For a while, it seemed like the best compliment you could give a rose perfume was that it’s for people who don’t like rose. “This isn’t your grandmother’s rose perfume,” they promised. But as it turns out, grandma was onto something.
— Read more in Reinventing the Rose: The Scents Seducing a New Generation at InStyle.
If you were to travel back in time twenty years or so and see what I was doing on a random weekday afternoon, you might find me browsing at Parfumerie Douglas in West Philadelphia. I might have been buying a nail file or a sparkly hair clip, and I was certainly sniffing my way through the perfume section, especially a shelf holding Sui Dreams, Sui Love and, best of all, Anna Sui’s eponymous debut fragrance from 1999. That powdery rose scent in its black-and-purple, rose-embellished bottle is still a favorite of mine.
Anna Sui recently celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of her brand’s foray into fine fragrance by launching a quintet of new scents: the Wild Wonder collection. All five were developed by perfumer Jérôme Épinette, who has worked on Sui’s fragrances since 2017’s Fantasia, and the face of the collection is Scarlett White, the daughter of model and singer-songwriter Karen Elson. Elson herself is a longtime Sui “muse,” and there’s a feeling of generational continuity with the packaging for Wild Wonder, as well: the gilt rosebud cap is shaped just like the black rosebud cap of the original Anna Sui perfume (now known as Anna Sui Classic)…
Happy Friday! It’s also Rose Day, plus we have a few birthdays: Charles Dickens, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sinclair Lewis, Eubie Blake. Our community project for today is a spin on rose. Wear your favorite fragrance that has a rose note but doesn’t smell primarily of rose, or wear a rose fragrance layered with something that tones down the rose.
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
I’m in vintage Guerlain Jicky…
And here is the narrative difficulty with Ms. Sevigny’s promotion of a rose fragrance: The scent is often associated with grandmothers.
“We like to use the word ‘fresh,’” said Ms. Sevigny, who wore rose fragrances by Comme des Garçons and Hermes for years before developing her own with her friend Alia Raza, the Régime des Fleurs founder, in 2019.
— Actress Chloë Sevigny on her fragrance, Régime des Fleurs Little Flower. Read more in Chloë Sevigny Finds Middle Age ‘Tricky’ but Loves a Scent Associated With Grandmothers at The New York Times.
It might just be my imagination, and a feeling of tentative hope that my city has come through the worst of the pandemic, but the roses in my neighbors’ front yards and the local parks seem lusher than ever this year. I’ve also been wearing some new-ish and new-to-me rose fragrances to mark the May/June transition, so here are my thoughts on five of them.
Back in the early spring, I finally got myself over to the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship to sniff my way though Dries van Noten’s year-old fragrance collection. I admired a few of them, but my personal favorite of the group was Raving Rose…