Balenciaga will launch Balenciaga Paris in February. The new perfume for women, made under the Coty umbrella, will be the brand's first major perfume launch since Cristobal in 1998.*
Balenciaga Paris was developed by perfumer Olivier Polge; the floral chypre features violet leaves, cedar and patchouli. According to Balenciaga's current creative director, Nicolas Ghesquière, it is "not a romantic floral" but a mix of traditional and contemporary elements. It will be fronted by Charlotte Gainsbourg (shown above in a Balenciaga fashion campaign from last winter; if you want to see the bottle, it's on the front page of today's Women's Wear Daily see below).
Balenciaga Paris will be available in 30, 50 and 75 ml Eau de Parfum and in matching body products. (via wwd)
* Flankers for Cristobal and Cristobal Pour Homme were released in 2003 and 2004, but as of this writing, all of Balenciaga's prior fragrances are out of production.
Update: additional information via Moodie Report ~
The juice – composed by IFF’s Olivier Polge – is described as a violet chypre. Its key ingredients include violet leaves and distilled woods.
“The violet was worked as a major note, in a vertical dimension, focusing on the natural, green, fresh aspect of the flower and its leaves,” explained Coty Prestige Senior Vice President Commercial Jean Mortier. “It is unusual in perfumery, [which] usually explores the powdery facets of the violet.”
Another update: see a review of Balenciaga Paris.
Just saw Coty and I said Blah straightaway…
I did not mean bla like “Bla bla” but … how do you say – Meeehhh?
Guess it’s too late over here to speak english properly 😉
I believe the term you are looking for is “meh”, but “blah” works as well 🙂
Question: Is “meh” an east coast expression? I never saw — or heard — that expression until I started to read perfume blogs. I sometimes say a sort of nasalized “eh” to mean the same thing. Forgive my compulsive Friday night wondering, but I HAVE been curious!
I’ve wondered the same thing, Haunani. I’ve never heard anyone say “meh”; it’s always “enh”. . .
My experience also had “meh” caming out big time on perfume blogs. It is potentially more East coast, perhaps ethnic…and certainly useful, once I caught on. 😉
I liken “blah” to be more forceful in the “not good/boring” way, whereas “meh” carries more “it didn’t even have enough there to rate interest, or is unworthy of rating/reaction.” Slang dictionaries equate it to “whatever” or “I don’t care.”
(Oh dear…methinks a bit of my language geek just slipped out…)
Ggperfume, “enh” is exactly what I say!
Meh actually came from the Simpsons, but only seems to have become really popular in the last 3 or 4 years. I see it written much more than I hear it said (“whatever” is still the spoken version, as near as I can tell) and that might be because it’s only 3 letters.
The Simpsons! Should have known.
I say “blah”, not “meh”. or I say “Ho-hum”
One can only hope that Mr. Polge will give us something that matches the gorgeously constructed, edgy, luxe clothing that’s been coming from Balenciaga in recent years. If those notes above signal a nice dry, woody modern chypre, it might just be the perfect foil for their clothing’s bleeding-edge elegance.
Then again, as you say, mybeautyblog.de, it will be a Coty fragrance…
Coty is not known for edgy. Mr. Ghesquière reportedly thought up smells he found interesting like floor wax and gasoline, but it isn’t really clear from WWD whether or not those made it into the scent itself.
If his Spring 2010 RTW line is any indication of his direction for the next couple of years — and Coty miraculously incorporates floor wax and/or gasoline — then there’d be a match made in heaven and an interesting scent to boot.
We can dream, can’t we?
Absolutely!
Floral chypre, my two favourite words! I will hold off passing judgement until after I sniff, Coty-Shmoty.
Modern chypres don’t excite me, but I’ll wait & sniff too! Might turn out to be fun.
Me too but the cedar is a note I usually pass on – there’s something high pitched about it that doesn’t work for me.
Considering how fab the clothes, bags and shoes have been under Nicolas Ghesquiere, it would be a real drag if the perfume were less than fab…so fingers crossed. I’m liking the bottle… and the 30 ml option (trying to stay positive here!)
Yes, a real drag. And a shame, since the name probably doesn’t have much weight on perfume counters after all this time (guessing the number of people in the US who know who Ghesquière is isn’t all that large).
I thought Balenciaga still had pretty good name recognition over here, no? I mean, at least among those who are familiar with any names in couture…
Anyway, I think I want to keep this one on my radar for the heck of it.
Perhaps, but don’t think the pool of people who really pay attention to couture is all that big. Not big enough to make huge $ in perfume, anyway. Guessing, for instance, that perfumes like Flowerbomb have made Viktor & Rolf known to many who would not have heard of them otherwise. Balenciaga is an older name, but most current consumers probably don’t know the perfume line…so if this one is a stinker, it seems to me it could be hard for them to “recover” in terms of their fragrance business.
Good point. Flowerbomb was a very successful and calculated brand extension for Victor & Rolf. They seem happy to be edgy in their clothing and mainstream in their perfumes. Let’s hope the current Balenciaga folks want a closer match between their clothing and their fragrance lines, a bit more like CdG. Although that thinking probably wouldn’t lead one to Coty… so I guess we find out in Feb.
After Gilty’s comment, it made me realize that — by these measurements — this one will be a “stinker” only if it doesn’t please the masses and sell like hotcakes. So maybe it’s unlikely that it will be considered “fab” by any of us, who probably like our scents a little more edgy than sellable.
I don’t know…I like weird edgy fragrances, but there is also lots of very mainstream stuff that I like. Prada, Hermes, Kenzo, Estee Lauder, Tom Ford (the regular Tom Ford), just to name a few brands. All of these brands make very middle-of-the-road fragrances that sell but that aren’t crap. I mean, whether or not you like Kelly Caleche, say, or Prada L’Eau Ambree, Kenzo Amour…those are well-made fragrances, nothing edgy or esoteric, but interesting, creative, not generic clones of everything else out there. Yet they sell them in Sephora. If they can do it, don’t see why anybody else can’t.
The tweens certainly won’t know Balenciaga and won’t care, but this doesn’t seem to be aimed at that market [for a change] and I’m hoping this will be a sophisticated and interesting fragrance. We might be pleasantly surprised – it could happen, right? [I’m liking the bottle.]
The bottle’s really nice, and looking forward to seeing the ads.
This does sound nice, though I couldn’t help but notice that cedar and patchouli are two of the major notes, and Guerlain’s Boise Torride makes a big huge stinking deal about the fact that its women’s scent contains, yes, cedar and patchouli, as if (as Robin noted) they haven’t been a mainstay of women’s scents for eons, as if it wasn’t women who first popularized patchouli in the West, for god’s sake. Do the people who write these things even know anything about perfumery, or are they just PR flacks and shills, writing for an equally ignorant audience?
Should clarify…don’t at all know that they are major notes in this one or not, I think it’s more just that they really haven’t yet given a very full description to the press. I’d guess we’ll see a longer list of notes later and these may turn out to be minor players.
But on your other point: gah, who knows who writes all this stuff.
Typically the copywriters will draw up such material, and quite often they don’t have a chance to communicate with the people involved in the fragrance development process.
Yes, it is a sad truth that these days nobody pays much attention if the PR or marketing expert they hired, actually has a clue about the very thing/service they were hired to promote and eventually sell. But that’s globalisation for you….nobody has time to learn anything about any given subject. thesedays, everybody just googles and then copy-pastes bit and pieces of info they find (from the first page links, they don’t even go to the second page)….
Hi everybody! I smelled it a few days ago and I wasn’t impressed. Very american, Daisy-like, with a soft hint of metalic Green in the top notes, and some very soft clean violet notes. Maybe the huge marketing campaign is gonna make it sell, but I really expected something else from Balenciaga…
Oh dear. Thanks so much for the warning!
very late to this but have just tested and this is WONDERFUL. It smells like nothing in the bottle but on the skin it’s amazing. It reminds me of the older version of Caron Violette Precieuse (not the vintage but the one before the current one).
Thanks! Have a sample on the way & looking forward to smelling it.
The violet patch combo seems interesting. What are other scents with that combination?
Tom Ford Purple Patchouli…and I’m sure others!
Viktor and Rolf’s Eau Mega? Same ‘ nez’!
Yep.
If gthis fragrance is ANYTHING Comparable in scent to Nicholas’ Clothes for Bal… The GOD HELP US ALL! I’d rather drown in a sea of that trashy Pam Anderson Swill than even REMOTELY smell anything that emulated the DRECK and HORROR of Ghesquiere’s Clothing for Balenciaga! The Man Ought to be Drawn, Quartered and Fed to the Pigs… as Joe Eula once said about Gianni Versace many moons ago over one his more Trashily Decadent Couture Collections! 😀 (although I thought the collection was a Smutty Bit of GENIUS! but then wasn’t Gianni always like that??? lol) I have Absolutely NO hope for this Fragrance to be anything other than Rancid! so.. even if it comes out SLIGHTLY Nice i will be OUTSTANDINGLY Surprised!
LOL…so you don’t like him then?
Frankly see little correspondence between fashion & fragrance from most of these lines, so doubt his fashion sense matters much.
I don’t understand the use of violet leaves in perfumes. Don’t the leaves have no smell? I have violets in my garden, and just pinched off a bit of leaf, crushed it and smelled it and it smells just faintly “green” with probably less scent than leaves from many other plants.
Many notes don’t smell the same in their natural state as they do when they’ve been extracted…
I smelled this scent on on of those paper magazine inserts, and it smelled wonderful! I loved it! It’s on my dream-to-get perfume list, and someday I will buy it! I rubbed the insert on my wrist, and it smelled great on me, so it’s not just a whimsical idea.