Valrahmeh

It all began with a sailing trip on the Cote d'Azur. The small locker in my cabin was smelling of various predecessors, and I couldn't sleep at night, because I had a lot of pains in my mind's eye rolling on my mattress. In my desperation I trotted into a perfumery in Antibes and cried myself out. "Take Baies from Diptyque, you will like it and you will sleep wonderfully" recommended the saleswoman and gave me a candle for 45 euros. I didn't care, my sleep was worth it.

In the evening I lit the fancy white candle in the glass and within a short time a wonderful scent of roses, currants and warm wax wafted through the lower deck. My cabin had become a princess's chamber within minutes. My men on board also thought that it smelled wonderful, until my younger brother noticed that a candle was burning in the cabin and had a seizure, which I will not go into here... after all, I didn't burn down the fancy boat with its shiny old wooden planks.

So the next day I went back to the perfumery and asked if this fragrance would be available without an open flame. Yes of course! The salesgirl said with a refined look at my blonde hair that Cathérine Deneuve also wore it. So I bought the eau de parfum without thinking twice. It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship.

The mixture of tomato stem, rose, currant leaves and green herbs is incomparable. A monolith among the fragrances. Unique and completely detached. Like a scent meteorite that has plunged from space into water. Many perfumes develop from predecessors, take over a certain style or direction. L'ombre dans l'eau is completely unaffected. There was nothing comparable before and nothing like it after that.

Probably Desmond Knox Leet couldn't sleep either, so he wandered around the garden and wrote down a formula in moonlight that a pond nixie had dictated to him. The next morning he mixed it all together in disbelief and called it "Shadows on the water".
It's not really of this world.
Probably the mermaid was never allowed to come to the surface again as punishment, because she had betrayed the most beautiful secret of the Aquarius' castle and his daughters

A terribly beautiful masterpiece. The light-dark billowing Caravaggio under the fragrances, simply magnificent. Baroque, but with class. Not fat and lavishly overloaded, but majestic and austere - just as one danced pavane at the court of Versailles.
They had fun, but always in style, they murdered, but behind the thick silk curtain. Eventually, however, the thick, already stagnant blood began to gush from underneath.
Wipe it away, says the King. And may it be hushed up, do you understand me? C'est une ordonnance
Mon Dieu, it's the little marquise who has been gossiping too much, quick, where is my rose scent...my heavy, deafening rose scent, otherwise I can't stand it...

I resisted it for a long time, I'm not at all the type for heavy wood patchouli rose fragrances, at some point it just hit me, I needed something against the daily banality of being. I rarely use it, but it's good that I have it. "Take it, it will help you", said the lady at my favourite perfumery. The only time I smelled it on someone was in Milan, in Via della Spiga. I think it was a man. Turkish rose, wood and patchouli. It was probably Prince Tancredi

Eglantine is a beautiful word - but what is a rose hip supposed to smell like? Let's assume that Eglantine just sounds better for a perfume - what we really mean is dog rose.
And it is very much in evidence here. A fresh, light scent of roses, as it often floats in the air on a sunny afternoon in June, accompanied by the humming of bees and a tart, delicately woody sweetness - that is the prelude to this Hermessence.
Fortunately, no clumsy myrrh comes steaming around the corner and throws itself on it, which I feared at first when I gave the name. Even myrrh is only delicately hinted at, just enough to give the fleeting hedge rose scent a little more depth and a little more lead status. Nothing more. Both harmonize wonderfully, and when you wear them you have the impression of witnessing a subtle game of catching : The hedge rose scent is a blond, barefoot wildcat, who always runs away with his fluttering dress, turning around laughing - and from behind the myrrh comes running a little slower and says: "I'll get you, just you wait and see!
A fragrance like a light-footed Fragonard painting.
Myrrh Eglantine at first seems like a water composed by a light hand, but it is a small, summery masterpiece

With Insolence it's like with Obelix: You press the spray button very carefully, krawummm, and in the next few hours you'll have to say bashfully "Sorry, I fell in there as a child". And somehow it fits to the magic potion, because Insolence is a fragrance that gets along completely without the person that goes with it. It's happened several times: I get into an office elevator in a high-rise building in the Parisian banking district, krawumm, there's a cloud of Insolence in it. All alone. Or I march along a platform, halfway down the platform I encounter insolence, completely detached. Where the fuck is the lady with it? Disappeared into thin air? I see Insolence as a cloud at least once a day in Paris, in Cannes, recently even in Tel Aviv. Never in Germany. This crazy mixture of violets, hairspray and raspberry pudding is rather nothing for a country that is dedicated to the hard nose bat and the huchen beetle. Insolence is a perfume for self-confident women who don't care what you think of them. Of course I have it too, but I never wear it in Germany. I'm too much of a coward, really.

I like perfumes that are completely out of time. Une fleur de Cassie could have worn Louise de La Vallière, or Madame de Montespan.
It's an unsweet, enchanted, but also somehow bulky perfume, gentle and at the same time unapproachable, like a beautiful 18-year-old girl who refuses to leave the house because then her beauty might attract the wrong people's attention. The composition is contradictory, complex and yet it creates a harmonious whole, which shows the effort with which it was created. I bought it as a work of art, sometimes wearing it and then cursing it. Because it never really fit. Like the white knight who discovers the beautiful 18-year-old girl sometime in his enchanted garden and kidnaps her on his horse. He has stolen something precious, but is not happy with it.