A New Opium Leading Lady for Yves Saint Laurent {Fragrance News} {Celebrity Perfume}

Actress Emily Blunt arrives at "Salmon Fishing In The Yemen" Premiere at Princess Of Wales during the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2011 in Toronto, Canada.

Yves Saint Laurent announced that they will launch a new advertising campaign for Opium, their iconic Oriental perfume from the artificial-paradise side of the 1970s. The new leading lady to be the face for the fragrance is British actress Emily Blunt, an unexpected choice if you think of her role as the young Queen Victoria, but closer to home if you envision her as Harriet in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen where the story does play upon the trope of British reserve set against a more smouldering Arabian backdrop...

There have been so many lascivous adverts for YSL Opium, that it is quite a bit funny to imagine the "young Victoria" indulging in a lapse of behavior.

Tom Ford infamously art-directed a publicity shot with Sophie Dahl which was so disturbing at the time to a segment of the viewers that it was banned in the UK. Does that story get old? No, because more recently with the release of Belle d'Opium, the flames of controversy were fanned again with people seeing a secret junkie code in the dance interpreted by French actress Mélanie Thierry. Opium continues to unsettle long after it was launched in 1977. Also, the brand makes sure that the perfume does make you think of dangerous things.

Renaud de Lesquen, president of YSL & Designer Brands said that the new campaign images shot by Romain Gavras and Patrick Demarchelier "unveil a fiery, almost reckless woman with magnetic seduction, that nobody or nothing can resist".

Emily Blunt said, 'I am very honoured to have been chosen to be the face of Opium. It is really exciting to embody a fragrance which has stood the test of time without its allure ever being diminished'.

if the scent's allure has arguably not diminished, it remains to be seen that its sillage has equally been cultivated to impress as much as it did in the beginning. The juice has been reformulated, but as experience shows, sometimes a reformulation is just a transition stage before it gets reformulated again and improved. Meanwhile, I'll continue to treasure a great incarnation of it, a limited-edition Opium Collector from 2006 houses in a protective black lacquered bottle.

Via Elle UK; Harper's Bazaar