New Perfume Launches: 168 posts

In my bid to fantasize that I’m living in a hot tropical climate, I’ve been starting my day by wearing citrus colognes. When I splash on something redolent of juicy oranges, lemon blossoms or bitter grapefruit, for a moment I forget the overcast skies and the nagging rain. As I sniff my bergamot scented wrists, I might as well be at the seashore, walking on warm sand, kicking up opalescent seashells with my toe.  Better still for my daydreaming if the citrus is wrapped around dark woods, smoky vanilla or luscious amber. Then, it feels particularly sultry and exciting! When I heard about Christian Dior Escale à Parati, which promised to take me to a town on the Costa Verde of Brazil and comfort me with tonka bean dusted oranges, I didn’t hesitate to order a sample.

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by Suzanna

Some of the most intriguing fragrances are meant to evoke environment and emotion, time and place. This is why the newest L’Artisan Parfumeur fragrance, Séville à l’aube, caught my attention. Perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour created Séville à l’aube as a celebration of journalist and perfume blogger Denyse Beaulieu’s remembrance of romance and seduction past. The idea stemmed from a story Beaulieu told the perfumer about an erotic event that transpired during a long-ago Holy Week (this turns up in the scent as an abstraction) and about the smells and associations of that time and place (more literal). Beaulieu describes her experience in the creation of this fragrance in her book The Perfume Lover. Duchaufour documents Beaulieu’s story as an “orange blossom Oriental” in which the sweet and honeyed white flower appears meaty and succulent and the dry resins of the base curl upwards in the manner of incense.

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by Suzanna

Aedes de Venustas is the hip West Village fragrance boutique that since 1995 has been a Mecca for the connoisseur of niche perfumes.  The Aedes brand roster includes both the popular and the polarizing; there are scents that smell of flower stalls and scents that smell of olives and damp cobblestones.  The shop also carries bath and body products, home fragrance, and candles like the ultra-covetable Mizensir Sapin de Noël.

The boutique now has its own house fragrance, the eponymous Aedes de Venustas Signature eau de parfum authored by Bertrand Duchaufour, he of the upcoming L’Artisan Séville à l’aube and the nose behind the wildly creative Eau d’Italie Sienne l’Hiver and cult favorites Avignon and Kyoto for Comme des Garçons. Aedes de Venustas signature is Duchaufour’s second scent for the boutique; the first was released under the L’Artisan brand and has no relation to the new Signature scent.

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Why do you wear perfume? If I were to judge by fragrance marketing, all of us wear perfume to make the opposite sex fall down in a dazed stupor at our feet.  Now, the good thing about Valentina, the latest perfume from Valentino, is that it avoids the tired clichés; it presents a young woman who plays by her own rules instead of following the conventions. I must have watched the TV ad with its terrific Via Con Me soundtrack by Paolo Conte at least a dozen times before I finally smelled the fragrance.

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There are days that feel so perfect that I wish I could capture them somehow—in a sentence, in a drawing or in a drop of perfume.  It may just be a mild spring morning when I wake up by myself before the alarm clock and find that my husband has already made some tea for me and the whole room smells of jasmine petals and wet leaves. Or perhaps, I’m enjoying a cup of coffee at a sidewalk café, soaking in the sunshine and the perfume of dusty geraniums. None of these moments are great epiphanies, but they comprise the small pleasures that color my days the most.  When I read that a niche house A Lab on Fire launched a fragrance called Sweet Dreams 2003, I became tempted as much by its story as by the scent itself.

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