Kilian Hennessy's By Kilian brand will launch the seventh fragrance in the L’Oeuvre Noire / Black Masterpiece series this coming September. Prelude to Love is a unisex fragrance exploring the theme of “Love and its prohibitions”…
…an olfactory memory of a first encounter…
Bertrand Duchaufour might be my second favorite (living) perfumer at the moment (you regular readers know that Jean-Claude Ellena is still at the top of the list), so Magnolia Romana by Eau d’Italie was one of my “most looked forward to” fragrances this year. I was a little worried about the “summer ozone” and “water” notes (other notes include purple basil, lemon leaves, neroli, nutmeg, cypress, magnolia, Bulgarian rose, tuberose, lotus, cedar, hay extract and white musk), and I was right to be: I don’t like synthetic “fresh” notes, and while Magnolia Romana isn’t overwhelmingly “fresh”, it’s just fresh enough to bother me…
Miss Marple, where were you when I needed you? Late last summer I stalked department stores in search of Cuir de Lancôme, a then-recent addition to Lancôme’s La Collection range of vintage reissues. The word on the street was that it was supposed to be released in the United States sometime in early fall 2007. A sales associate at Saks Fifth Avenue rifled through some Lancôme sales packages and found something claiming that Cuir should have been released in spring 2007. Another sales associate, this one at Nordstrom, looked at me like he believed I was making it all up and proffered a bottle of Lancôme Sikkim with a busted atomizer. A lukewarm review over at Perfume Smellin’ Things did little to chill my ardor, and news that Lancôme eventually decided not to release Cuir in the United States only made me crazier for it. I had to have a bottle of Cuir de Lancôme…
L’Oeuvre Noire, or The Black Masterpiece, is the debut collection of fragrances from By Kilian, a new brand founded by Kilian Hennessy:
I conceived The Black Masterpiece with a quasi-Faustian ambience in mind. I wanted to cast a spell, like those that darkened Rimbaud’s spirit or conjured the witches in Macbeth…
Just when I was worried spring would never arrive, we are having a gorgeous, sunny day, almost warm enough for shorts. To celebrate, I am wearing Balmain’s Vent Vert, the classic green floral fragrance created by Germaine Cellier and released in 1947. Like just about everything else, this was “reworked” to appeal to modern sensibilities; the reformulation was done by perfumer Calice Becker, and I believe the relaunch was in 1990. The notes for the new version are greens, orange blossom, lemon, lime, basil, rose, galbanum, lily of the valley, freesia, hyacinth, tagetes, ylang-ylang, violet, oakmoss, sandalwood, sage, iris, amber, and musk.
Vent Vert starts out a strong, bitter, slightly perfume-y green. After a few minutes the bitterness calms and the citrus notes and orange blossom take the stage, later still, the citrus notes are replaced by the other florals…