Coming next month from Guerlain: La Petite Robe Noire, a new fruity gourmand perfume for women inspired by the wardrobe basic "the little black dress".
The notes include Sicilian lemon, licorice, almond, rose, smoky tea, musk and vanilla.
Guerlain La Petite Robe Noire will be sold exclusively in Guerlain boutiques; 100€, size and concentration unknown. (via vogue.fr, elle.fr)
More limited edition collector fragrance bottles, with the usual disclaimers: in most of these cases, the juice is unchanged, just the bottle is “special” (or not, as the case may be), and some of these may not be available in the US.
For the 2008 holiday season and the 180th anniversary of Guerlain, the brand presents Shalimar, L'Instant Magic and Insolence in “the legendary bottle of L'Heure Bleue”, with “the unmistakable round label of anther [sic] legendary scent, Mitsouko, to symbolise the timeless refinement of the House of Guerlain”…
I always enjoy watching Sylvaine Delacourte, Guerlain’s head of fragrance development, in action; I have no idea if she would be fun to work with or for, but she always appears vivacious and flirtatious in Guerlain film clips. Watching Delacourte and Thierry Wasser, Guerlain’s exclusive house perfumer, discuss Guerlain Homme on the Guerlain Homme website is amusing. Delacourte, sitting next to Wasser and staring straight at the camera, claims the idea for Guerlain Homme came to her six years ago as she drank a thirst-quenching mojito in Cuba at the Hemingway Bar. Wasser, upon hearing this pronouncement, lowers his head, laughs and gives Delacourte a look that reads: “Oh, NO she didn’t!” Wasser then says HE’S been working on a mojito accord (rum, mint and lime) “on my own”. (It’s really too bad there’s not a Liz Smith of the perfume world; let’s just say Delacourte and Wasser collaborated on Guerlain Homme.)
Guerlain is marketing Guerlain Homme as a new type of fragrance — a new type of ‘freshness’ in perfumery; Wasser calls it “inimitable”. The Guerlain Homme film ad is set in a jungle, where a well-groomed, half-naked, modern-day ‘Tarzan’ drinks at a watering hole alongside wild animals. I like the goofy ad but there is nothing really new, wild or animalic about Guerlain Homme. As I wear Guerlain Homme, I don’t think “Tarzan” or “jungle” — I imagine a Lacoste-clad guy on a Caribbean veranda sipping a mojito alongside Delacourte. But just because Guerlain Homme is not wild, or wildly original, does not mean it’s bad; in fact, this is the first new mainstream Guerlain fragrance I’ve liked in a long time…
A very kind person sent me a sample of Guerlain’s Cologne du 68 last year, some time after it had launched in France back in 2006. I liked it, so I put it on my “to buy” list. Mind you, my “to buy” list isn’t really a list of things I actually mean to purchase; it’s more a list of things I’d like to have in my collection and that I might hypothetically be willing to spend some hypothetical amount of money on in some hypothetical future. At the time, Cologne du 68 was only sold in Paris, and only in a 490 ml bottle for 180€, so the likelihood that it would ever grace my perfume shelves was pretty much nil.
Fast forward to 2008. As part of their 180th anniversary celebrations, Guerlain has now issued Cologne du 68 (named for their address on the Champs Elysées) in a 100 ml bottle, and it can be had at your local Neiman Marcus for $100. I went to visit it there to see if it was worth having now that it was affordable (at least in the relative sense), decided it was not, and promptly bought it anyway. Serves me right, doesn’t it? My advice: don’t go hanging around the Guerlain counter if you don’t want to spend money…
Guerlain has launched Les Elixirs Charnels, a trio of limited edition fragrances that “let a woman explore her changing moods and fantasies with magical potions created to evoke them”. The scents were developed by perfumer Christine Nagel.
Chypre Fatal “indulges your inner femme fatale with hypnotic notes of white peach, rose, patchouli and vanilla”…