Next week you'll read something very special from Paris, but until then I could not resist to confess that Daniela Andrier and Antoine Lie, two exceptional perfumers, made my weekend with an amazing creation that I've been wearing since Saturday 9 AM. This is not a perfume for a commercial brand but a creative work around some new raw materials that will shape the scents from 2012 and beyond and it was conceived as a short poem. Daniela Andrier is to Givaudan Paris what Sophia Grosjman was for IFF in the 80's and 90's when she signed her major works, and her perfumes are surrounded with so much maternal love that you can only be amazed each time. Both have developed a type of perfume called "hug me fragrance", a term used in the 90's to describe Trésor (Lancôme). It doesn't have an olfactory precise definition but it simply says that wearing your perfume is like a secret romance and you will constantly love the air around you. This is why perfumes from Prada are all gorgeous and you cannot resist to someone wearing these creations.
In the past 6 months I've been obsessed by several olfactory universes: le Dandy d'Orsay (the real vintage one, not exactly the perfect copy of No5), the ylang & nutmeg ballet, the elusive outstanding character of Mousse de Chypre, the mellow spiciness of Epicene gamma base, the ethereal aldehydic character of several perfumes from the 70's, the santalol-javanol accord and of course how the gender of classic perfumes can be "modified" through a creative approach.
By a strange coincidence the creation of Daniela Andrier and Antoine Lie has answered to my personal quest for new accords and more, it has mesmerized me since the day I had the bottle of this non-commercial creation. Add to that the airy classic carnation with a gardenia touch and you will have the scent that made me dream these days since my morning Saturday coffee at Crillon. Les Dandys, the title of this opus inspired by an ylang flower worn at the buttonhole of an elegant jacket with white gloves, is actually a very distant cousin of Woodhue and a closer friend to Chanel with an extremely modern spiciness. It doesn't reveal its personality on the blotter but has an amazing property to perfume the air with an exquisite sillage. Unlike the nutmeg perfume of Jean Paul Guerlain, strong and virile, this one has the softness of suede gloves and the texture of rich fabrics. Metaphorically, it is a perfume imagined for Les Muscadins, the well-dressed young men during the French Revolutions who rebelled against les sans-culotte. The sensorial allusion is perfect. The image is a plate from Costumes Français (1834-1838) and presents an "Incroyable with a Muscadin", both wearing elegant and extravagant fashions during French Directoire. The elegance of Muscadins opposed to the rudeness of sans-culottes is expressed here in the most obvious way because Daniela Andrier and Antoine Lie had imagined a creation that is the opposite of what we perceive today as alpha male (from the power of woody ambery notes to the aromatic fougère). They twisted the most refined and feminine olfactory shape. They also brought another small reference to those times because the perfume has an important "exotic touch" - ylang and vanilla and I could not stop thinking about the future empress of France. But more important than my interpretation is the scent and here the perfumers are at their best, conceiving a delicious masculine fragrance where sweetness, spiciness and muskiness are perfectly combined. Though it is not directly related to Le Male (Jean Paul Gaultier), the scent evokes a similar sweetness that perfectly fits the masculine skin scent while its spiciness evokes some glorious perfumes from the 80's, now all discontinued. Antoine Lie is a master of secret accords hidden inside his perfumes, those small elements that are able to twist dramatically a known accord (he did Armani Code, Gucci Rush Men and many Etat Libre d'Orange creations) and he put some of his magic inside this creation.
But more on other perfumers from Paris with a focus on 2 creators and their amazing scents at the end of the week.
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Fragrance is the 8th Art - Octavian Coifan - Le Parfum est le 8ème Art
