MinoTaurus

So in the mid-90s, LVMH was now wearing the pants at Guerlain, and in addition to the cash injection for the revival of great fragrance classics, there were still strict instructions from the new masters: Guerlain was to become younger, more pleasing, more suitable for the masses and more colorful. With a - for Guerlain - new olfactory concept, LVMH wanted to attract completely different customers.

The instruction to Guerlain was this: Make us a fragrance that breaks with the stylistic gimmicks of the classics. LVMH didn't want any more guerlinade in this new fragrance!
( For those who don't know, the guerlinade was embedded in all the fragrances except the eaux, including the men's. A round composition of vanilla, bergamot, jasmine, rose and iris. The Guerlinade was the signature of all Guerlain fragrances ).
The name "Paris" was taken, but "Champs Elysées" knows the world.

Guerlain complied and created Champs Elysees without Guerlinade: An opulent, floral fragrance with a light lilac note - and the fragrance was a flop! To the old customers it didn't smell like "Guerlain", and to the young new customers it also didn't smell like "Guerlain" in the way they might have known it from their parents and grandparents.

In the end, sales figures argued for listening to Jean-Paul Guerlain's objections again after all, and LVMH let him reformulate the fragrance. The Guerlinade was added, and since then Champs Elysées is a permanent fixture in the Guerlain fragrance world with many loyal fans.

The fresh, floral opening gains a comforting warmth after a while, depending on your skin type, a slightly biting almond note can pierce through, and at the end you are left with the soft, slightly cool vanilla-sandalwood note. A typical "Guerlain".

By the way, for a few years now, LVMH has been tampering with the Guerlinade again: it is now told at training courses and events that the Guerlinade is always included as soon as one of the five fragrance essences is part of a perfume: if vanilla is in the fragrance, one speaks of Guerlinade. Is there a dash of iris? Well, then it is also the Guerlinade.......and the advertising department can be sure that there will be fewer and fewer people who can remember that the Guerlinade had always consisted of five essences, and had been part of every Guerlain fragrance as an independent fragrance composition.

Yet another absolutely superfluous fragrance water from the house P + G for the brand Boss.....

What do I smell? Fresh apple, tart currants, then comes vanilla, cinnamon, raisins and cake dough.....ready is the apple strudel.
In addition to the already purely synthetic fragrances, which may nevertheless still be called "apple" and "vanilla" and "cedar wood", there is then as an extra bonus a laboratory fragrance mixture molecule with the sonorous name "Goldenwood".
How can one still pay so much money for such chemical clubs?

But if you are looking for an alternative to La Vie es belle, because Man(n) or Woman or Divers desire for "something new" has, then Alive is exactly the right medicine.

Do you know the story of Samsara? I mean the one that Guerlain told before LVMH made a second Dior out of it?
It goes something like this:

Jean-Paul Guerlain struck up a conversation on the streets of Paris, completely incognito, with a lady who was conspicuously not wearing perfume.
She would love to wear perfume.....but her favorite scent, sandalwood, was reserved for men, and she didn't want to wear a man's scent.

Guerlain now did the following: He created Samsara. The world's first feminine sandalwood fragrance.
The wood he refined with his guerlinade and precious raw materials, eg the often and popular jasmine.
And if they have not died, they are still living happily ever after together...

Of course, Samsara is a child of its time: an opulent fragrance of the 80s. He is in no way inferior to LouLou or Poison.

It's a wonderful fragrance, and I confess to enjoying wearing it myself from time to time.Whenever I find old bottles, I can't resist.....

The reformulation is fresher, lighter and flatter. As an eau de toilette, it is now a diluted disaster. As an eau de parfum, a semi-acceptable substitute for the bad days when my old bottles will be used up.

Caron pour un Homme is one of my signature fragrances, in all three variants Eau de Toilette, Parfum and SPORT.
A fresh lavender note literally melds with exotic, warm vanilla, and in this combination, it is the only perfume that turns rather classic women's fragrance notes into a seductive masculine men's scent.

Absolutely new at the time, by the way, was the use of a chemically obtained extract of the tonka bean, which has only in recent years again increasingly used.

Imperial has everything a special niche fragrance needs to have: Depth, exclusivity, longevity, and it's rare enough that you won't encounter three others with it in the same room.

Lavender meets fresh-tart rosewood, in the heart follows soft jasmine and an overdose of labdanum and then in the base the full force guaiac and oud. The madness!

Imperial is one of the few fragrances, on which I was once again positively addressed.

Due to the comlexity of the formulation Imperial belongs only on the skin tested, and it applies: less is more.