withered slice of orange. For all it doesn’t look particularly natural, it does look rather aesthetically pleasing and as such the pink, yellow and green of the mixture works very well.

In amongst the predominantly green botanicals there’s also a few yellow dried flowers which I like as they take the edge off the green.

The botanicals hold the fragrance rather well. When I open a bag of Sweet Bergamot pot pourri I can usually detect the fragrance for a couple of weeks before having to refresh the aroma using the matching refresher oil. This is very easy to do – you just place the pot pourri in a plastic bag, add a few drops of oil and shake the bag around to ensure the oil covers as much pot pourri as possible. You then just return the pot pourri to the bowl and leave it do its work for a few more weeks.

The Marks & Spencer pot pourri has served me very well – I’ve had the same pot pourri in my living room for 18 months now and it’s still going strong. I have a box I bought at the same time I haven’t yet had to open although I must say when I do open it I will add some refresher oil immediately to liven it up as the aroma isn’t very strong as the box isn’t airtight and therefore doesn’t hold a fragrance the way the sealed bags do.

Overall I can highly recommend this – it may not be an entirely natural product but it does look very pretty and works as an effective, and constant, way to fragrance a room. For £4 and the cost of some refresher oil this will last a long, long time and unlike a scented candle – it doesn’t burn out!