Dolce & Gabbana Devotion, Carine Roitfeld Forgive Me, Le Galion L’Astre and other reviews – 2023

The penultimate review video of the year was broadcast on YouTube the other day, featuring new releases from Dolce & Gabbana, Carine Roitfeld and others. Here’s a link to it, followed by the full list of perfumes, with timestamps: Dolce & Gabbana Devotion, Carine Roitfeld Forgive Me, Le Galion L’Astre and other reviews.

Dolce & Gabbana Devotion 5:22
Le Galion L’Astre 14:50
Le Galion Ferveur 23:26
Ella K Camelia K 28:57
Ella K Musc K 38:52
Carine Roitfeld Forgive Me 44:34

Ella K’s 2023 releases highlight how the brand continues to struggle to formulate a coherent identity: Sonia Constant‘s works want to be taken as serious, ‘independent’ products, but in terms of how they smell, they’re decidedly safe and mainstream. That said, Musc K is certainly a few notches above Camelia K, and its combination of super-clean laundry musks with iris isn’t devoid of interest.

The Le Galions I discussed during the video made me resolve to give this brand more attention next year. After all, their scents tend to be made by Rodrigo Flores-Roux, whose work is invariably interesting. And their mix of bygone aesthetics with modern sensibilities always has the potential for greatness. Both L’Astre and Ferveur are well worth seeking out, the former for its grand, floral opening, and the latter for its combination of incense with herbal notes.

It goes without saying that Olivier Cresp is the master of gourmands, and although his Devotion for Dolce & Gabbana doesn’t quite reach the lip-smacking heights of Bake (for his own brand, Akro) it is a treat from start to finish, and must surely be one of the best things to have emerged from D&G for quite a while. I’d be quite happy for Madame Persolaise to wear it while I’m tucking into some glorious offering from Fiasconaro.

Finally, and quite unexpectedly, I was taken by the latest from Carine Roitfeld, whose work I haven’t found especially impressive so far. Forgive Me, composed by none other than Dominique Ropion, is a masterfully insidious tuberose, using the earthiness of patchouli and the weird, slightly skin-crawling quality of Cashmeran to place the flower somewhere on the dividing line between Jekyll and Hyde. It’s almost as though Ropion has tried to do here what he did for jasmine in Mugler Alien (in other words: make the flower otherworldly and borderline horrifying) and by and large, he has succeeded. A must-try.

Persolaise

[Samples of the Dolce & Gabbana, Ella K and Carine Roitfeld were provided by the brands; the rest were obtained by me.]

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