PORTRAIT OF A LADY FOAM BATH
She is languid in the bath, as on a chaise longue, as though she is taking in the sun, as though taking in Bizet, a glint with water and steam, maybe with a book in her hands, surrounded by billowing clouds of foam. Alone, of course—this is a private pleasure. She sinks into the voluptuous waters: a generous measure of rose and a mixture of amber, patchouli, and sandalwood, one might think the scent was carved in her likeness. She abandons herself to it, and it to her. She loves the intimate resonance of its perfume, dream-distilled. Perhaps it is she who is scenting the waters.
And she steps out reborn from the spume, trailing the note of this suspended moment. Portrait of a Lady. The foam bath.
Portrait of a Lady Foam Bath: 110€
Once upon a time was a woman.
The idea of the rose came to Dominique Ropion and Frédéric Malle like the breaking of the first day. After months and months of work, in the rosy light, a sublime portrait took shape, a Portrait of a Lady.
The original sketch was ambitious, to reinvent the genus of oriental perfume. From the heart of a amboyant masculine perfume, Géranium pour Monsieur, the two would extract the basis of a sumptuous feminine perfume, like a ash of heat across the skin—beautiful but unbounded.
Ropion and Malle spent months exploring, dissecting, and reinventing, and then, at the last moment, they changed course. They went beyond the limits of the reasonable, they dared to choose excess over restraint. They lavished the concoction with opulence, with an indecent amount of rose, endless petals – no less than 400 owers per 100ml bottle —and to this they added an abundance of amber, red berries, and a dash of exoticism. It was an epiphany in Turkish rose.
Having worked through a calendar of grey days, they found themselves faced with a masterpiece, a dust cloth pulled back to reveal a perfect chandelier. The result is an unprecedented potion, almost too sublime to exist, an inspiration in a bottle. They had created the perfume of all perfumes.
At the heart of the sillage, the most ravishing woman in the world is conjured into being. Under the in uence of the rose, the perfume stands up and walks forth, a nimbus come to life in feminine form. She strolls, shadowless, across polished oors and up velvet stairs. She is a dream woman, a Callas, a Dovima, a swan, her every gesture an unforgettable arabesque. She is impossibly elegant, yet she is possible. She is lit from within by a breathing elegance, a graciousness that she inherited like precious metal, a generosity so complete you can almost feel its weight in your hand.
This perfume is her gown, the color of time, limpid at midnight and brilliant at noon. It becomes her. It is a second skin, a gauze of temptation and allure. The attribute of a goddess, her shield, her polished armor. An elegant adornment that changes her as she changes it, rendering her resplendent.
The Portrait of a Lady.