September impressions

"Già l'odore della terra odor di grano
sale adagio verso me
e la vita nel mio petto batte piano"

"The smell of earth smell of wheat already
rises slowly towards me
and the life in my chest beats quitely"

While coming back from Florence, this song echoes in my head thinking back to my first experience at Pitti Fragranze. This experience has grown up my never died passion for the universe of smells. Bringing back home a load of energy to share thoughts and sensations about things that makes you thrill inside now gives me the strength to restart writing this travel journal of my discovery in the world of perfumes

This edition of Fragranze has been characterized by a stong wish to start new creative paths; you can feel it from many signs. For example Dyptique with its new Eau Duelle explores a composition a little bit more structured than many of its fragrances with a bucolic inspiration. The creation concocted by Fabrice Pellegrin (Firmenich) starts with green sparkling notes of juniper, pink berries and cypress. Then it goes through the contrast between light and shade of vanilla burbon and somalian olibanum. The base keeps up the whole with vetiver from Haiti and papyrus wood. The effect is a dewy green juice that warms up later in a smooth ambery vanilla with smoky facets of incense. On my skin fortunately this is balanced by the bitter greeness of calamus cutting through the middle, almost like an ivy vibe preventing the smell to become cloying and coupling it with the base slightly woody and musky (cypriol?) that diffuses with a smooth, light, aura.


After having expressed all the passion for incense notes in her first four fragrances, also Maria Candida Gentile starts a new creative dialog with two bucolic and joyful eau de parfums. The first one, Hanbury is a lively and feminine floral juice playing with notes of acacia and calicantus inspired by a early spring walk in the homonymous ligurian gardens. The second one, Barry Lyndon is a well balanced symphony of very green aromatic notes with hints of leather and resins inspired by the main characted of Kubrik's masterpiece, a tribute to hope and freedom of the hero gallopping towards the future.

Having great expectations about the three new Les Nombres d'Or by Mona di Orio (Cuir, Musc, Ambre) and having sniffed them quickly the first day, I was a little bit puzzled about them. I was expecting a provocative approach to this classic perfumery themes like in Nuit Noire. That's why the day after I was longing to take my time to better understand them, so I asked to Mona to explain me the inspiration that led her throung the creation of this golden section. Extreme elegance, deliberate smoothness and the absolute quality of raw materials are the criteria chosen by Mona to concoct her three compositions. It's a nonsense to recreate exactly the great classics from the past, for example a leather like Cuir de Russie by Ernest Beaux as it was originally: time has changes, the way of wearing fragrances has changed and even if we can't use anymore some components, the many new raw materials offer us a different writing style, more contemporary.
The advice we can learn is a lesson of style and balance: it's possible to obtain the same character, the same extreme elegance in a modern way. Thinking about this, now I finally got the charm of these creations even if I often like more daring leathery and animalic notes. I liked above all three the amber with its slightly smoky warmth and its enveloping though diffusive richness.

Finally Pierre Guillaume has introduced his new line of eight fragrances named Huitième Art Parfums, a parallel way running with Parfumerie Genérale so to be free to experiment new styles of composition. The concept begins from a sentence of Octavian Coifan "Le parfum est le huitième art" to which Pierre gives the respons concocting eight olfactive pictures, eight snapshots of intense sensations as much real as possible. The fragrances exploit new chemical processes and new compositive techniques that surely prove Pierre's creative ability into the lab.
Nevertheless there's the risk that many brilliant ideas all together don't have the working out they deserve as themes. The result is that some of them even if amazing, give the impression of being perfect exercises of style lacking part of the emotional maturity of a worth development.