I remember reading an interview with Meryl Streep ages ago where she said she never ran for a bus, because there would always be another one coming along pretty soon. (I agree with the spirit of that statement but there must be exceptions: I’d swallow my pride and run for a midnight bus if that were the last bus till morning.) I try to have the same attitude about discontinued or hard-to-find perfumes too: I’ll never run after one (crying at its departure, and pitying myself for not stocking up — how embarrassing!) Not too many years ago I would have added…“because another perfume will arrive to take its place.” These days, due to the restrictions on so many perfume ingredients in Europe, perfumes won’t be arriving that can take the place of old standards of perfumery. Most new perfumes can’t conjure the past convincingly, which leads me to the topic of reissues of venerable fragrances.

Guerlain Derby was created by perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain and released in 1985. Sometime in the 90s, I bought Derby, unsniffed, and was not a fan (I gave it to my mother, who enjoyed it); recently I decided to obtain some vintage Derby and compare it to the current reissue in Guerlain’s Les Parisiennes collection. I hoped I wouldn’t love Derby, old or new, because the old sells for an average of $500 for a 100 ml bottle and the new is hard to come by…

Read the rest of this article »

At the current stage of my perfume “obsession,” I rarely buy perfume. (Most of my time, and skin, is reserved for new fragrance samples, and I really don’t need any perfume until I use up some of what I already own.) When I first became a perfume-maniac, I bought, often unsniffed, everything in sight. If I liked a fragrance house, I’d work my way through all their masculine offerings. Sometimes, a beautiful ad in a magazine or the sighting of an interesting perfume bottle was all it took to “make” me head to the store and buy a fragrance — and hope for the best. Long, long ago that’s how I came to know Guerlain Héritage: I loved Guerlain and the Héritage bottle* so I bought it!

Héritage, created by perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain, was released in 1992; it includes notes of lemon, bergamot, lavender, coriander, pink pepper, patchouli, cedar, vanilla and tonka bean. Héritage opens with lots of bergamot and lavender, a creamy, not astringent, blend. As the scent dries on skin, lavender becomes more noticeable and herbal. Pepper and coriander notes are subdued but add a “gleam” to the perfume. Héritage’s heart and base are almost ‘one’; after its opening, Héritage heads directly to its destination: a shimmering, “golden” amber composed of balmy cedar, a touch of musk, patchouli and vanilla (with some lingering lavender). Héritage is a well-gauged/low-impact scent — there is no startling “blast-off” and there is no bumpy landing…

Read the rest of this article »

A fragrance named after a fictional thief? Possibly Jean-Paul Guerlain‘s last fragrance? A leathery oriental? I had to try Guerlain Arsène Lupin Dandy.

While I waited for my decant to arrive, I boned up on Arsène Lupin. Maurice LeBlanc created Arsène Lupin in 1905 as the antihero of a series of short stories. Lupin is a sybaritic thief with a keen eye for furniture, paintings, jewels, and pretty ladies. He plans his heists more for the challenge than the loot. In one typically Lupinesque caper, he writes to a Baron who lives in a heavily guarded mansion on a rocky island in the middle of a river. He instructs the Baron to deliver certain of his treasures to him by a particular date or he’ll steal them and more. (He adds not to bother with the larger Watteau in the dining room, because it’s a fake, just in case the Baron isn’t aware.) The clincher is that Lupin writes the letter from jail. The Baron refuses Lupin’s request, and even hires protection for the night Lupin threatens to break in. Sorry Baron. Hope you were insured…

Read the rest of this article »