Guerlain Aqua Allegoria Pamplelune

Corcovado at night, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Pamplelune is tart with salty tears and luxuriant as a sigh. When I wear it, I begin to hum Jobim's famous song, Corcovado. Pamplelune has the same lyricism, the bittersweet longing of bossa nova. Potentially challenging notes of grapefruit, blackcurrant and patchouli give Pamplelune its decisive and ethereal phrasing. In Pamplelune, Mathilde Laurent created the greatest grapefruit scent ever. Somehow, Laurent even made her feat of perfumery seem easy.

Like making good music, creating a grapefruit perfume is no easy task. The enlivening scent of grapefruit is dangerously close to that of garlic because of the tiny amount of sulfur it contains. Although grapefruit oil is 98% d-limonene, what we smell in grapefruit is the sharp odor of a sulfur compound called 1 p-methen-8-iol also in garlic. Luca Turin has commented on the similarity between grapefruit and garlic in his encomium to Pamplelune. The sulfurous undertone to grapefruit is what makes Pamplelune a scent of longing. But there is sweet with the bitter. Grapefruit is combined with lemon and bergamot in the opening of the scent. Pamplelune is the scent of laughter through tears.

Pamplelune’s finesse with grapefruit in the opening notes is only slightly less amazing than its mastery of two other difficult notes: blackcurrant and patchouli. Blackcurrant, a juicy tart note, can tend to verge on an acrid cat pee odor. In Pamplelune, blackcurrant pulses at the tangy heart of the perfume along with buds of petitgrain. Blackcurrant gives the scent mischief without any gaucherie.

Since it is one of the light formula waters Guerlain calls "Aqua Allegoria," one wouldn't expect distinctive basenotes. Yet, patchouli delivers the real surprise and reward in this scent. Patchouli has its fans and its detractors. I am historically shy of patchouli. As a teenager, I didn’t know what it was but referred to it as “the punk mold smell” because all the boys and girls at my school with kohl-rimmed eyes and safety pins through the nose reeked of patchouli in the raw. Since that time, Angel and her progeny have dulled my sensibility to the shock of patchouli but Pamplelune reawkens my sense of smell and my emotions, to hum, to long for love, to weep a little at the perfection of the stuff.

Pamplelune is available from Sephora, Guerlain and a bunch of other retailers.