I saw Aerin Lauder in person once, just for a few fleeting seconds. She was sitting in a lunch meeting at an uptown eatery in Manhattan. She looked just as she often looks in photographs: very pretty, very polished, reserved and just a touch skeptical. I kept thinking of that sighting when I was trying out Rose de Grasse, a new floral fragrance for women recently launched by Lauder’s namesake Aerin brand.

Rose de Grasse is described as a “captivating scent — pristine, sophisticated, unexpected and iconic,” and an homage to several varieties of roses. It combines notes of centifolia rose, Bulgarian rose and “rose absolute” (no specific rose named here) with ambrette seed, a “watery accord,” violet wood, ambrox and musk. My main impression is that Rose de Grasse is made with good-quality ingredients, even if leans more towards the “pristine and sophisticated” rather than the “unexpected and iconic…”

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