Not only about love: scents with a rose that will surprise you
TEXT:Ksenia Golovanova, author of the telegram channel Nose Republic
Rose - one of the most important and popular notes in perfumery, with enviable regularity returning to the aromatic fashion. Probably, everyone can recall the smell of this flower, but nevertheless, thanks to the imagination of perfumers, we can choose from hundreds of shades. Our expert Ksenia Golovanova talks about the brightest, most unusual and complex pink fragrances.
L'Eau, Diptyque
3275 rubles for 50 ml
“Water” is a debut, in 1968, produced by the fragrance of the brand, which always seemed to be with us: Diptyque did in a good way strange perfumes long before Jean-François Laporte and his L'Artisan Parfumeur were declared the father of niche perfumery. A suitable example is L'Eau, contrary to the name of the most "dehydrated" perfume of the existing ones. The first breath is like a hairdryer of salon power sharashit your face: here are hot spices, and hot chips in a brazier, and roses burnt with desert wind. One user in the Basenotes perfume forum described L'Eau very correctly: "Marianne Faithful and Mick Jagger go to Tangier in 1968." It remains to add: they are monstrous, inhumanly in love.
La Fille de Berlin, Serge Lutens
8400 rubles for 50 ml
"Berlin Girl" is not the most famous fragrance of the brand, largely due to the fact that Sa Majesté La Rose and Rose de Nuit already bloomed in the portfolio of Serge Lutens at the time of La Fille de Berlin. Those who prefer the second of these two - a green rose in the style of the 1970s - most likely will like the "Girl from Berlin": the fresh pepper pepper bitterness of green leaves is so shrill as if the Red Queen from "Alice in Wonderland "threw a tantrum and after the unfortunate Valet beheaded all the roses in her garden.
Cinabre, Maria Candida Gentile
2400 rubles for 15 ml
“The outcome of the dragon’s battle with the elephant” was Pliny the Elder’s cinnabar: the dragon attacks the elephant, thrusting its fangs into it, the elephant dies, but with it the serpent himself, crushed by the victim’s body. As a result, if you believe the historian, from a mixture of dragon and elephant blood you get a moderately poisonous paint, which William Turner was very fond of later: the most violent sunsets in his paintings are written by cinnabar. Turner died in 1851, not even eight years before a new, safe paint — aniline — appeared in the artists ’palette.
All his life he had been searching for the perfect red, and these searches were periodically accompanied by a risk to his life - that was, perhaps, the plot that formed the basis of Cinabre Maria Candida Gentile. Here, the perfumer, like Turner, takes a risk for the sake of beauty: she takes a thick, fondant rose, from which it is difficult to breathe in the first five minutes, and interferes with the bloody pigment a great deal of evil black pepper. The new "shade" - red with a black tint - looks stendalevski weighty.
Eau de Protection, Etat Libre d'Orange
7500 rubles for 50 ml
Eau de Protection is dedicated to Pedro Almodovar’s favorite muse, Rossi de Palme, and is written, like the Picasso's face of the actress, with sweeping and sharp strokes: black pepper, bitter chocolate, a metal rose and a salted blood chord. This is a rose on the verge of a nervous breakdown - for those days when at lunchtime, instead of dining, you get to Domodedovo international terminal.
Aquarian Rose, Strange Invisible Perfumes
$ 145 for 15 ml
First, a little about the Strange Invisible Perfumes brand itself: this is natural perfumery made up without the use of synthetic substances, and in addition botanical - there are no animal ingredients in the formulas. All of the above, especially in combination with the lead-in picture on the site (they offer scents according to the signs of the zodiac), noticeably smacks of New Age, but the scents themselves are completely cerebral - clear, transparent and very meaningful.
Take at least Aquarian Rose: they promise you a "sea" rose - and that is what you get. Surprisingly, with the help of natural materials alone, perfumer Alexandra Balahutis creates a recognizable aromatic hologram of such an uneasy landscape as the sea coast: bright spicy herbs (sage and marjoram) are mixed with the title rose, as well as sandalwood and algae tincture.
Nightingale, Zoologist Perfumes
$ 35 for 11 ml
We have already written about the Canadian indie perfume brand, which names its fragrances in honor of animals, but we will return to it more than once - until the views of the brand in the zoological atlas end. What probably will never happen: Zoologist founder Victor Wong loves all living beings indiscriminately, including "unobvious" animals that have marketing difficulties, such as beavers and bats (art house Beaver and Bat were devoted to them).
Nightingale, "The Nightingale", compiled by Japanese perfumer Tomoo Inaboy, is more understandable to the nose, but still very unusual - it is a classic chypre in its structure, filled with rose, plum color and fragrant darkness. This intoxicating twilight would like a real nightingale: the head birds keep quietly, live in dense and shady thickets, and prefer the lilac hours of the early morning to the noonday sun.
Photo: Diptyque, Ile de Bote, Essenza Nobile, Etat Libre d'Orange, Mecca, Content, Zoologist