Amouage makes perfumes that are Arabian corollaries to how perfumes used to be made in the US up until the post-World War II era.  By this I mean assertive, statement-making perfumes with incisive notes. Amouage Lyric Woman (2008) is a blueprint rose chypre for this type of perfume, using Middle Eastern motifs on a classical framework.

Lyric Woman is composed around a central floral scheme of rose, jasmine, and ylang-ylang.  The particular rose used in Lyric Woman is not a Western-type dewy or jammy rose but one that has smoky elements, as if rose were a herbal, rather than a floral, component. This rose is scattered all over Lyric Woman, its dried petals offering a textural counterpoint to rich, rubbery ylang-ylang and honeyed jasmine.

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There’s a twenty-year-old ad for Yves Saint Laurent Paris that says everything you need to know about this iconic fragrance.  In the ad, the model Lucie de la Falaise leans against a wall while holding a huge bouquet of light-pink roses.  Everything but the model’s face and the bottle of perfume is in gauzy soft focus, including in the background the Eiffel Tower.  De la Falaise looks otherworldly in this city of muted pinks and greens, serene, elegant, and very, very French.  Surely the City of Light is scented exactly like this, is it not?  Isn’t Paris a veritable rose macaroon, tinted pink as Yves Saint Laurent’s fantasy fragrance is?

Paris is an ebullient and romantic daydream of a scent that interlocks a fruity, jammy, and abstract rose with violets that smell the way candied violets look.  One spray and (nearly) all is revealed. This is not a perfume of special effects but one that opens big, stays big, and gives you a bit of sandalwood as a basenote souvenir.

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Serge Luten has unveiled his newest Paris exclusive fragrance called Une Voix Noire. “The stars rise in chorus. The night sky is filled with the light of the moon.  It is a tribute to the singer Billie Holiday, a reference to a gardenia she wore in her hair.

The perfume is now available via sergelutens.com, 75ml is 130 euros. Via sergelutens.com

“Flowers can have a dark enchantment,” says Tom Ford of his new Jardin Noir series. “When you showcase their darker and less innocent aspects, flowers can become so thrilling and beautiful, they could almost ruin you. That was the sensation I was after.”* For a flower from a collection called Jardin Noir, Lys Fume upon first impression is not all that dark. For a perfume named “Fume”, which I take to mean “smoked lily” in French, the smoke is quite subtle.

But even if Tom Ford is after the “film noir” glamour goddesses in theory only, Lys Fume is an enjoyable fragrance. Real lilies smell intensely indolic–of ink and moth balls–and while perfumers Rodrigo Flores-Roux and Shyamala Maisondieu  tone down the animalic components, they didn’t shy away from exploring some surprising twists to create this blossom.

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Guerlain’s Les Déserts d’Orient trio of Rose Nacrée du Désert, Encens Mythique d’Orient, and Songe d’Un Bois d’Été is now available at Bergdorf Goodman in New York.

A tribute to enchanting Arabia with three iconic creations that represent the Orient in all its original splendor… There has always been a beautiful love story, an undeniable and faithful bond, between Guerlain and the Orient. Superb compositions are the prestigious proof. With the creation of Shalimar (1925), Jacques Guerlain founded the great oriental olfactory family. As rounded as a waltz, it majestically combines the sweet, opiate notes of balms, precious woods and vanilla with flowers and exotic essences to embody the opulence of faraway horizons imbued with mystery… Thierry Wasser, Guerlain’s perfumer-creator, wanted to demonstrate this concept in his own way, with sumptuousness and freedom, while giving dazzling expression to the notes that make these lands an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

Via Bergdorf Goodman