Product Watch: Roses are a classic choice for Valentine's Day — here are 5 top picks
Keira Knightley for Coco Mademoiselle L'Eau Privee
This is not a great time for testing cosmetics of any kind and unless you repurchase your other half’s favourite (yawn), buying a fragrance for Valentine’s Day is a real gamble. Roses are a classic choice but rosy perfumes vary widely and often smell nothing like the air above a flower.
The reason for this is threefold. Firstly, natural rose extracts used in perfumery do not smell like roses. “Rose oils are so different from the real thing that asking them to imitate the flower is like asking marmalade to imitate oranges,” says Luca Turin, co-author of Perfumes: The Guide (Perfüümista OÜ, 2018).
Further, the concentration of rose in the bottle is sometimes quite minor. In a 2019 interview with The Talks, fragrance expert, Frédéric Malle, explains: “When a company says there’s something like natural rose in a perfume, they put generally 0.01%. Just to legally be able to write that [it contains rose]. It’s not going to change anything. You don’t smell it.”
Finally, the symphonic nature of today’s perfumes may keep even a high concentration of rose from being the star note. For example, Mr Malle’s own brand’s bestseller, , which takes a reported 400 roses per bottle to make, is not dominated by the flower. Here are five rose perfumes any woman will adore.
Why did Tom Ford give a perfume everyone asks about a name that’s so embarrassing to say? He is incorrigible but really very charming about it. Rose Prick was inspired by his private rose garden and is fabulous, very happy-making, with a heart of Bulgarian, May and Turkish roses, spicy top notes and a patchouli-tonka bean base. The bottle is a matte pink version of Tom Ford’s signature chess-piece flacon.
Paul Poiret, Gabrielle Chanel’s great rival in the 1920s, was the first couturier to sell his own perfumes. He named them after his daughter. Neither Les Parfums de Rosine nor Poiret’s fashion house survived the Great Depression. The revived perfume brand (launched in 1991 by Marie-Hélène Rogeon, the great-granddaughter of Poiret’s colleague) is devoted to roses. Ballerina no.1 is powdery, sweet and light. With a peach-bergamot top note, a rose-peony heart and a vanilla-milky base, it is also an exceptionally girly rose. There’s even a pink-chiffon tutu on the bottle.
This gift needs no explanation. Not only is Coco Mademoiselle by Chanel (it’s almost impossible to go wrong with a Chanel perfume), it is the brand’s best-selling scent after No.5. To me, the rose in Coco Mademoiselle L’Eau Privée, released last year, is more prominent than that of the original. It opens with mandarin orange, has a jasmine and rose heart and dries to a sweet white musk. This is called Privée because it’s a nighttime fragrance, conceived for wearing to bed.
“Make me a perfume that smells of love,” Christian Dior told perfumers Jean 'Tabu' Carles and Paul Vacher, his first perfumers and the creators of the original Miss Dior back in 1947. She’s had many makeovers since but the current formula is just as romantic. A parfum is very grown-up, even when it is called Miss Dior. This is not eau de anything, it is the most highly concentrated version of the scent and requires some restraint. A little goes a long way and it really lasts. Long-lasting fragrance can be a menace but with a heart of Turkish and Bulgarian roses, a warm vanilla base and a sparkling mandarin top-note, this one is lovely company.
Dominique Ropion is the best living master perfumer, to my nose and — if sales are any proof — millions of others. He is (solely or collaboratively) responsible for lots of commercially successful scents, including Viktor and Rolf’s irrepressible Flowerbomb, Dior’s knock-him-dead Pure Poison and Lancôme’s sparkling blockbuster, La Vie Est Belle. Editions Frédéric Malle allows perfumers to work far more personally and creatively than big international houses like Coty and IFF, and for him, Mr Ropion has created many beautiful things. Portrait of a Lady is the most successful. This is long-wearing, slightly spicy rose with notes of Turkish rose absolute with raspberry, cassis, clove, cinnamon, patchouli, and amber.
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