Barry Lyndon by Maria Candida Gentile Maître Parfumeur

These fall mornings with the colder air, trees showing colours from gold to burnt and  the still warm sunlight after rainy days make me craving for some contact with the nature before it hibernates. In these days I desire to feel it on my skin with greener aromas, to dive "into the sylvan spirit, living life like a tree". I spray, close my eyes, inhale and it makes me think of a misty morning with the hollow trampling of hooves on the drenched grass and the sparkling air coming up the nostrils bringing the moorland smells. Maybe also Maria Candida Gentile could have imagined all of this while concocting Barry Lyndon, her last creation launched at Pitti Fragranze 2010. 

While describing the idea for this perfume born in a morning on the meadows in Aosta Valley, her face still shines thinking at Kubrik's movie based on W. M. Thackeray's novel of the same title. In detail the inspiration comes from a cross-reference with the scene in which Barry Lyndon after a duel runs adventurously away through the irish moorland with just twenty guineas in his pocket. For the movie Kubrik didn't want artificial lights to be used in order to have a particular light design, natural, almost similar to the one in Hayez paintings. As well getting excited by the nature and the likenesses it recalls us and always looking forward to it it's a constant of the creative path of this perfume's Lady and her narrative strength that here becomes a poem on the pages of an ancient leather-bound herbal, with dried herbs pressed between the yellowed by the age porous sheets.

My pic of a trip to Normandy

The fragrance is the most decidedly manly of Maria Candida Gentile's line and it seems to fit like a glove for a noncomformistic man that likes to dress with the confortable elegance of a cashmere sweater or for a self confident woman wearing a neatly cut tweed jacket. Common ground will be the love for nature and trying to stay in contact with it escaping from cement as much as possible.

As soon as the juice warms on skin, you can perceive the original opening with a stinging blow of herbs almost medicinal with heather, anise and bitter of thyme and a hint of citrus, maybe bergamot and winter lemon greener and drier just like the moorland in a misty morning. Later the fragrance opens up and the artemisia appears announcing sunrise's first rays than make arnica bloom with its golden petals conjuring up the warmth of a sunsoaked meadow. All is kept on the greener side by a very dry lavender coupled with artemisia chasing each other. Finally a good amount of tonka bean with vanilla hints in the base show the heritage of the Age of Enlightenment with the yellowed porous pages of the herbal preserving the powdery tone of the elegant salons crowded of alabastrine ladies and the blonde tobacco aroma of the smoking rooms with leather and hay facest echoing Barry's saddle and the horse. Don't even think to hardcore tobacco and leather because here everything is subtle, delicate yet longlasting and keeps traces of that sunny grass staying for hours like a pleasant bucolic aura that took me back to summertime spent in the countryside, with the familiar smells while rolling in the hay or running through the fields and made me live again that liveliness without melancholy, on the contrary putting me in a good mood.