Last week I was reading an article about the definition of “niche” in the ever-changing fragrance market, and I started thinking back to some of the first “niche” perfumes lines I ever encountered — L’Artisan Parfumeur and Annick Goutal, in particular. There were others I never had the chance to try, and some of them are now discontinued (Gobin Daudé!), but once in a while an early niche line makes a re-appearance. Le Jardin Retrouvé, for example, describes itself as “the first ever niche Maison de Parfum, created in 1975 by the renowned perfumer Yuri Gutsatz.” In 2016, Gutsatz’s son and daughter-and-law re-launched the brand with reformulations of seven of its original fragrances.
I’ve had a small stack of Le Jardin Retrouvé’s boxed sample vials on my desk for the past few weeks, and I’ve been shuffling them around like a deck of cards…
