Luxe Calme Volupté by Francesca Bianchi: fragrance review

 

There all is order and beauty,

Luxury, peace, and pleasure.

-Charles Baudelaire, L' invitation au voyage

In the poem, Baudelaire invites his lover to join him in an exotic place where they can live in calmness and peace. Francesca Bianchi described in 2021, when the fragrance launched, how this fits with the times in which we found ourselves and how she felt the need to offer something which could bring comfort to the spirit, an invitation to connect with oneself and temporarily forget about the daily concerns. Now, after the pandemic, this message isn't lost on us. It still delivers a powerful reminder to savour small pleasures, every single day and Fancesca Bianchi envisioned Luxe Calme Volupté as this escape. 

photo borrowed from pinterest

Baudelaire included L'Invitation Au Voyage in his poetic collection Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, inspiring in turn the namesake 1904 painting by Henri Matisse. Bianchi is often inspired by classical chords not only in poetry but in perfumery as well and she has divulged that she was inspired by no less than three classics when art-directing this one: Y perfume by Yves Saint-Laurent, Must de Cartier, and Envy Gucci. A floral chypre, a green-top oriental (the mix of galbanum and amber is very characteristic) and a green floral. Armed with that knowledge my adventure in the lands of Baudelaire and Bianchi promised a wild ride. The fragrance of Luxe Calme Volupté is not wild but lush and rich in depth. And it doesn't really recall green chypres of the past, although there is definitely the natural feel those leave you with (although they're not at all natural). Melifluous, honeyed, sweet and fruity, but with that kind of fruity depth we have marvelled at from fruity chypres of yore, when women wore this rich lactonic effluvium directly on their naked skin, their naked bosom and charmed by-standers and their dates while on a night out in the city. Ylang ylang and peachy-plummy notes evolve and get sweetened with a lacing of sweet resins and balsams, without however becoming heavily orientalised or ambery. 

photo borrowed from pinterest

 Perhaps like another verse by Baudelaire, Bianchi aimed for corrupt, and rich, triumphant, With power to expand into infinity. While retaining her Italian pedigree as well. Luxe Calme Volupté feels like a cadenza extending into eternity, because of its nuance, its depth, its fruity ecstasy, which embraces without overwhelming with that horrid shampoo-like synthetic aura so many fruity fragrances do. The Luxe Calme Volupté fragrance leans more feminine than masculine, though all sexes may want to experiment with it. It feels gorgeous and lovely and this comes from someone who isn't crazy about fruity fragrances on the whole. In the same way the Francesca Bianchi fragrances, even when not overtly sexual, take sensuality as a point of departure to ponder on the value of sensuousness, of analyzing Hedone as a philosophical concept. Indeed the Latin name for this Greek goddess is...Voluptas. So there, the Luxe Calme Volupté name of the scent alone recounts the entire story, faithfully.

Thierry Mugler Angel Muse Eau de Toilette: fragrance review

In 2016, the house of Thierry Mugler opened a new chapter in the story of the famous gourmand galaxy of Angel fragrances - the "futuristic-gourmand" Angel Muse. The Muse Eau de Toilette version of this scent came out at the end of 2017. 

 

The sweetness of hazelnut cream at its heart, a repeat from the original Eau de Parfum version, is not overly foody, and it keeps the dignity that a sophisticated gourmand like the original Angel brings along (or I should say, used to bring along, before all the reformulations), with the Akigalawood™ base (a clear patchouli note) made dirtier with vetiver "borrowed from masculine perfumery." It is signed by perfumer Quentin Bisch of Givaudan.

 The great thing with Angel Muse Eau de Toilette is that it seems to have brought back that inexplicable playfulness that the original Angel version from the 1990s possessed and seemed to have lost during a sequence of reformulations in the intervening years. Becoming ever hollower, like cheekbones sucked in too hard and a fake pout posing for an Instagram selfie, the iconoclastic bestseller has slowly become a ghost of itself. An entire generation will never know what we have been talking about regarding its artistic value.

I remember the original formula quite well because what attracts me now in Angel Muse Eau de Toilette is what appalled me when I first smelled the original Angel in the 1990s (and I have written about my mysterious and troubled relationship with Angel before): the blackcurrant juiciness, which was so intense, so sour -and sweet too-  atop the maltol. To be honest, it instantly reminded me of The Body Shop Dewberry. Is this even possible? I wondered at the time, perplexed by the incongruity of a French designer borrowing this rather "cheap" effect for an innovative fragrance that would be his first on the market. I don't wonder anymore; I take things at face value.

In the words of Mugler officials, "Angel Eau de Parfum is the star, while Angel MUSE orbits around the star." (Christophe de Lataillade, Creative Director for MUGLER fragrances).

 The base of patchouli and vetiver, although advertised to sound masculine, as polar opposites to the femininity of the sweet heart notes, is not entirely rugged. It brings a counterpoint, like in a fugue, a motif that returns to underscore and chase the sweet gourmand and the sour-sweet top notes of citruses, and therefore renders it a love/hate for modern audiences who missed the great clashing compositions of the golden age of perfumery. Back then, vetiver violently clashed with vanilla in Habanita, or waxy-citrusy aldehydes were smeared with civet (but not quite!) in Chanel No.5 Eau de Cologne. Ah, what do we know, these scents have been lost on the younger generation. But there's still hope as long as small gems of unexpected pairings such as Angel Muse continue to get launched. If only they weren't chopped off the block so soon...

 

L'Artisan Parfumeur Mure et Musc: fragrance review

Berries are an especially pliant fruity note in perfumes; no less because a certain group of synthetic musks has a berry undertone. The classic Mûre et Musc by L'Artisan Parfumeur paved the way in as early as 1978. The passionfruit focus of Escada's own Chiffon Sorbet didn't come out of the blue either: Guerlain's Nahéma (1978) brought a saturated fruity mantle to the central rose lending sonorous timbre. 

 

The idea for using this fruit in fragrance was conceived by Jean Laporte, the founder of the small niche brand of the pioneering group of artisan perfumers of the 1970s, L'Artisan Parfumeur. His little wonder of innovation from 1978, Mûre et Musc, still seduces its audience just as much over 40 years later. Discreet and gentle, Mûre et Musc was almost hippy-ish in its innocent naivety. The fresh tanginess of citrus (comprised of lemon, orange, and mandarin with a hint of spicy basil) complements the blackberry, enhancing the sweetish trail with a musky base note that lingers for a very long time on skin and on clothes.

Flanked with raspberry ketone, blackcurrant bud, and Galaxolide (a clean smelling musk), this structure would be simple, direct, innocent, sweetish, and tart in equal degrees, and captivating to those harboring the same memories in their heart of hearts! He succeeded with Mure et Musc, a huge cult phenomenon which gave rise to a constellation of berry musks that took the market by storm and formed the springboard for many young girls to jump into the realm of fine fragrance.

But why did it become so special in people's minds that even drugstores came to order their own blackberry-musk mix for their not-especially sophisticated clientele? "Its cottony-fruity notes that melt flawlessly to the skin. It's a close-to-the-skin perfume, which brings people in," to quote Jean-Claude Ellena who oversaw the commemorative editions that reprised the theme decades later for the, now owned by a conglomerate, L'Artisan Parfumeur. The original's cute innocence and come-hither subtlety still beguile the young at heart.