The last post in our eight-part series on fragrance related holiday gifts is the crazy expensive luxury edition. As always, items are listed in order from holy-cow-you’ve-got-to-be-kidding to maybe-I-could-sell-a-body-part. Do add any of your own recommendations in the comments!
Yves Saint Laurent celebrates the 40th anniversary of Opium with a hand made edition by artist and gilder Manuela Paul-Cavallier. 20 were made, 15 ml Extrait de Parfum for €2,000 (about $2375).
From Annick Goutal, a special edition of Eau d'Hadrien in a handmade glass bottle by Venini in Murano. 60 bottles were made; each comes with two 100 ml refills. €2,000 (about $2375).
From Viktor & Rolf, a(nother) Flowerbomb limited edition: "Indulge in the addictive scent of Flowerbomb, an explosion of the most luxurious and alluring flowers. Encrusted with exquisite Swarovski crystals, this limited edition bottle sparkles as magnificently as the fragrance captured inside. Only 25 pieces exist in the world, available exclusively at Neiman Marcus." $2500.
From Mugler, Angel in a refillable bottle hand blown by Frédéric Alary and decorated by Jean-Jacques Urcun. There are also special bottles for A*Men, Angel Muse, Alien and Aura. €2900 each (about $3450), possibly available at Printemps Haussmann in Paris.
From Chanel, Gabrielle in crystal: "An elegant celebration of the luminous floral fragrance inspired by Gabrielle before she was Coco, expressed in an exceptionally rare form: a grand 900ml crystal bottle handcrafted by Baccarat for the CHANEL fragrance collector. Each precious bottle is numbered from 1 to 83 in honor of Gabrielle Chanel’s 1883 birthdate. This masterpiece of fragrance composition and craftsmanship is limited to just three bottles in the US — with the coveted number 7 available exclusively on chanel.com, to be hand-delivered to the collector." 900 ml for $9500 at Chanel (and also available in Chanel No. 5 L'Eau for the same price).
From Guerlain, La Petite Robe Noire in a 1.5 liter Baccarat bottle with a leather "jacket" designed by Marie Barthès in collaboration with Tassin Cuirs. 18 were made; reportedly €10,000 (about $11,800).
The J’adore Amphoras Jewel Box was £10,000 (about $13,400) at Selfridges before it sold out. If you have £10,000 to spare, perhaps Dior will make you another set.
From Memo Paris, a Waterford carafe holding 740 ml of Irish Leather perfume oil. "The leather case contains the Memo Paris decanter by Crystal Waterford, filled with 25.4 fl. oz. of Irish Leather oil of perfume, and a pack of Irish Leahter [sic] postcards by Bill Phelps, winner of the Grand Prize of Portraits for the World Press." Reportedly $20,000.
From Lalique, a lost wax technique bottle of Deux Cigales, produced in collaboration with Knoll Prestige Packaging. Eight were made, €50,000 each (about $60,000); you can read more about the bottle here.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the perfume companies would think.
These presentations are for BOTTLE collectors.
I am a PERFUME collector.
How about some pre-IFRA juices with lots o’ warning stickers so the legal department won’t have a sh!t fit.
Just a thinking man’s thought…
????
Thanks for the post and the forum, Robin. ✌
My guess is that if you were a perfume collector with big money, you could get your hands on whatever un-IFRAed juices you wanted, so long as the materials in question still existed — which not all of them do!
Celebrating 40 years of Opium with a €2000 bottle containing what is but a pale shadow of the original formulation makes me both sad and angry.
Yeah. On the other hand, I think it’s the nicest bottle of this grouping — or at least, tied with the Lalique.
I was about comment: “€2,000 is the price perfumistas would pay for the old formula, gilding or no!”
I’m lucky enough to have found a number of full netsuke bottles so this one does strike my fancy.
The Eau d’Hadrien bottle is really beautiful. Very interesting box and bottle for Deux Cigales, but I would not sell any body parts for any of them……
The Hadrien surprised me — if they were going to have Venini do a bottle, would have thought they’d have them do a bottle with some visual element that tied to the brand? That just looks like a lovely bottle you could buy from Venini and fill with whatever you want.
I suppose so, but the bottle strikes me as elegant and timeless, just like the frangrance (which I *finally* tested a couple of weeks ago, love, and will probably buy in 2018, budget permitting). In that respect, the pairing makes sense to me. Oh, and in the context of the rest of the page, it is practically free! Perfumelover67, the Deux Cigales and the Hadrien are the ones I would choose from this page. You know, after hocking my third hand and my seventh kidney, if I had them to spare.
Not even hocking my whole life…. ????
I magnified the image looking for the brand and nowhere. An expensive shame!
Their butterfly bottles didn’t have the brand name either, but they were recognizably Goutal, which seems a more sensible branding move? But this one is gorgeous.
The shape of the bottle and the stopper reminds me of the original Kate Spade fragrance.
There are people in the world that live in a totally different plane of existence….LOL! Oil sheiks, Royalty, “old money”, Gates and Bezos money……
The rest of us wonder how that kind of spending could ever be justified!
I am still having trouble justifying the $50 I spent at Lush this week.
Did you get nice things?
Santa’s Christmas & Bubbly shower gels, that’s it!
Ha, I like lush but the was like 2 things, right?
Exactly 2 things!
Hahaha!
Ha! My struggle as well. And I’m happy for it. Even if I could afford a $2000 collectors addition bottle of whatever I could never pull the trigger on spending that much when I’ve got people right outside my building living on the street.
Nope, can’t do it.
Living in what sometimes seems the most expensive city on the planet I wonder how many of these items were sold to my “neighbors.” Different plane of existence indeed.
Doubt I’d find the post-IFRA Hadrien too compelling, but that Venini bottle is lovely. With 2 100-ml refills, one would have to have an entire family of Hadrien enthusiasts.
It’s a lot of Hadrien!
The volumes of some of these is staggering. What would one do with 1.5 litres of anything?
The sizes are clearly aimed at the wow factor.
Some of these also fall into the “Must Have Head Examined” category.
Swarovski crystals, particularly the clear ones” are an industrial product made in huge quantities. While they are beautiful, the technies for embellishing objects with them is available to any hobbyist with a yen for sparkle and a bit of patience. A bottle decorated with them is hardly work thousands.
There are some really great Murano (empty and awaiting your favorite juice) on Amazon starting well below $50.00.
As for the Le Petit Robe Noir, who would even want to hide a baccarat crystal bottle in a little leather wrapping. If I want a designer leather jacket, I’ll get one for myself.
I can always decant my Hadrien into one of those muranos from Amazon and feel myself “luxurious”….
Anything with Swarovski crystals makes me laugh. I was a beader, I know they’re dirt cheap.
Hey cool, I am a beader to.
That Lalique cikada bottle is just beyond beautiful.
If I had even new money (“better nouveau riche than no money at all” as one of Ivana Trump scatter cushions was embroidered with) and the bottle contained something that I really coveted, I’d consider it.
The Lalique is stunning!
Yes. It really is lovely. And I assume it will be a stunning vase when it’s empty.
Love the Hadrien bottle, not at all like any other Goutal bottles, but gorgeous nevertheless. I loved those Goutal moon bottles that they used to do.
Yes, those were lovely!
Well, as long as Memo would throw in the pack of Irish Leahter postcards…:)
LOL — yeah, the postcards make it all worth it.
The bottles are nice but I can never justify spending more than $300 for an Amouage.
Some Roja Doves cost over $2,000 without anyn special embellishments. I would rather save my money for a new laptop I don’t need
Quite so! And my last laptop, which I adore, was cheaper than everything on today’s list.
The Flowerbomb looks like a vajazzle in bottle form. I’m sure it’s sold out already.
Probably!