My mother loves the smell of mogra flowers - how can I choose a jasmine or mogra attar without accidentally buying something too sweet?

Mogra is jasmine sambac. The same flower, Jasminum sambac. So Adaa, which is built on jasmine sambac, is the mogra answer.

The translation, because this is the single most useful thing on the page. The flower your mother loves is Jasminum sambac. In Hindi and Marathi it is mogra. In parts of the south it is mallige or malli. In the English-language trade it is often called Arabian jasmine. On a perfumer's note list it is written jasmine sambac. Those are five names for one plant. The reason this matters commercially is that the category tends to sell "mogra attar" and "jasmine attar" as if they were two separate things, which leaves a reader buying for a mother who loves mogra convinced she needs to find a specific product with the word mogra on it. She does not. She needs a composition built on jasmine sambac, and the note list is where that is written.

Which of ours that is. Adaa is bergamot, green cardamom, jasmine sambac and white musk. Four materials, and the sambac is the subject - the bergamot and cardamom are the opening and the white musk is the floor it settles onto. If you want a mogra attar from this range, that is it, and I would say so on the product page in those words if the page had room. 3ml ₹379, 6ml ₹669, 12ml ₹1,149.

The other jasmine, and why it is a genuinely different thing. Mastani is night-blooming jasmine, Damask rose and oudh. Night-blooming jasmine is the heavier, more opulent reading of the idea of jasmine: bigger, more nocturnal, less bright. Put Damask rose beside it and oudh underneath it and you have a composition that goes deep rather than clean. Both Adaa and Mastani are honestly describable as jasmine attars and they are not remotely the same experience, which is the best illustration I can give you of why the word jasmine on its own tells you almost nothing. Mastani, 3ml ₹389.

Now the sweetness question, and the answer is not about the flower. This is the half of your question that most pages get wrong, because they treat sweetness as something a flower either has or does not have. It is not. In a composition, sweetness arrives from what is put underneath and around the flower: vanilla, amber, benzoin, tonka, heliotrope, a jammy fruit, a caramelised resin. A jasmine over vanilla reads sweet. The same jasmine over citrus and green spice does not. The flower is the subject; the base decides the register. The full method for spotting sweetness in a note list, including when vanilla is not listed at all, is worth reading if you buy fragrance for anybody regularly.

So apply that to the two jasmines in front of you. Adaa's jasmine sambac has bergamot and green cardamom above it and white musk below it. There is no vanilla in the composition, no amber, no benzoin, no resin and no fruit. Bergamot is a bitter citrus and green cardamom is a cool, dry spice - both of them pull in the opposite direction from sweetness - and white musk is a clean, skin-close drydown rather than a sweet one. That is about as structurally unsweet as a jasmine composition can be made. Mastani's night-blooming jasmine has Damask rose beside it and oudh underneath. That is not sweet in the vanilla sense either, but it is rich, and rich is what a lot of people mean when they say sweet. For somebody who dislikes sweetness, Adaa is the safer gift.

One distinction worth making before you buy, because it changes the answer. "Too sweet" and "too heady" are different complaints and people use the same words for both. Jasmine sambac in a strong dose can read indolic - heavy, almost animal, the smell of the flower at the end of a hot day rather than the beginning of it. That is not sweetness. It is intensity. If your mother loves the mogra she buys as a garland in the morning but finds jasmine perfumes overwhelming, her complaint is probably about intensity rather than sugar, and the answer is still Adaa - but the practical advice to pass on is to dab once rather than three times. Controlling strength on an oil is mostly a question of dose, and an attar gives you much finer control over dose than a spray does.

How to read any mogra or jasmine listing anywhere, in two lines. First, find the flower: if the list says jasmine sambac, mogra or Arabian jasmine, it is the flower your mother loves. Second - and this is the step people skip - read the rest of the list and ignore the flower entirely. If you see vanilla, amber, benzoin, tonka, caramel, honey, praline or a jammy fruit, expect sweetness. If you see citrus, green notes, dry spice or a clean musk, expect it clean. If you see oud, resins, labdanum or balsams, expect depth. The flower tells you the subject. The rest of the list tells you what kind of a thing it will be, and that is the part that decides whether she wears it.

What the fresh flower will not do, and I would rather say it. A garland of mogra and a mogra attar are not the same smell and no composition will make them the same. The living flower is being replenished continuously by the plant, it is wet, and it is a moving thing. Any fragrance is a fixed composition built to recall it. A note list is not a smell, and an attar built on jasmine sambac is not a substitute for wearing it and finding out. If what she loves is specifically the garland on the morning of a festival, the honest thing to tell you is that an attar is an adjacent pleasure rather than a replacement, and she may love it for its own sake rather than for the resemblance.

And the size. A 3ml at ₹379 holds the same liquid as the 12ml at ₹1,149 and it is the right gift size here even though this is the most confident recommendation in the whole gifting block. I am confident about the botany. I cannot be confident about her skin, her dose, or whether the bergamot opening will charm her or irritate her, and nobody who has not smelled a composition on a particular person can be. Buy the small one. If she loves it, the large bottle is a purchase she will make herself and enjoy making.