The hour when water turns green

Seven o'clock light has a colour no one quite names. Almost green. It arrives before the heat, flat across the water, and it holds for about an hour. After eight, the water turns blue again, the way it looks in brochures. But at seven it is green, vivid, carrying a brightness that comes from the side and passes through everything it touches.

That colour is not in the water. It is in the angle. The sun sits low enough to graze the surface rather than fall onto it, and that grazing makes the green. An hour later the angle has shifted, the light drops from above, and the green is gone. Which is why the shade is almost never photographed: it asks you to be there at the right moment, and the moment is short.

Freshness is not shown with a citrus fruit placed on a table. It is shown with light passing through.

This is the hour ALBA carries. Not the landscape, not the setting: the quality of the light. Bergamot opens green and clean, exactly like first brightness on a wet surface. Neroli and orange blossom extend that opening without warming it. Vetiver and white musks hold it on the skin, clean and vertical.

We spent a long time working out how to make that freshness visible. The answer came by subtraction, by removing objects. No fruit, no ingredients on screen. Wet glass, linen, clear water, pale wood. Surfaces that receive light and give it back. There is something in this hour that does not last, and perhaps that is what makes it precious.