Posted by Angela
on
13 August 2012
A spray of Guerlain Coriolan, and right away I smell the high desert on a summer’s evening, the time when the ground still holds the hot scent of the earth while the wind is cool and fresh. The earth smells of hot rock, pinyon pine, immortelle, dry wood, and the piney sage that grows gnarled on the ground. The breeze delivers the bite of mint, citrus and fennel. Somehow the cool air and hot landscape meld into a singular fragrance. Coriolan reminds me of eastern Montana in August.
Jean-Paul Guerlain created Coriolan, and it was released in 1998. It’s a woody chypre with notes including lemon tree leaves, bergamot, juniper, absinthe, coriander, nutmeg, oakmoss, patchouli and everlasting flower. I also smell dry wood, amber, musk, and what I swear is mint.
Coriolan bombed. Despite its gorgeous bottle, caged in pink-gold metal with a flip-top lid, sales were weak enough for Guerlain to pull Coriolan before too long…
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Posted by Angela
on
6 February 2012
The archetypal image of Valentine’s Day is a heart-shaped box of chocolates. Done right, the box is wrapped in lightly padded vermillion satin, and the chocolates are rich and silky smooth — no grainy cherry filling here. Of course, next to the box is a lush bouquet of fragrant flowers. It’s romantic, timeless, and sure to melt the coldest heart. To me, its perfume equivalent could only be Guerlain Attrape-Cœur.
In 1999, Guerlain released Guet-Apens Eau de Parfum as a limited edition and named Mathilde Laurent as its nose. The fragrance was reissued in 2005 as Attrape-Cœur, this time credited to Jean-Paul Guerlain. (I’ve also seen Maurice Roucel’s name tossed in as a contributor to Attrape-Cœur.) In 2007, Guerlain released an Eau de Toilette formulation in duty free shops and named it, oddly, Vol de Nuit Evasion. (To make it even stranger, Vol de Nuit Evasion was packaged in a L’Heure Bleue/Mitsouko bottle, but labeled with the classic Vol de Nuit parfum logo.)
In French, guet-apens means “ambush.” I think Attrape-Cœur (“heart catcher”) is a more fitting name for the fragrance…
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Posted by Kevin
on
28 September 2011
I remember reading an interview with Meryl Streep ages ago where she said she never ran for a bus, because there would always be another one coming along pretty soon. (I agree with the spirit of that statement but there must be exceptions: I’d swallow my pride and run for a midnight bus if that were the last bus till morning.) I try to have the same attitude about discontinued or hard-to-find perfumes too: I’ll never run after one (crying at its departure, and pitying myself for not stocking up — how embarrassing!) Not too many years ago I would have added…“because another perfume will arrive to take its place.” These days, due to the restrictions on so many perfume ingredients in Europe, perfumes won’t be arriving that can take the place of old standards of perfumery. Most new perfumes can’t conjure the past convincingly, which leads me to the topic of reissues of venerable fragrances.
Guerlain Derby was created by perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain and released in 1985. Sometime in the 90s, I bought Derby, unsniffed, and was not a fan (I gave it to my mother, who enjoyed it); recently I decided to obtain some vintage Derby and compare it to the current reissue in Guerlain’s Les Parisiennes collection. I hoped I wouldn’t love Derby, old or new, because the old sells for an average of $500 for a 100 ml bottle and the new is hard to come by…
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