Und hier ein Artikel von Monsieur-Guerlain.
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L'HOMME IDÉAL
Guerlain likes to be mentioned as the brand that brought several ground-breaking ideas to 20th century perfumery: the revolutionary Jicky, the fruity chypre, the oriental accord, and the masculine oriental, to name the greatest. There's another talent, though, that is just as important as the first, namely to pick up a popular trend and give it the Guerlain treatment.
Guerlain's long-awaited new men's fragrance, L’Homme Idéal, is an example of the latter. It can be classified as what perfumers call a "boisé sec", a category of potent fresh-woody fragrances of which Boss Bottled by Annick Menardo (1998) was among the first. Her stratagem was to use powerful aroma molecules that smell vigorously, yet monotonously woody and citric. The effect is cool, young and dynamic, with impressive radiance and tenacity. Not surprisingly, the concept has been copied and interpreted by most perfume brands, as in Bleu de Chanel (monochrome woody), Bang by Marc Jacobs (peppery woody), 1 Million by Paco Rabanne (fruity-sweet woody) and Invictus (macho woody, also by Paco Rabanne). Nightclubbing boys like these fragrances for their capacity to act as sex pheromones, while professional men buy them for their self-confident masculinity. Perfume aficionados, on the other hand, generally don't find them tasteful, and we guess most had hoped that Guerlain would never venture into this genre.
So, what magic did the Guerlain machinery create this time? Well, let it be said from the start, that the whole thing — juice, bottle, box and marketing message — is very handsome. During the first few seconds of the top notes, we think we are hit by the aforementioned diehard molecules. These seconds can prove valuable for Guerlain, as they might seduce many of those who didn't know or like Guerlain until now (people who already love Guerlain will be surprised by how many people have never heard about the brand — compare Dior’s 14 million Facebook likes with Guerlain’s 500.000).
Shortly into the fragrance, however, we get the aromatic-citrus accord that we associate with Guerlain, a distinct camphoric-green rosemary, crisp and fresh, together with lemon and the essential oil of orange blossom a.k.a. neroli, which smells spicy-honeyed and a bit metallic. Then, in full contrast, comes what Guerlain touts as completely new in a masculine perfume: the almond. The heliotropine-vanillin almond note holds a special place in Guerlain’s heart, from L’Heure Bleue to La Petite Robe Noire. Here, we sense both a bitter almond and a sweet, caramelized one. Combined with tonka bean, Guerlain calls it an "amaretto" accord, but it doesn't come across as overly liqueur-like or sugary, more like a gourmand praline streak that moves in and out of focus as the fragrance develops. There are moments when the tension between this amaretto and the nip of rosemary and neroli is just right; that’s when L’Homme Idéal is really delicious. At others, the top notes seem still a tad too metallic and dry, too resistant to the amaretto suaveness. Or, is it the vetiver’s hoarse grassiness that sets in from below one moment too soon? A future EdP version with more almond depth could probably solve that; we assume that Thierry Wasser wanted to be on the safe side of the gourmand margin for this massive introduction. The base accord is a dark and dense combination of vetiver, cedarwood and dry leather notes. Because the almond is still there, the drydown maintains the Guerlain elegance and doesn't fall for the overdone, cold manliness we often find in a boisé sec — albeit it’s not nearly as sensual as in Guerlain’s former men’s style. Compared with his mentor Jean-Paul Guerlain, Thierry Wasser is more concerned with details than with flirtation.
Based on the fragrance description, which slipped through the Guerlain firewall by mistake long before the press release, Guerlain followers have already baptized L’Homme Idéal ”a poor man’s Tonka Impériale”. It’s not. L’Homme Idéal is a boisé sec with lovely little Guerlain touches here and there, made with Guerlain's sense of its historic signature, of good materials, and of balance.
It probably wouldn't be wrong to call L'Homme Idéal the masculine counterpart of La Petite Robe Noire. The spirit is young and contemporary, at once sparkling and delicious, commissioned by the marketing department to perform well on a large, varied and competitive international market. People don’t like the same things in Paris, New York, Moscow and Shanghai, but a modern, ideal men’s fragrance is supposed to be adaptable: not too sweet, not too fresh, not too rounded, not too hard, not too brash, and certainly not too elitist. Old-school Guerlain aficionados will likely scold it for that.
There's somehow a black and white feel to L'Homme Idéal: the white almond and the black wood, the bright rosemary and the tight leather. This theme is echoed in the presentation of the perfume, one of Guerlain's most eye-catching ever. The front of the box is off-white and features the logo of L'Homme Idéal, an almost cubistic illustration of the perfume's tagline, "No need to be l'homme idéal anymore, you have your fragrance." It's the first Guerlain fragrance to come with an (almost) international tagline, by the way. The ideal man is a myth, Guerlain says jokingly, but a perfume can be perfect. Some may wear the fragrance just for the pleasure of it, but this subtle message appeals to our intelligence.
The bottle itself is an aesthetic triumph, to which the ad visual is not doing enough justice. The label is white with a handsome black font and frame. An inventive detail is that the L'Homme Idéal logo is printed on the reverse of the label, visible through the glass. The label's frame is repeated on all four outer sides of the bottle, painted with matte black. Seen from the front, the bottle is formed like a cube, with finely cut facets that make the golden juice twinkle with diamond-like luxury. The design reprises the travel bottle shape of Robert Granai’s elegant Eau de Toilette bottle, made in 1988 for Vetiver and Habit Rouge, and turns it into a clean-cut piece of perfume bottle art. The matte black cap of the bottle is solid and stately, decorated with a silver ring and a guilloche-like pattern on the lower part. The upper rim encircles the double-G logo with a reprise of the bottle's glass facets. Some might claim that the overall proportions are more than loosely inspired by the Bleu de Chanel bottle, although the expression remains very different.
There will be a press release for L'Homme Idéal tonight, while the official launch date is June 23rd. However, the fragrance has already been delivered to select travel retail shops.
Zuletzt bearbeitet von Mezzanine am 04.06.2014, 09:30, insgesamt 2-mal bearbeitet
L'Homme Idéal 
