What is it: a 50 ml bottle of Aerin Rose de Grasse, used for testing.
How do I get it: For a chance to win, leave a comment on the website telling me that you live in the US. Then tell me either a) a $150+ fragrance that you think is worth every penny, or b) your favorite rose fragrance, or c) something else you’ve been dying to post in a comment.
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I saw Aerin Lauder in person once, just for a few fleeting seconds. She was sitting in a lunch meeting at an uptown eatery in Manhattan. She looked just as she often looks in photographs: very pretty, very polished, reserved and just a touch skeptical. I kept thinking of that sighting when I was trying out Rose de Grasse, a new floral fragrance for women recently launched by Lauder’s namesake Aerin brand.
Rose de Grasse is described as a “captivating scent — pristine, sophisticated, unexpected and iconic,” and an homage to several varieties of roses. It combines notes of centifolia rose, Bulgarian rose and “rose absolute” (no specific rose named here) with ambrette seed, a “watery accord,” violet wood, ambrox and musk. My main impression is that Rose de Grasse is made with good-quality ingredients, even if leans more towards the “pristine and sophisticated” rather than the “unexpected and iconic…”
Aerin Lauder in a very quick spot for Aerin Rose de Grasse.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when the Aerin fragrance brand launched in 2013, but after smelling the first five, I got the general drift. The latest two, Iris Meadow and Waterlily Sun, are in the same easygoing light floral mold as Lilac Path, Ikat Jasmine and Gardenia Rattan (the other two, Amber Musk and Evening Rose, had a little more heft). None of them are the perfumista-bait some of us had hoped for, but they’re wearable enough, and I’ve come to think of the Aerin brand as a sort of mashup between the (early) Jo Malone brand and the (later) Guerlain Aqua Allegoria range: (ostensibly) material-driven, clean, youthful and easy to wear. The bonus factor, I suppose, is the casual-luxe “Aerin lifestyle”, which seems to be the key selling point of the advertising…