Perfume Reviews: 871 posts

Shanghai sample raffle (newsletter-subscriber exclusive): the winners are Marc, Adrienne, Lee, Aurélie, Jonah. I’ve contacted you via email.

Now and again, walking down a street in Paris, I catch a whiff of Shalimar. According to the latest bestseller lists—compiled by companies whose entire business rests on the arcane practice of counting doors and tracking fragrance sales—Guerlain Shalimar remains among the top ten best-selling perfumes in France. If that is true, then excellent. Few perfumes deserve to be worn, loved, and admired as much as Shalimar.

What makes Shalimar extraordinary is its paradox. It is sumptuous, yet startlingly modern; ornate, yet almost linear in its construction. One could even call it a precursor to the Sophia Grojsman style: a bold block of high-impact materials, softened and ornamented with delicate flourishes.

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At Notes Shanghai, the Born to Stand Out booth was impossible to miss. A blaze of red, pop-art prints, and crowds three rows deep—all trying to get a whiff of the brand’s latest releases. I admit that I hadn’t heard of this Korean house before the fair, but a perfumer friend insisted I stop by: “They’re doing something interesting,” she said. She was right.

The founder, Jun Lim, guided me through several perfumes, but the one that immediately caught my attention was Black Crème, a new creation by Quentin Bisch. If you know Bisch’s style—those bold, ambery-woody harmonies that manage to be both extroverted and impeccably polished—you’ll recognize his hand here at once.

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What’s your idea of leather? Ever since my perfumery student days, I’ve associated it with the green-dark paradox of iso butyl quinoline—or perhaps the horse-sweat pungency of cresols. I’ve tried many leather perfumes, but Ganymede redefined what a leather fragrance could be. Created by Quentin Bisch for Marc-Antoine Barrois, it replaces smoke and darkness with light and air. The result feels both ancient and futuristic.

The first impression is mandarin peel tinged with saffron—a brightness so sharp it seems to refract. Then comes the abstraction of leather: smooth, mineral, almost tactile in its absence. The familiar warmth is replaced by a sense of polished stone.

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When I first smelled a vintage bottle of Coty’s L’Aimant, I understood why it was once considered Chanel No. 5’s great rival. The fragrance shimmered with aldehydes, yet instead of the icy brilliance I associate with No. 5, it felt warmer, more tender, as if the light were diffused through silk rather than crystal. There was romance in its aura, a quality that seemed less about abstraction and more about embrace.

François Coty launched L’Aimant—“the magnet”—in 1927, determined to prove that his house could meet the challenge Chanel had set six years earlier. By then, aldehydic florals were reshaping the landscape of luxury perfumery, and Coty entrusted the task to Vincent Roubert, one of the most gifted perfumers of his time. Roubert composed a fragrance that was both modern and romantic, a scent that embodied Coty’s idea of femininity as magnetic, sophisticated, and irresistibly alluring.

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Chanel’s Comète українською

Chanel’s Comète, part of the Les Exclusifs collection, takes its name from the shooting-star necklace designed by Gabrielle Chanel in 1932. Where jewelry sought to capture the shimmer of diamonds, this perfume translates radiance into scent: a floral, powdery, musky caress, soft as starlight dusting the skin.

The opening has a surprising gourmand flicker—almond and cherry, weightless and fleeting. Soon the violet unfolds, first earthy and cool, then turning sweet and powdery. Violet and heliotrope add their familiar duet: tender, almondy, with a faint modeling-clay impression that some may find comforting, others distracting. To me, it’s a reminder that playfulness often hides inside refinement.

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