Thierry Mugler’s Angel, like Yves Saint Laurent Opium or Guerlain Shalimar, is one of those perfumes that is so iconic, and so widely written about, that it’s hard to think of anything new to say on the subject. But as was the case with Shalimar, I want to review a flanker, and it just seems wrong to talk about the flanker when you haven’t talked about the original fragrance. So: some brief thoughts, a few quotes, but nothing like a real review.

Angel launched in 1992. It was the first fragrance from Mugler, who at one time was one of the bigger names in French fashion but whose house had by that time already started to decline; arguably he is better known today for the perfumes.¹ Vera Strubi, president of Thierry Mugler Perfumes, noted that:

Angel is not the product of a marketing recipe. Angel surprises and intrigues people at the same time. It is so different that some find it shocking, but others become addicted to it.²

I, for one, found it shocking. Angel was, and is, a bestseller, so I surely must have smelled it at some point over the course of the 1990s, but I was not especially interested in perfume at the time and have no memory of it — the perfume I remember smelling everywhere in the mid-1990s was Calvin Klein’s CK One…

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