Roger & Gallet has launched Mandarine, a new limited edition fragrance for summer 2018…
A little bit of Provence
Perfumer Mathieu Nardin talks about his work for Bastide.
Molinard Les Amoureux de Peynet ~ fragrance review
French perfume house Molinard recently launched Les Amoureux de Peynet, a fragrance inspired by French illustrator Raymond Peynet. That name didn’t mean anything to me at first, but once I did a quick search, I realized I’d seen those “lovers” before. Peynet first sketched the duo of the wispy-haired, bowler-hatted violinist-poet and his perky lady-love in 1942, but they appeared in his artwork and on countless trinkets throughout the 1950s and 1960s. (Just check eBay, and you’ll see what I mean.) The lovers often appeared together on a park bench — that is, when they weren’t canoodling in a gazebo, a rowboat, or some similarly whimsical venue…
Annick Goutal Nuit et Confidences ~ fragrance review & a quick vanilla poll
tl;dr a decent middle of the road vanilla.
If you wanted a good illustration of the muddy distinction between niche and mainstream perfumery, you could hardly find a better example than Annick Goutal. The house mostly made its name with classic colognes like Eau d’Hadrien and Eau du Sud, and a handful of pretty feminine florals. When I reviewed Eau de Camille and Eau de Charlotte back in 2007, I noted that…
The Annick Goutal line occupies a rather in-between place among perfume fans — the company probably qualifies as niche based on their size and their limited distribution; still, they are available in a number of mainstream stores (three department stores in my local mall carry them),1 and the line doesn’t feel niche. The feminine perfumes are emphatically pretty, romantic even; they don’t, like so many niche perfumes, challenge traditional notions of what a woman ought to smell like.
What I perhaps didn’t emphasize enough was how few mainstream brands were making nicely done yet emphatically pretty fragrances at the time…
Annick Goutal Tenue de Soiree ~ perfume review
Go ahead, perfumistas, think of all the perfumes you know with a pompom attached to the bottle. I am sure there are more — do comment! — but I could only think of four off the top of my head. Three of those are from Ariana Grande (Ari / Frankie / Sweet Like Candy) and the fourth is Annick Goutal’s latest launch, Tenue de Soirée. If Ariana Grande and Annick Goutal strike you as unexpected bedfellows, think again, because the times they are a-changing at Annick Goutal. The new buzz words are “fun, quirky and young”, and they’re looking to shake up everything from the packaging to the logo to the brand name itself. Tenue de Soirée (evening dress or evening wear) is the “bridge” between the old Annick Goutal and the new, brand-name-yet-to-be-announced. Expect to see the full results of the rebranding by 2018, and for Goutal’s existing line up to be pared down to about 20 or 25 fragrances…