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Friday scent of the day 10/7

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It’s Friday and Jacques Guerlain’s birthday. Our community project for today: wear a Guerlain fragrance if you have one. Extra points if it was created by Jacques Guerlain, quintuple bonus points for wearing a week of Guerlain representing five different Guerlain perfumers. Adapted from a suggestion by Oakland Fresca.

What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.

I’m in the Jacques Guerlain masterpiece, Après L’Ondée…

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Guerlain Pour Troubler ~ fragrance review

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Guerlain Pour Troubler

It’s been a long time since a new Guerlain fragrance tempted me. Even Guerlain old timers have fallen out of favor. I’ve found vetiver perfumes I prefer to Guerlain Vétiver. Mitsouko is now used in my house more as a home fragrance than a perfume to put on my person. Jicky don’t smell like Jicky no more (sounds like the title of a 1920s song, doesn’t it?) The only Guerlain survivors pour moi are Habit Rouge and Les Eaux — Eau de Cologne Impériale, Eau de Cologne du Coq, Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat and Eau de Guerlain.

I came across (and bought) a small bottle of Guerlain’s 1911 Pour Troubler1 Extrait years ago…

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The Shalimar Face-Off

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Guerlain Shalimar, bottle detail

Has everyone recovered from Friday’s group project of wearing Guerlain Shalimar? Today I’ll test your endurance with a Shalimar Face-off. For the past few days, I’ve been wearing different formulations and vintages of Shalimar to suss out their differences.

Before we start, let’s have a quick Shalimar refresher. Jacques Guerlain created Shalimar, and it launched in 1925. Its notes include bergamot, lemon, iris, jasmine, rose, vanilla, incense, opopanox, patchouli, musk and tonka bean. What you smell are chiefly Shalimar’s tent poles of lemon, vanilla and rotting squirrel. Wafting over these tent poles is a complex fabric smelling of incense, amber, tonka, opopanox, vetiver, musk and powder.

For the face-off, I dug out every concentration of Shalimar I had on hand: a 1970s Eau de Cologne, the sought-after 1980s Parfum de Toilette, a 1990s Eau de Parfum and a pre-1985 Extrait…

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Guerlain Vega and Etat Libre d’Orange Vraie Blonde ~ fragrance review

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Guerlain Vega, vintage advertGuerlain Vega perfume bottle

A statuesque blonde draped in bias-cut, ivory silk charmeuse is a classic image of glamour. She drinks champagne, has breakfast in bed on a tray, takes bubble baths, and breaks hearts. A puff of maribou trims the toe of each of her slippers. Now that this image is firmly in mind, let’s tweak it. Give our blonde a few years in a Swiss finishing school, a lusty appetite for lobster at midnight, and a laugh a little too loud for her patrician mother, and you have Guerlain Vega. Substitute wine coolers for the champagne, a facility for Pig Latin rather than French, and an addiction to patent leather heels from Payless, and you have Etat Libre d’Orange Vraie Blonde. They’re sisters from opposite sides of the tracks.

Jacques Guerlain created Vega, a blowsy floral aldehyde, in 1936…

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