Enough to make me care about Valentine's Day: the Frédéric Malle Roses Coffret, with 7 ml bottles of Lipstick Rose, Portrait of a Lady, Promise, Rose & Cuir and Une Rose ($175 at Bloomingdales). And why not throw in one of the newly (and betterly) repackaged perfume guns in Rosa Rugosa (€140 for 450 ml at Frédéric Malle in the EU)?
How quickly they grow up! It seems like yesterday I was trying out Les Parfums de Rosine’s “tender and innocent” Ballerina No. 1 and now we’re already up to the “shimmering and rich” Ballerina No. 5. Like other Ballerinas in this series, No. 5 was inspired by a specific ballet — in this case, La Bayadère, which made its debut in 1877 with music by Leonard Minkus and choreography by Marius Petipa. La Bayadère is an opulent but tragic tale of a romance between a beautiful bayadère (temple dancer) and a warrior.
La Bayadère‘s passion-fueled plot and its Indian location help to set the scene for this rose-centered perfume…
Masque Milano Love Kills is a punk rock name for an operatic fragrance. In this case, the music has to do with roses.
Perfumer Caroline Dumur developed Love Kills. Its notes include Turkish rose, geranium, ambrette, patchouli, cedarwood, musk and ambergris. (I’m not going to quote the fragrance’s description in Masque Milano’s press materials, because, frankly, I don’t understand it. It tosses around literary and musical references with vague observations about “a rose by any other name” and how fleeting life is…)
Has the “luxury collection” trend died down yet? I started tuning it out a long time ago, certainly before Robin posted about the Viktor & Rolf Magic Collection three years ago. The original six fragrances in that line — “a collection of six transformative illusions in the spirit of an enchanting universe from fragrance magicians Viktor & Rolf” — arrived in stores in early 2017 and I never bothered to try them.
Since then, the collection has shuffled and expanded a bit. (The price also seems to have dropped substantially.) I received a sample of Salty Flower with a Sephora purchase and spotted a positive comment about Dancing Roses in a friend’s Instagram feed, so I tried that one too. Guess what? They aren’t ground-breaking or life-changing, but I liked both of them. And with the price drop, they suddenly made a lot more sense to me…
A collaboration with film and fashion icon Chloë Sevigny, Little Flower is Régime des Fleurs’ provocative take on Sevigny’s favorite bloom — the rose. . . . Thérèse of Lisieux, a late 19th century French nun who died at the age of 24, was referred to as ‘The Little Flower’ and became the Catholic patron saint of flowers.
Well, if you were trying to come up with a fragrance that would sound irresistible to me, you couldn’t do much better than that. I’m a life-long lover of rose perfumes and a former Catholic schoolgirl still deeply influenced by my religion’s iconography. I’ve also been following Chloë Sevigny’s work (and style) ever since her 1994 profile in The New Yorker, so I already know that she’s a serious perfume fan who used to wear Comme des Garçons Rose…