When I chose Sylvaine Delacourte Florentina to review, I didn’t know Kevin had already served it papers in his review of the line’s Helicriss, where he called Florentina “the most insufferable of the bunch” of the house’s releases. I understand that. If you don’t like powder and musk, you might well loathe Florentina.
Me? I’m a fan. I love a silky soft, swan’s-down puff of a perfume, and Florentina is all about that. To me, its musk is more about texture and body than about cleaning products…
Since he joined Guerlain as in-house perfumer in 2008, I’ve blamed Thierry Wasser for all the new Guerlains that are awash in white musk. I even thought he might not be able to control himself and add some white musk to Mitsouko or Eau de Cologne Impériale or L’Heure Bleue. I imagined him in charge of the installation of an Olympic-size swimming pool under Guerlain headquarters that, upon completion, was filled with white musk. (Guerlain is doing well financially, so white musk works for them and lots of perfume consumers…if not for me.)
I may have been putting too much blame on Wasser’s shoulders because his cohort, Sylvaine Delacourte, until recently the Director of Fragrance Evaluation and Development at Guerlain, just launched her own perfume line with a collection of fragrances centered around — white musk. Now I imagine Thierry and Sylvaine cavorting in the Guerlain musc blanc pool, planning their next nose-ache in a bottle…
Sylvaine Delacourte, long the Director of Fragrance Evaluation and Development at Guerlain,* has launched her own eponymous brand with The Musk Collection, a series of five fragrances (Dovana, Florentina, Helicriss, Lilylang and Smeraldo) based on white musk…