As anticipated, its elaborate, tasseled glass bottle with bejeweled crystal lid offers a nod to the lavishness of an 18th century French chateau. But in the identical means that Sofia Coppola’s movie Marie Antoinette mixes interval items with new wave music from the ’70s and ’80s, Palatine takes an old-school uncooked fragrance ingredient and provides it a contemporary lease of life.
Let me clarify. In perfumery, violet petals have historically been used to lend a sure sort of frilly sweetness to a scent. It earned perfumes that go heavy on violet a fame for being dowdy, fussy, and, above all, old school.
But Palatine is completely different. The precise odor of violet petals is not the results of plucking the flower to extract the perfume. Instead, breakthrough expertise was used, the place the flower’s scent is launched below a glass dome and the molecules within the air are measured.
This allowed Julien Sprecher, founder and creative director of Parfums de Marly, to maneuver the scent away from smelling like your grandmother’s wardrobe or to be an excessive amount of like a pores and skin scent. Instead, the violet petals have been re-interpreted to odor barely candy but in addition tart, in order that they’ve this actually edible, binge-worthy attraction.
Then, in an fascinating feminist plot twist, Parfums de Marly’s Palatine took a historically masculine be aware in colognes—lavandin—and dropped it into the center of this overtly female fragrance to actually amplify the sharp tang of those violet petals.
Pretty intelligent, no? It’s additionally becoming because the fragrance’s namesake was Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria, a.ok.a Princess Palatine, who was famend for her free spirit and independence in Chateau de Marly’s court docket, a rarity for a girl within the seventeenth century.
“To rejoice that audacity, I needed to revisit the violet petal, a be aware that tends to be perceived as conventional, and make it the heroine of a composition that’s, quite the opposite, fairly up to date and sudden,” says Julien.
What does Parfums de Marly’s Palatine odor like?
I’m not usually a floral fragrance lover however there’s simply one thing about Palatine that attracts me in for a second, third…and fourth sniff. I feel the largest purpose for this, is that it would not lean into basic jasmine, rose, or lily.
Palatine nonetheless has the addictive sweetness that’s catnip for Parfum de Marly lovers, so I really feel Delina followers may also be received over by it. It has loads of the playful, female vitality that the model is thought for, too, nevertheless it’s not a sickly, saccharine scent—nor does it odor dated.
A mix of mandarin, bergamot, pear, and lavandin is simply contemporary sufficient to take the sting off the sweetness of the violet. While the addition of sandalwood, patchouli, musk, and vanilla provides an sudden heat to the scent that lingers for hours. Having examined this perfume for a month, in several climate situations, I can attest to that.
