At a time when the number of annual perfume releases continues to hit the 2000+ mark, it is increasingly difficult to work out which compositions influence the aesthetics of future scents. The stats are simply too overwhelming: when you’re dealing with so many individual pieces of work – and inordinate pressure to emulate the success of others – many are bound to smell very similar and several will go unsniffed and unmentioned. Therefore, trying to discern the precise – or even the vague – starting point of a penchant for a certain style is challenging, to say the least. But despite this, a few perfumes somehow manage to strike a chord so decisively that their power over everything that comes after them is almost impossible to deny. One such beast is Dominique Ropion’s Portrait Of A Lady for Frederic Malle, which finds its image reflected in the new Belgravia Chypre from Penhaligon’s, much to the vexation of many people, it would seem.
I could, of course, have flipped that paragraph on its head and said that, at a time when the number of perfume releases continues to hit the 2000+ mark, it is increasingly difficult to achieve any measure of olfactory originality. The sheer weight of the numbers is a limiting force in itself: when there are so many perfumes out there, the probability increases that many will smell similar.
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