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En Passant by Olivia Giacobetti at Editions de Parfums by Frederic Malle (2000) {Perfume Review & Musings}
Photographer Alice Austen wearing a hat decorated with white lilacs, June 1888, by Captain
Oswald Müller, courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society
En Passant by Olivia Giacobetti at Editions de Parfums by Frédéric Malle (2000) - Perfume Review & Musings
En Passant by Olivia Giacobetti at Editions de Parfums by Frédéric Malle (2000) - Perfume Review & Musings
Official notes: white lilac, orange leaves, cucumber absolute, wheat absolute
What they say: the scent of a lilac whipped by the wind and carried by the spring air near a garden; an impressionistic fragrance; a play on one note (white lilac); captured at an instant in time; a glorification of the scent of nature coupled with watery notes; radiant and serene (Source: Editions de Parfums French website).
I was probably unconsciously attracted to the words "En Passant" (While Passing By) on New Year's Day to want to review this scent. We have crossed into a new year, 2009, a symbolic benchmark which reminds one of the transiency of things and makes one think of what might lie ahead at the other end of the passage, as we come out of one little tunnel of time and enter another.
En Passant is like a soliflore but with a sense of dramaturgy Although the predilection for transparency that Olivia Giacobetti is famous for (an oversimplification in fact when you look at all her work) is apparent in this composition it seems to play second fiddle here. The nucleus of meaning of the scent appears more to be a paroxistic remembrance of a moment of folie amoureuse for an aroma, a scene, a moment in a day. The white lilacs anchor the other scents that may have converged towards them (are they all real, are they imagined, we don't know and it doesn't really matter). Without that defining central aroma, the bread smell, the watery cucumber scent lose meaning. If En Passant insists on the transiency of the event, integrating a sense of the passing of time in the composition like an olfactory clock that waxes and wanes, it by no means signifies that the event was subtle, brief, or only partly experienced or imagined. It is the full experience of an olfactory apotheosis as passed through the filter of the perfumer's imagination...
White Lilacs from a Practical Handbook of Trees Shrubs Vines and Herbaceous Perennials by John Kirkegaard
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