Vintage ads Oriza L Legrand
Any new release from Oriza L. Legrand, this most divine of resurrected French Houses is worth discussing and Violettes du Czar is no exception. I was first alerted to them by a friend and have liked all of their carefully re-orchestrated formulations to date, painstakingly and lovingly restored in heritage packaging and artwork that never fails to delight me. I love vintage fragrance houses redolent with the olfactory equivalent of neglected doors, crumbling damp walls, a bloom of mould, reeking of yesteryear, powdered ghosts roaming forgotten corridors, boudoirs and decaying chapels.
Oriza L. Legrand started life in 1720 under the regency of The Sun King Louis XV. The name Oriza is a corruption of oryza sativa, Latin for rice, a reference to the vast amounts of rice powder used in face and wig preparations of the day. The house had a royal warrant and supplied numerous royal and imperial courts in Europe. Despite various successful incarnations, eventually by the 1930s Oriza was gone, run into the ground by economic exhaustion and bad management. The wars were not kind to perfumery. Many great houses suffered, smelling good was not a necessity of war. The house was resuscitated by Franck Belaiche in 2012, a television and movie producer with a passion for fine fragrance and the romantic history of scent. Working with an extensive archive of some eighty fragrance, Franck and his partner Hugo Lambert set about re-orchestrating and reviving the scented fortunes of this neglected old house.
Oriza L Legrand Perfumes photo Oriza L. Legrand
The house is thriving, now based in an exquisite boutique in rue Saint-Augustin in Paris’ 2nd arrondissement, selling handcrafted soaps, botanical skin care preparations and chandlery alongside the burgeoning fragrance collection. I adore Rélique d’Amour. It is one of the finest chapel scents in the business, but oh so melancholy. Also Œillet Louis XV is another favourite, an arresting essay in scattered dust, honey, rice powder and musks; homage to the atmospheric bustle of Versailles, wigs, silks and floral waters.
Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna the Younger (1810 – 1958)
Violettes du Czar was originally made for the aristocratic Imperial Russian Court in the 1860s. I have been waiting for this ambiguous floral for a while, perversely craving a furred mauve scent that might reek of courtly disdain and powdered pomp. I have a thing for off-kilter violet aromas, not the sickly sugared echo of the flower a Downton Abbey housemaid might buy at the apothecary to enhance a tired mien, but a dark, swirling dance of bitter violet leaf and velveteen bloom on shifting shadowed musks, woods and leathered balms.
Violet by TSF
I’m not going to lie to you. This is VIOLET written large, so violet haters, look away now.
Vintage Victorian Violette Postcard
Since the discovery of ionones and methyl-ionones in 1893 by Tiemann and Krüger, the synthesising of violet aromas has long since been standard practice in perfumery. The extraction of exquisite violet leaf is prohibitively expensive and the days of enfleurage extraction for the delicate flowers are a distant almost folkloric memory. I have Mona di Orio’s astonishing Violette Fumée in my collection, her love letter to her partner Jeroen, one of the most beautiful violet scents in the world. I also love the Balenciaga Paris scents, woody and coldly aloof, the violets coy and oddly menacing in forest undergrowth.
Portrait of Vita Sackville West by Phillip de Laszlo, 1909
It’s the delicious manifestation of texture in fine violet scents I adore and Violettes du Czar is no exception. The powerful triptych of French Violet from Nice, iris and heliotrope in the heart is dramatic and explodes off the skin with huge opacity, trailing the heady violet leaf from the top like frayed silk ribbons. I smell a gamut of effects from lemon balm and spearmint tea to licquorice and shattered macaroons. Then everything begins to carefully and regally coalesce; amber and smoky guaiac wood in the base provide a screen behind which the violet transforms into something rather magnificent, a deeper, more mysterious metallic version of itself, weary but radiant with night and memory.
Violettes du Czar by TSF
The haze of this arrestingly effulgent launch from Oriza is hard to resist. Yes you’ll probably have to be a violet fan to wear it. That much I will concede. But it’s an interesting violet perfume. Oriza wants men and women to wear it. I smell damn fine in it; you will too, powdered, courtly, mauve and defiantly beautifully retro.
Disclosure: From my own collection
–The Silver Fox, Editor and Editor of The Silver Fox
Thanks to Fragrance & Art niche boutique in Sweden we have 3 samples for 3 readers in the EU, US or Canada. Please leave a comment on what appeals to you about Violettes du Czar, if you have a favorite Oriza L Legrand perfume and where you live. Draw closes December 11, 2014
We announce the winners only on site and on our Facebook page, so Like Cafleurebon and use our RSS option…or your dream prize will be just spilled perfume