Spring has sprung in Paris: My top 10 scents

© Marin Montagut, courtesy RMN

The picture above is the design of a scarf by the young artist Marin Montagut, exclusively sold at the Grand Palais boutique during the Jardins exhibition, depicting one of my two favorite places in Paris, the Luxembourg Gardens. My other being the Palais-Royal, a technicolour riot of hot-pink magnolias, purple hyacinths and yellow daffodils these days. It’s hard to resist springtime in Paris, despite the news being unrelentingly dismal. So I’ll share a few pictures I took last week along with our seasonal top 10!

The Jardins exhibition at the Grand Palais

Perfumes are our immaterial gardens; and like gardens, they are ways of framing and dreaming the vegetal world. Last week I celebrated spring slightly ahead of the calendar -- but the thermometer read 20°C -- by visiting the beautiful “Jardins” exhibition at the Grand Palais. From Dürer’s violets to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s herbarium, Gerhard Richter’s hazy, haunting Sommer Tag or Patrick Neu’s obsessively detailed watercolour portraits of wilting irises (see above), it’s incredibly rich, and it lasts until 24 July, so if  you’re in Paris, book yourself a visit…

Sous les magnolias, Pierre Bourdon

I wore this bright chewy fruity floral chypre in the same room as the great perfumer A.M., aka the Human Chromatographer. “Someone’s wearing a very good Diorella”, she said. And it is. Sous les magnolias is as close to a signature scent as I’ve had these past few months. So here it is again, heading my list.

White song, Dear Rose

The brand’s co-founder, singer-songwriter Alexandra Roos, used to wear Poison (much to the chagrin of her mother, the tremendous Chantal Roos, who worked on the Opium team and created the Issey Miyake and Jean-Paul Gaultier perfume brands). Fabrice Pellegrin’s spicy almond blossom White Song is Poison gone cool French rock chick, L’Heure Bleue without the blues.

Le Sillage Blanc, Dusita

Its author, the self-taught Thai perfumer Pissara Umavijani, named this after one of her father’s poems. Something must’ve been lost in translation, because it’s hard to think of any scent smelling less “blanc”. This is Bandit’s love child grown up wild in Phuket: a bracingly bitter green earth brew that connects with the past without feeling retro.

Totally White, Parle Moi de Parfum

Michel Almairac is a perfumer’s perfumer: the name that comes up when they have to praise a colleague still in activity. He’s cut loose in the brand created by his son, not by doing crazy niche-y stuff, but by giving them cherished formulas he’d never sold, on one condition: no tweaks. Totally White is a gift to his wife, who asked for an evocation of the Parc Monceau shrouded in a frothy white nebula of lilac, hawthorn and mock orange. This is, quite simply, springtime in Paris bottled. You need it.

Bleu Framboise, Jean-Michel Duriez

Now gone indie, the former nose of Patou and Rochas conceived this while crossing the Pont Alexandre III on the Seine, just as sunset turned the sky blue and red. Hence the name, which translates into a mouthwatering raspberry accord and a touch of blue chamomile. This is a fruity floral chypre with a cheerful verdant twist (rhubarb, galbanum, geranium, oakmoss…) and a hefty animalic kick from jasmine sambac. This smells like Paris filmed by Wes Anderson.

L’Eau Bleue, Miu Miu

Most things in life can be improved by the mere fact that kittens exist. And few songs are more empowering than Lesley Gore’s “You don’t own me”. The film for L’Eau Bleue features both. And both make me feel pretty sappy. It’s the operational word for Daniela Andrier’s second Miu Miu fragrance though this time in the original sense: a day-glo green sap dotting the bells of her lily-of-the-valley. Like Diorissimo in its day, this is not “the flower, but an arabesque around the flower” (to quote Edmond Roudnitska). Dew, sap, and the moist earth of a Givaudan captive, akigalawood (a mutant patchouli obtained through enzymatic reaction). And kittens.

Grace by Grace Coddington, Comme des Garçons

You’d expect the flame-haired Ms. Coddington’s rose to come fully equipped with claws (here be lions). But then, anything that comes out of a pouch adorned with twee drawings of cats and capped with the kind of pussyhat a space explorer would wear to land on Planet Claire can’t be too feral. Twisted with a bunch of basil and mint and tossed on a Cashmeran throw, Coddington’s rose exudes a playful, I-woke-up-like-this charm.

Parco Palladiano V, Bottega Veneta

How often do we get to smell aromatic notes outside of fougères -- and their dread “fresh” men’s deodorant accord -- in fragrance? Composed by Daniela Andrier for Bottega Veneta’s exclusives line, Parco Palladiano V plucks a bouquet garni from an Italian herb garden and serves it up as is. Rosemary, laurel and sage, no longer used as olfactory condiments, reveal their fresh, spicy and ambery facets. Pity such a simple, embraceable scent should be featured in such a costly collection. Its salubrious scent evokes the half-medicinal, half-fragrant recipes that preceded Eau de Cologne as European fragrance blockbusters, such as the Eau de la Reine de Hongrie. I’d splash it on every morning.

 Woodissime, Thierry Mugler

You could say this is Féminité du Bois led astray from Morocco -- its notes spanning the Orient from the Middle-East to China. Here, the violet/pit fruit and cedar/sandalwood accords are shifted on the scent-map to, respectively, osmanthus and oud. The principle of Mugler’s Les Exceptions is twisting a classic form with what they call an “unexpected guest”: in the present case, osmanthus. Which makes more sense than you’d think: Jean-Christophe Hérault hooks them up by teasing out the phenolic facets in both (leather, beaver butt, ink, black olive -- after all, osmanthus, an Oleaceae like jasmine, is related to the olive tree). The result is what may well be the sole smiling oud on the market.

For more Spring round-ups:

Bois de Jasmin

Now Smell This

The Non-Blonde

 All pictures are mine, taken at the Jardins exhibition or at the gardens of the Palais-Royal, except the topmost.