Like people, perfume houses eventually find their way back to what they once were, as though time, after taking a thousand detours, were ultimately nothing more than a road leading home. Estée Lauder, whose golden age was marked by some of perfumery’s most celebrated creations, now appears to be following that very path.
We remember, or at least we should remember, for the memory of fragrances is a fragile thing, even more fragile than that of men, White Linen, Pleasures, Beautiful, names that once promised happiness bottled in glass. The brand, which has perhaps never stopped hoping to recapture those years, will launch a new eau de parfum on August 6: Glimmer, perhaps “a glimmer of hope,” cast into the world like a message in a bottle, buoyed by the slightly naïve yet deeply touching faith that accompanies every fresh beginning. At $160 for 100 millilitres and $130 for 50, the price of hope, if one may put it that way, varies according to the size of the bottle.
Three perfumers, Dominique Ropion, Anne Flipo, and Jean-Marc Chaillan, masters of the invisible at IFF, have composed this floral amber fragrance with an unmistakably gourmand facet. It deceives no one: beneath our serious façades, we all long to be comforted by sweet things. A rose macaron accord, raspberry mousse, a vanilla bean, as though, in a world that offers precious little tenderness, they had sought to imprison a measure of sweetness within glass.
The bottle itself harbours ambitions one is happy to forgive. Rectangular in shape, it aspires to be both feminine and strong, as though those two qualities had ever truly been at odds. Its sides are sculpted with half-circles that, when placed together, become whole once more. There is perhaps an image here worth more than it first appears: two halves that, brought together, cease to be halves at all.
As for the numbers, the house remains silent, exercising the kind of discretion that still carries a certain dignity in an industry where rumours are often left to speak instead. And this time, the rumours suggest first-year sales of sixty million dollars. Which, after all, is simply another way of measuring the enduring desire of men and women to feel, if only for a fleeting moment, just a little better than they are.
FM