Les Nez is a new(ish) perfume house. It comprises two noses, both female - Isabelle Doyen and Sandrine Videault. I like their playful, crazy fragrance names, but they attach textbook examples of wanky, pretentious copy to their packaging, so awful that I almost couldn't bring myself to smell them. Let's compare their descriptions to mine.
The Unicorn Spell
If by dawn still linger on your skin mixed scents of leaves, frost and violet blooms, and that relentless yearning for stellar sights, you will know that, at night, you felt the milky breath of a unicorn.
Smells of ancient ideals of honor and fundamental goodness. The "Joan of Arc" of perfumes.
Parma violets.
Let me Play the Lion
Scents of dusty trails,
Of lightly sweetened ochre,
Of sun-weathered wood,
Of silence swept
by mild breezes,
Of skies open like an endless
azure cut oozing signs
of the coming storm.
Like watching incense smoke curl lazily through a sunbeam as it wafts, disappears, and returns.
Lemon and aniseed to start with; very sweet. Quickly fades to absinthe, but SO bitter. So bitter that I made the Orange Face (i.e. the face I made, the other day, when I tried to eat a whole orange, peel and all, because I heard it was a good cold remedy. I hadn't really predicted how bitter it was going to be. So bitter I nearly threw up). Dries down much better though - spicy and cold, certainly dusty as it claims. Pretty good all in all.
L'Antimatière
An invisible ink that leaves a trace,
Foreseen rather than felt,
Persistent
Yet whispered,
Like a creased bed linen scent
wandering along your curves...
Performs a series of understated scent tricks and olfactory maneuvers that bypass security and sneak in through the back entrance...
Oh god, I really want to hate this. Fact is, when first sprayed, you can't smell it at all. I was hoping to be able to write something about the bloody Emperor and his bloody new clothes. You are selling people water, for god's sake, and writing stupid poetry about invisible ink! But coming back to it after a few minutes and... I like it. I do. It doesn't smell like a thing. It smells like things all around us; it smells like people. The Scented Salamander puts it very well:
It smells like the inside of a leather bag, a familiar coat, a favorite scarf, half-abandoned well-used gloves, a presence and the sum of one's experience of life. It smells as if for years and years this perfume had scented familiar objects around you. It could perhaps even be the smell of your house...
This is precisely correct and I have to admit that it's a very clever scent. I'm not sure I'd buy it as I think it's too subtle for me, but it's definitely the most interesting of the three. Oh, and can I please add: 'back entrance'. Huh huh. Huh-huhh huh.
