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Les Parfums de Rosine Ballerina No. 5 ~ fragrance review

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How quickly they grow up! It seems like yesterday I was trying out Les Parfums de Rosine’s “tender and innocent” Ballerina No. 1 and now we’re already up to the “shimmering and rich” Ballerina No. 5. Like other Ballerinas in this series, No. 5 was inspired by a specific ballet — in this case, La Bayadère, which made its debut in 1877 with music by Leonard Minkus and choreography by Marius Petipa. La Bayadère is an opulent but tragic tale of a romance between a beautiful bayadère (temple dancer) and a warrior.

La Bayadère‘s passion-fueled plot and its Indian location help to set the scene for this rose-centered perfume…

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Masque Milano Love Kills ~ fragrance review

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Masque Milano Love Kills is a punk rock name for an operatic fragrance. In this case, the music has to do with roses.

Perfumer Caroline Dumur developed Love Kills. Its notes include Turkish rose, geranium, ambrette, patchouli, cedarwood, musk and ambergris. (I’m not going to quote the fragrance’s description in Masque Milano’s press materials, because, frankly, I don’t understand it. It tosses around literary and musical references with vague observations about “a rose by any other name” and how fleeting life is…)

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Viktor & Rolf Magic Dancing Roses & Magic Salty Flower ~ fragrance reviews

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Has the “luxury collection” trend died down yet? I started tuning it out a long time ago, certainly before Robin posted about the Viktor & Rolf Magic Collection three years ago. The original six fragrances in that line — “a collection of six transformative illusions in the spirit of an enchanting universe from fragrance magicians Viktor & Rolf” — arrived in stores in early 2017 and I never bothered to try them.

Since then, the collection has shuffled and expanded a bit. (The price also seems to have dropped substantially.) I received a sample of Salty Flower with a Sephora purchase and spotted a positive comment about Dancing Roses in a friend’s Instagram feed, so I tried that one too. Guess what? They aren’t ground-breaking or life-changing, but I liked both of them. And with the price drop, they suddenly made a lot more sense to me…

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Regime des Fleurs Chloe Sevigny Little Flower ~ fragrance review

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A collaboration with film and fashion icon Chloë Sevigny, Little Flower is Régime des Fleurs’ provocative take on Sevigny’s favorite bloom — the rose. . . . Thérèse of Lisieux, a late 19th century French nun who died at the age of 24, was referred to as ‘The Little Flower’ and became the Catholic patron saint of flowers.

Well, if you were trying to come up with a fragrance that would sound irresistible to me, you couldn’t do much better than that. I’m a life-long lover of rose perfumes and a former Catholic schoolgirl still deeply influenced by my religion’s iconography. I’ve also been following Chloë Sevigny’s work (and style) ever since her 1994 profile in The New Yorker, so I already know that she’s a serious perfume fan who used to wear Comme des Garçons Rose…

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Hermetica Multilotus, Rosefire, Patchoulight, Sandalsun & Greenlion ~ short fragrance reviews

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Hermetica is a new niche fragrance line that launched in 2018; it offers “a collection of molecular fragrances inspired by the ancient practice of alchemy” and was founded by John and Clara Molloy (the duo behind Memo and Floraïku), who decided to “create a revolutionary collection by not choosing between natural ingredients or synthetic molecules but using a combination of the two.” Additionally, Hermetica seems to be claiming the fragrances’ alcohol-free base as another innovation.

I’m no chemist, but I’m raising my eyebrows for a few reasons…

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