tl;dr a decent middle of the road vanilla.

If you wanted a good illustration of the muddy distinction between niche and mainstream perfumery, you could hardly find a better example than Annick Goutal. The house mostly made its name with classic colognes like Eau d’Hadrien and Eau du Sud, and a handful of pretty feminine florals. When I reviewed Eau de Camille and Eau de Charlotte back in 2007, I noted that…

The Annick Goutal line occupies a rather in-between place among perfume fans — the company probably qualifies as niche based on their size and their limited distribution; still, they are available in a number of mainstream stores (three department stores in my local mall carry them),¹ and the line doesn’t feel niche. The feminine perfumes are emphatically pretty, romantic even; they don’t, like so many niche perfumes, challenge traditional notions of what a woman ought to smell like.

What I perhaps didn’t emphasize enough was how few mainstream brands were making nicely done yet emphatically pretty fragrances at the time…

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