What follows is not, properly speaking, a review of Guerlain’s Shalimar. Shalimar is so iconic that there isn’t much to be said on the subject that hasn’t already been said, and the only reason I’m writing about it today is that I’m planning to talk about the newest member of the Shalimar family, Eau de Shalimar, tomorrow, and my inner perfume geek insists that I can’t talk about Eau de Shalimar without at least mentioning its parent first.

The oft-told story about Shalimar is that perfumer Jacques Guerlain was messing around with ethyl vanillin, a then-new synthetic vanilla, and he poured some into a bottle of Jicky to see what would happen. Apocryphal or not, the anecdote neatly connects the dots between the dawn of modern perfumery with Jicky in 1889 and the classic fragrances of the 1920s and 1930s…

Read the rest of this article »