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Jean Patou is relaunching three fragrances from its archives: Adieu Sagesse, Amour Amour (now called Deux Amours), Que Sais-Je? The perfumes were originally created in 1925 and were to represent three phases of love, seduction, doubt and abandon. In-house perfumer Thomas Fontaine brought them back, along with the earlier reissues of Chaldée, Eau de Patou and Patou Pour Homme.

Adieu Sagesse created by legendary perfumer Henri Alméras is a floral blend dominated by gardenia. It includes notes of jonquil, lily of the valley, neroli, carnation, tuberose, opopanax, civet, and musk.

Deux Amours (formerly Amour Amour), a classical floral bouquet, was created by Georges Reboul and Henri Alméras. It features notes of bergamot, black currant, narcissus, neroli, carnation, jasmine, rose, and vetiver.

Que Sais-Je?, another Alméras perfume, is a classical chypre. It includes orange blossom, apricot, peach, carnation, iris, jasmine, rose, amber, cistus labdanum, and civet.

The Heritage Collection is available at Jean Patou boutiques and counters. Via press release

Bois de Jasmin will return on Tuesday, June 24th. Today we have our “Recommend Me a Perfume” thread. You can use this space to ask any questions about perfume, including fragrance recommendations. If you’ve asked for a recommendation before, please let us know how your search went and what you’ve discovered.

How does it work:

1. Please post your requests or questions as comments here. You can also use this space to ask any fragrance related questions. To receive recommendations that are better tailored to your tastes, you can include details on what you like and don’t like, your signature perfumes, and your budget. And please let us know what you end up sampling.

2. Then please check the thread to see if there are other requests you can answer. Your responses are really valuable for navigating the big and sometimes confusing world of perfume, so let’s help each other!

To make this thread easier to read, when you reply to someone, please click on the blue “reply” link under their comment.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

Among the many things that perfumery and cuisine have in common is their ability to take you back into the past. A whiff, a taste, and you’re in another time and place. My Proustian madeleine was a  green salad my grandmother put together when we suddenly discovered that our lettuce patch was about to be overgrown. Since wasting food is a cardinal sin in our household, I was sent to pick the lettuce and herbs, while my grandmother boiled eggs and whipped a simple sour cream dressing. The combination of dill’s spicy licorice, tart cream and slightly bitter greens was refreshing, but it also reminded me of my childhood so poignantly that for a while I sat with my fork mid-motion.

Among my grandmother’s large repertoire, salads never played a big role. Depending on the season, we always had a large plate of fresh vegetables on the table–cucumbers sprinkled with salt, sliced tomatoes, radishes or spring onions, but the salad was hardly more than slivered cabbage tossed with parsley, dill and toasted sunflower seed oil. Green salad wasn’t even considered food fit for humans, and I vividly recall my great-grandmother pointing to a pile of lettuce and saying that only during the famine of the 1930s would she eat that “green nonsense.”

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Do you think only perfume lovers decry reformulations and look for the “vintage” blends, with all of the good things still intact? Elisa found a terrific cocktail blog by Paul Clarke about the reformulation of Lillet, a refreshing French aperitif, and she wanted to share it with you.

“Lillet is still in production, and is a lovely aperitif wine, but a reformulation in 1986 removed the product’s quinine bite (along with the quinine-related “Kina” from the name), in the process altering the flavor characteristics Lillet delivered when mixed in a cocktail. To read the rest, continue here.”

It looks like quinine is the oakmoss of the cocktail world!

So, you’ve worn fragrances in the days when the dangers of oakmoss didn’t occupy the bright minds in the EU’s governing bodies. Perfume to you means character and statement, not something that smelled blindly could be mistaken for shampoo or a flavor compound mistakenly rerouted from a candy factory. Or you simply love scents that have curves and glamour, just like the stars in your favorite black-and-white films. Well, I have three words for you–Jean Patou Mille. Or let’s just make it a number–1000.

Although Jean Patou’s fame owes much to its 1930s bombshell Joy, 1000 is my favorite from the collection. It packs as much old-school glamour as a reasonable person could take, but that’s what makes it interesting. You can certainly find plenty of dramatic perfumes with a touch of vintage glamour, from Chanel to Frédéric Malle, from Guerlain to Parfums de Nicolaï, but 1000 holds its own next to No 5, Hermès Calèche and Madame Rochas.

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