Frederic Malle will introduce a new fragrance for men, French Lover, in May. The scent was created by perfumer Pierre Bourdon:
Mosses, musks, ambroxan and karanal bestow ‘a kind of plant-based animal quality that immediately evoked the smell of a man’.
Additional notes include include pimento, galbanum…
I certainly own enough scented body products with artistic designs and elaborate promotional rhetoric, but even in my most frivolous moments, I am loyal to Beekman’s COPA Soaps. This small company, housed in a Philadelphia workshop, perfectly demonstrates the truism that “less is more.”
COPA is an acronym for the company’s basic soap recipe: a mix of coconut, olive, palm, and almond oils. Nothing is added to this blend of saponified oils except natural essences with aromatherapeutic benefits; no dyes, synthetic perfumes, or preservatives are included. The same back-to-basics approach is applied to the soap’s packaging. The hand-cut bars are bound in brown-paper labels, and they have no eye-catching coloring, decorative shapes, or whimsical names…
He decided to start his seventh creation for Bulgari with not the root but the scent of the iris flower.
“I wanted to create a contemporary iris flower perfume, captured through the nature print technique in association with a new, special woody molecule, and not only on the iris absolute.
“So, I combined the scent of the iris flower with the marvellous natural Bulgarian rosebud.”
— Perfumer Alberto Morillas quoted in Scent of a freshly manicured garden, talking about the creation of Omnia Amethyste.
In honor of it finally being spring (hooray!), I decided to devote some space to the scented cleaning products that are easily available in the local supermarket. Generally, I have a horror of the scented candle displays in the supermarket aisles, having learned early on that the so-called vanilla candles smelled suspiciously similar to the gardenia candles, which were in turn not much different than the lilac candles, and I checked out entirely when it came to cotton candy scented products. But of late there has been a trend towards ‘botanic essences’ and ‘aromatherapy’ even in cleaning products and my curiosity got the better of me.
So on a breezy sunny early spring day, when my eye was caught by a few products that I had not seen before, I decided to give them a try. Today’s subject: a dishwashing liquid by Dawn, claiming to be scented with lemongrass and orange blossom and to produce an ‘uplifting’ effect. It is part of their Dawn Botanicals line and I purchased the Ultra Concentrated version…
Jean Paul Gaultier, long known as the enfant terrible of French fashion for his irreverent approach to design — “I like to show that there is no frontier between good taste and bad taste”, he told The Independent last year — launched his first fragrance in 1993. Originally known as Jean Paul Gaultier, it was later renamed Classique to distinguish it from the scents that followed. Classique was developed by perfumer Jacques Cavallier, and the notes for the musky floriental include bergamot, orange blossom, rose, mandarin, aniseed, carnation, orchid, iris, ylang ylang, ginger, vanilla, wood, amber and musk.
Gaultier was already a household name by the time Classique launched, having gained considerable media attention for the costumes he designed for Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour (including the “lethal conical bra designed to damage a retina at 10 paces“). It was not to be expected that his debut scent would be dull, and Gaultier’s inspirations sounded appropriately zany…