Many of you will remember that niche line L’Artisan Parfumeur used to do a limited edition unisex summer fragrance every year. Usually, it was something fleeting and happy meant for hot weather wear, packaged in a whimsical bottle and sold at a slightly lower cost per ml than the regular L’Artisan line. If the fragrance did well, sometimes it ended joining the regular line. So far as I can tell, they haven’t done one since 2006, when they released Mandarine Tout Simplement.

Batucada, L’Artisan’s latest fragrance, is not a summer limited edition. It might be the latest in the travel series, I’m not sure — and it doesn’t really matter: the point is, it doesn’t get a fun bottle and it costs about the same as the rest of them. It would have fit right into the summer limited edition line-up, though: it’s cheerful and summer-y, and light-hearted in a way that we haven’t seen from L’Artisan lately.

It was inspired by the Brazilian samba style of the same name, and by Brazil in general…

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