Putting on perfume is a daily gesture. Scents of flowers, amber, hesperids or heady: the chords are declined at will. If the offer is of an incredible variety, some luxury perfume brands are however distinguished by their know-how. Discover the excellence of high-end perfumery.
Luxury perfumes, the requirement as a priority
Hundreds of fragrances are emerging, but very few stand the test of time. Luxury perfume brands, however, manage to create timeless juices, capturing both the zeitgeist and knowing how to fit into everyone’s life for decades. To fill the senses and get exceptional deals, these brands use premium quality ingredients. It was the exceptional flowers of Grasse, the French capital of perfume, that inspired Annick Goutal for her first creations. The scents of these flowers and their quality still meet the requirements of Bottega Veneta, Dior and Louis Vuitton. With its ancestral know-how, the city has developed a real centre of excellence dedicated to the manufacture of luxury perfumes. The subtle scents of jasmine, Madonna’s lily, tuberose and Rosa centifolia are extracted both by hot and cold enfleurage, hydrodistillation, or thanks to volatile solvents that make it possible to obtain divine absolute essences.
Luxury perfumery: between tradition and modernity
With a long experience in leather craftsmanship, the Italian house has embarked on the manufacture of luxury perfumes with the same concern to gather precious raw materials, the only ones capable of ensuring an unforgettable wake. Similarly, Hermès has been inspired for decades by its rich history to imagine fragrances with luxurious ingredients paying tribute to the equestrian world, while offering compositions with spicy, woody or floral notes. This is the great strength of luxury perfumery: marrying the traditions of excellence with the present. The future, meanwhile, is found in the facilities of these big names in luxury perfumery. Thus, in Muscat, the capital of the Sultanate of Oman, Amouage combines the rarest essences of rose, jasmine and vanilla in a state-of-the-art factory to fill 25,000 bottles per week, with the greatest respect for these ingredients with exquisite fragrances.
Quality components are not the only ingredient that make luxury perfumery so successful. This industry knows how to show incredible creativity to offer original fragrances. Tom Ford, for example, was not afraid to break free of codes to create surprising and unforgettable chords. With its top notes of tobacco and spices, its vanilla heart and tonka bean, and base notes combining the sweetness of dried fruits with the sweetness of tree sap, Tom Ford Tobacco Vanilla is a mixed luxury fragrance. The latter perfectly embodies this avant-garde fringe of luxury perfumery.
We also find this desire to upset habits in Jo Malone. Since its creation, the English house has never ceased to imagine disconcerting fragrances that always prove to be a real olfactory experience. Pairings of green hazelnut, cedar and roasted oak for English Oak & Hazelnut, an alliance of bergamot, cucumber and beeswax for the sparkling Cologne Earl Grey & Cucumber, or a blend of a mesmerizing cumin, a bright juniper and an intense cedar wood for the mixed perfume Black Cedarwood & Juniper: Jo Malone and luxury perfumery as a whole are betting on inventiveness to seduce more and more enthusiasts!
Luxury perfumes and renowned noses: an inseparable duo
It is impossible to evoke luxury perfumery without dwelling on the noses that make up these subtle and refined fragrances. By providing them with the most precious raw materials, luxury perfumery offers them an inexhaustible playground. To create its niche perfumes, the New York brand Bond No. 9 invited Aurélien Guichard, who composed Chinatown, an oriental floral mixing bergamot and patchouli. David Apel, who imagined Downtown Wall Street, a luxury fragrance combining the power of leather and musk with the evanescence of cucumber and citrus, or Michel Almairac, who notably composed New York Beaches Coney Island, a mixed oriental fragrance with a wake combining vanilla and sandalwood, are also among the great noses that collaborated with Bond No. 9. For each of these creations, they were able to use up to 30% pure perfume oil, an exceptional concentration, a guarantee of undeniable quality and an outstanding hold.
French luxury perfume brands are not to be outdone and also attract renowned master perfumers, such as the inevitable Dominique Ropion. It is indeed to this exceptional nose that we owe the inevitable Lalique Le Parfum. For this feminine and sensual fragrance, Dominique Ropion (to whom we also owe Carnal Flower at Frédéric Malle, La Vie est Belle by Lancôme or Dune and Pure Poison at Dior) has composed an unforgettable wake that sees bergamot and pink pepper with top notes draped in the enchanting scents of sandalwood and patchouli. It is also he who can be found at Boucheron for the composition of the luxury floral perfume Miss Boucheron (in duet with Anne Flipo) and the oriental Oud de Carthage, two brilliant fragrances emblematic of luxury perfumery.
It is with the greatest respect for traditions that luxury perfumery has established itself as a must for perfume lovers. Noble, even rare, raw materials, cutting-edge technology and renowned noses elaborate the agreements of the success of this industry that has been able to combine the strength of history with creativity to reinvent luxury perfume and compose ever more surprising and captivating fragrances.