Anaïs Anaïs Eau de Toilette

Anaïs Anaïs is the first fragrance from Cacharel, the fashion house founded by Jean Bousquet, whose fragrance license is held by L’Oréal. Launched in 1978, it remains the brand’s flagship fragrance, sold today as Anaïs Anaïs L’Original, in eau de toilette.

A fragrance for young girls

According to a story reported by Le Figaro, Jean Bousquet and the chief executive of L’Oréal came up with the project on a flight from Mexico City to Paris: a fragrance for the in-between age of adolescence and adulthood. Annette Louit, then a young product manager, worked on the launch.

Elena Vosnaki of Perfume Shrine credits Annette Louit with the fragrance’s commercial success. She notes that the youth market was still largely untapped at the time, and that young women found the usual perfume imagery bourgeois and old-fashioned and wanted fragrances of their own.

L’Express recounts that François Dalle, the head of L’Oréal, turned the project down for two years and that the very first launch failed. The house still describes a young girl who is both innocent and sensual, and a fragrance carrying a message of tenderness.

Four Firmenich perfumers

Four Firmenich perfumers signed the formula: Raymond Chaillan, Paul Léger, Robert Gonnon, and Roger Pellegrino. The house explains that they took the lily as their main theme, surrounded by other white flowers and green notes, to express freshness and purity.

Le Figaro sees it as the first formula in the history of perfumery signed by a collective of noses. Chant Wagner of The Scented Salamander reports that the project began as a lily soliflore and gradually grew into a white bouquet, on a green floral structure.

The name of a goddess

The house derives Anaïs from Hannah, “the graceful one,” and from a goddess of ancient Persia. Élisabeth de Feydeau names this goddess of love Anaïtis. Elena Vosnaki recalls that many read the name as a nod to the writer Anaïs Nin, a lead the brand never officially adopted.

Chant Wagner cites Michael Edwards, for whom the name came to the team for no particular reason before being justified by its resemblance to Anaïtis. For Le Figaro, the repeated first name echoes the intended duality of the fragrance, at once innocent and sensual.

A worldwide success

Carried by Sarah Moon’s images, the fragrance sold thirty-five million units in five years, according to FashionNetwork, thanks to a price below that of its competitors. The brand states that it was the best-selling fragrance in the world from 1982 to 1985.

L’Express counts it among the first fragrances sold in supermarkets, at Prisunic; Élisabeth de Feydeau writes that it returned to traditional perfumeries as soon as success came. Elena Vosnaki describes basins of water in department stores, where young women washed their hands before a cream and a spritz.

Élisabeth de Feydeau sees in it “a real lesson in marketing”: in 1985, she writes, the students of May ’68, now grown women, wore it, along with their little sisters and their daughters. Le Figaro links the vogue for the first name Anaïs in the mid-1980s to the fragrance.

The L’Original relaunch

In 2014, Cacharel launched Anaïs Anaïs Premier Délice, composed at Firmenich by Olivier Cresp and Dora Baghriche. The 1978 fragrance then took the name Anaïs Anaïs L’Original, whose return Victoria Frolova of Bois de Jasmin announced in March 2014.

Victoria Frolova explained in 2018 that the formula had been adjusted to comply with new perfumery regulations, without straying from the original. The eau de toilette is sold today in 30, 50, and 100 ml, in the white opaline bottle of the launch.