I like Prada. Not because of the fashion — regular readers here know I don’t know a thing about fashion — but because of the perfumes, which for the most part (I’m ignoring Prada Tendré) have eschewed the aim-for-the-lowest-common-denominator approach of your average mainstream designer perfume brand. The Prada perfumes aren’t wacky or outré, and they’re not necessarily the sort of thing that will please your jaded, niche-snob perfumista, but they’re well-crafted, and they strike me as perfumes made by people who care about the product as much as they care about making money. I’m as jaded as anybody, but I’m entirely willing to believe perfumer Daniela Andrier when she says Prada gives her more money to work with than other brands.¹

It is precisely because I like Prada so much that last year’s Infusion de Fleur d’Oranger was such a disappointment. It was the first in a new series of limited editions, the Ephemeral Infusions.² According to Andrier, the “idea of Infusion is almost as an imprint of the chosen material in water, a kind of watercolor fragrance reworked with colorful pastel crayon”³ — doesn’t that sound delightful? And it worked out perfectly, for me anyway, in the original that preceded the series, Prada Infusion d’Iris, and also in Prada’s recent L’Eau Ambrée, which was not part of the series but which took a very similar approach…

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