Cocooning Scents - Interview with Sylvaine Delacourte

Dear Madame Delacourte, for years you were as much part of the Guerlain family as Thierry Wasser is, and now Guerlain is just one of your two main passions, for launching your own fragrance line recently has become just as important. What made you take this step?

I belong to a family of entrepreneurs, I think they have always encouraged and stimulated me. It's been a while since I had the plan to launch my own brand and I decided to take the plunge with a young entrepreneur who gave me the wings to create my own line with a lot of freedom!

Our goal is to bring something different to people who are ever more looking for exclusive perfumes but also authenticity and knowledge on products the buy. Hence the discovery experience we have created on the website.

When you chose the main theme of you fragrance line, you decided on MUSCS. These are synonyme to soft, comfortable, cocooning scents. Why did you choose this direction?

I wanted to distinguish myself from the other brands and I made the choice to work on a single raw material to create a full collection of 5 perfumes.

A lot of people were waiting for me to work on a guerlinade "seal" or "gourmand perfumes" but I wanted a new challenge, that's why I decided to work on white muscs!

First you can't find that many musky perfumes in niche brands, and when you take a closer look at them, they are always built in the same way.

Second it is very difficult to work on muscs, at first they are not really tenacious and it is a challenge to reinvent them in each fragrance.

So here in my collection, you have 5 interpretations of the muscs. For example Smeraldo is enhanced with a green facet when it is more a spicy facet in Helicriss. My goal was also to give them a lot of projection, to be memorable, and of course confortable as I like to call them "olfactive pashminas".

Your fragrance line consists of 5 perfumes in the Eau de parfum concentration: Smeraldo, Dovana, Helicriss, Lilylang and Florentina.

While they are all beautiful and have a magical quality, will you keep launching muscs only, or are you planning on going in different directions too, like for instance oudy, chypre, floriental?

Yes I am already thinking of my next collection with another ingredient: maybe wood, vanilla or citrus. I am working on it!

As of now, your perfumes can only be purchased from your website sylvaine-delacourte.com, and you deliver them all over the world. Will they become available more widely in the near future, in shops or other places?

We have created a discovery experience on the website so you can order the 5 samples from the Collection for 4€ delivered to your home and then discover in a video the raw materials origins and my inspirations for each perfume and share with me your feeling on each creation.

You can buy the full bottle on the same website and to answer your question we are under discussions with potential partners which will be able to talk about the perfumes as much as I can do it myself so you might be seeing the Collection in a few exclusive shops in 2017.

As it is always risky to purchase a fragrance without having smelled it first, you offer a sample kit of all 5 scents which also can be ordered from your website. Is it the only way one is able to get to test the fragrances, and do you intend to enlarge that range by adding body products, candles or maybe even cosmetics?

We are a very young start up and we are going to build and reinforce the brand step by step! For now we are focused on creating great perfumes and take people to an olfactory journey into the heart of each fragrance.

The fragrances you made for Guerlain are unmistakably "you", they are gourmandy, dreamlike and beautiful. Will you still partake in creating more for Guerlain (or maybe even other houses) still?

I will not be part of Guerlain next creations, I will be in charge of bespoken fragrances for this beautiful Maison and also in charge of creating some special training. I am also here to stay as an ambassador of the brand worldwide!

Thank you for your time and I am sure the parfumo.de readers in German speaking countries and the parfumo.com followers worldwide can't wait to hear, read, see and smell more from you, chere Madame!

The interview was conducted Chanelle, many thanks!