New Perfumes & New Line: The Unicorn Spell, Let Me Play The Lion..., & L'Antimatière by Les Nez.com
René Shifferle's long-standing passion for perfumes has led the businessman hailing from Switzerland to finally pursue and concretize his dream of creating a series of perfumes he felt were lacking from the contemporary scene. The result is an unconventional series of three fragrances with dreamy poetic names created in collaboration with Isabelle Doyen, the nez for Parfums Annick Goutal.
Shifferle told us earlier that although he started with the idea that the perfumes would be the results of a classic collaboration betwen a customer and a perfumer, he quickly came to revise this view after a few months. The founder of Les Nez realized then that the most important person in the process was the creator, that is the perfumer. Shifferle adds that the concept of the perfumer as author developed by Frédéric Malle, who sees himself as a perfume publisher after the model of a book publisher, inspired him to go in that direction.
The Unicorn Spell is described as a green floral. In Isabelle Doyen's own words, "If by dawn still linger on your skin mixed scents of leaves, frost and violet blooms, and that relentless yearning for stellar sights, you will know that, at night, you felt the milky breath of a unicorn"...
Let Me Play The Lion... is a warm woody perfume. It is inspired by a passage from Shakespeare's Midsummer-Nights Dream "Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that I will do any man's heart good to hear me; I will roar, that I will make the duke say 'Let him roar again, let him roar again.'"[...] " I will roar as gently as a dove."
For the perfumer, it evokes
"Scents of dusty trails,
Of lightly sweetened ochre,
Of sun-weathered wood,
Of silence swept by cool breezes,
Of skies open like an endless azure cut oozing signs of the coming storm".
L'Antimatière is described as an animalic perfume with no headnote and as an "unconventional exercise in Minimalism - Sexy - Dirty." It uses an infusion of ambre gris.
Shifferle says "Isabelle has been working on this little project for about ten years. It is unmarketable by conventional standards. But as we want to work primarily with samples and not sell in shops we have decided to give it a go: the quantities of concentré we had to order where acceptable for a little adventure". [..] Thou shall not cheat the customer with a misleading headnote" is the reason for the initial shock which goes from alcohol to nothing and starts again after about 30 minutes".
Isabelle Doyen evokes a very sensual atmosphere with her description of it:
"An invisible ink that leaves a trace,
Foreseen rather than felt,
Persistent
Yet whispered,
Like a creased bed linen scent wandering along your curves..."
You can find more information at www.lesnez.com The website will be fully open for retail in October 2006.
Source: Press release
