Rochas will launch a new fragrance for women, Soleil de Rochas, in February. The scent was inspired by the soft heat of a gloriously sunny afternoon in Paris; the print ad features French model Morgane Dubled.
The fruity chypre fragrance features notes of tangerine, pear, pink pepper, rose, tuberose, orange blossom, patchouli, blond woods and vanilla.
Rochas Soleil de Rochas will be available in 50 and 75 ml Eau de Toilette and in matching body products. (via abc-luxe, news-parfums, osmoz.fr)
Other recent releases from Rochas: Désir de Rochas.
This could be a good one. Rochas makes good perfumes.
Although the qualification 'chypre-fruity' does not immediately make my heart beat faster Rochas is too much of a high quality name to be ignored.
Well that is my humble opinion.
The question is: more “fruit” or more “chypre”?
And: Why pink pepper again?
Curious to smell it, though. I like Coco Mademoiselle and Gucci by Gucci, both often classified as “fruity chypre”.
I find “soleil” accords appealing but too often they are paired with super-sweet fruits. I wouldn't be surprised if this smelled similar to Elizabeth Arden's “Mediterranean” (very sweet). A mainstream sun-accord based fragrance that wasn't particularily sweet was Estee Lauder's “Azuree Soleil” (smelled of salty, sun-beaten skin), so it could lean more in that direction. I'll definitely test this out of curiosity!
What I don't really understad is why some fragrances are called a fruity scent and others are not while both groups contain fruits.
Like some are socalled floral fruity and others just floral or floral woody musk. I am so confused by all that.
Marianne, I should not that Osmoz is calling it a floral oriental, and I do not know which one is correct.
Pink pepper is still “in”, apparently!
M, fragrances are classified into families by their dominant olfactory impression, so to speak, not based on the list of notes. So a fragrance that contained a fruit note could still end up in almost any category you can imagine.
I don't know if this actually has a “sun” or “warm skin” accord, but it doesn't sound like they're going for a tropical or Mediterranean kind of scent. We'll see!
If it is a floral oriental then I definitely will have to smell it. Oriental sounds more like a Rochas fragrance, to me at least (Byzance, Byzantine).
I remember one of the first floral fruities SunnyFrutti by Escada, that was in the 90's and then I loved it a lot. After about two years SunnyFrutti was not good anymore, just gone bad. Maybe the fruity accords make a scent more vulnerable?
Read in an article by Chandler Burr that fruit scents are difficult to make, like eaux. They are a lot of work for a perfumer.
Also read in one of his articles that he believed that blogs might be a wonderful source, marketingwise. Weblogs are not to be neglected, au contraire 🙂 And that he wrote that blogs are overlooked by perfume companies because they still think in a conservative way: the clients who go to the stores instead of the clients who read first and try samples.
So Robin, keep up the good work 😉
Mystere de Rochas was one of my first fragrance passions, which leaves me with a soft spot for Rochas. But I have no memory at all of 'Desir de Rochas'! How did that one sneak through?
I don't know about the UK, obviously, but the Rochas line is not widely carried here — offhand, can't think of a mainstream department store that carries the whole line. I have seen Desir de Rochas at the online discounters, but have never laid eyes on a tester anywhere (nor did I ever see the 2 they launched in 2006, Reflets d'Eau de Rochas).
I think the real reason that blogs are “overlooked” by the perfume companies is that they can't control the content. In magazines, obviously, they needn't worry about anything negative being said about a fragrance. They'd rather launch their own company blogs, as YSL has done for Elle & Nina Ricci has done for Nina.
Of course Robin that is the word 'overlooked' but then on purpose. Well Chandler Burr does not read blogs as he himself wrote but he stated that they have precious information, and that is so true…:-)
Rochas is pretty easy to find in the UK, so I'd expect to see anything new from them on the shelves fairly quickly. The Escentual site doesn't list either Desir or Reflets d'Eau, so I guess they were never released here.
'…the soft heat of a gloriously sunny afternoon in Paris…'. LOL! The smell of sweaty passengers on crowded buses and métro, melting tarmac and acrid exhaust fumes and the scent of exasperated tourists finding that the whole of Paris is closed during August. 😉
I have loved Mystère and Byzance, but this Rochas fragrance is not for me. Fruit? No, thanks.
bella, you left out the cigarette smoke and croissant fat!
i have my olfactory fingers crossed on this one. i, too, tend to enjoy rochas scents, so i'm hoping this one is a good one. the pear and pink pepper make me a little nervous, but the other notes could make it work.
Aha, so maybe they aren't exported? But the Desir is here at the discounters, and for all I know, Rochas is easy to find here and I just don't know where.
LOL — but J, you do know that is my own (no doubt lousy) translation 🙂
Well, there isn't any cigarette smoke because there aren't any Parisians in Paris in the summer. Croissant fat, yes. Everyone eats those. LOL!
Oh, I've made myself all nostalgic now… 🙁
Hey, there's nothing wrong with your translation, R. 🙂
Good then, glad I didn't flub that one!
Robin, I don't see any oakmoss in the notes listed, although it's being called a chypre. How can it be! I've read about oakmoss being banned as a perfume ingredient, is that only in perfumes made in Europe? And will these be a new group of perfumes that are being classified as chypres without having oakmoss as a note? Thanks for any info!
Patti, there are now tons of scents being called chypres without oakmoss. But, oakmoss is not banned at all, it is just that the concentration has to be kept at a certain level, over that, you have to include it on the label as an allergen or something like that.
And, of course, lists of notes are not ever complete, nor does a perfume that lists “oakmoss” in the notes necessarily contain the real thing. We don't know which fragrances have oakmoss and which don't, and strictly speaking, we never did 🙂
Thanks for the info, Robin!
more fruity…