Facing another lineup of soliflores, it’s easy to be dismissive. Everyone from Van Cleef & Arpels and Roger Vivier to Marc Jacobs and Chloé seems to be churning out single note fragrances. Add that to the established soliflores on the market from everyone from Serge Lutens to Annick Goutal, and you have to ask if we really need another take on lily, iris, or amber. Recently Mona di Orio jumped into the soliflore game with her Les Nombres d’Or. Do we really need more soliflores, especially those that retail for $220 for a 100 ml bottle?

Before tackling that question, let’s first consider the soliflore, then look at the latest Les Nombres d’Or offerings: Tubéreuse, Vétyver, and Vanille.

A soliflore fragrance focuses on one note. It’s the sort of fragrance you can sniff and quickly say, “Oh, that’s lily of the valley,” or “That’s incense.” But it doesn’t mean Edmond Roudnitska made Christian Dior Diorissimo, an ode to the lily of the valley, by squeezing a bunch of lilies of the valley into a bottle, and if you smell Diorissimo next to a real lily of the valley you’ll appreciate that the fragrance isn’t a slavish imitation of the flower, either. I’m not an expert, but from what I understand, to create a soliflore a perfumer must draw from a variety of materials to summon the green, crisp, soft, watery, lush, sharp, earthy, or other aspects of the fragrance she is creating.

For instance, take the rose…

Read the rest of this article »