Ça sent beau: A flower rests on a fruity pebble. A passion for flowers, a fondness for an artist, Serge Mansau, and here is the very first Kenzo perfume to appear on the market, to our great delight, in 1988.
After launching his haute couture collections in the 1970s in a style that was both romantic and colorful, the designer Kenzo Takada presented his very first fragrances, such as King Kong in 1980, but above all Kenzo by Kenzo Signature, which would become the magnificent Ça sent Beau in 1989. A genuine success from its release, Ça sent beau offered the keys to a world of flowers and fresh fruit that Kenzo would never truly leave behind...
Ça sent beau, an ode to nature signed Françoise Caron for Kenzo
The Kenzo style is made up of so many blends of cultures, colors and shapes that it proved quite difficult to translate into a perfume. While King Kong offered the early fragrant beginnings of future major successes, it unfortunately did not achieve the expected success, still too far removed from what devotees of the label expected from a Kenzo perfume.
But thanks to the talents of Françoise Caron and the boundless imagination of designer Kenzo Takada, Kenzo Signature, quickly renamed Ça sent Beau, would touch women's hearts by offering them, in complete contrast to the opulent, heady trends of the time, European and Asian flowers and fruit, as though settling on their necks to exhale their divine scents.
It is true that Françoise Caron, born in Grasse into a family of celebrated perfumers, is a lover of flowers. But a lover who prefers to render them in the simplest, and ultimately the noblest way, perhaps quite simply because her first encounter with flowers was through picking them, through their raw scents.
When we were young, we would go to the Drôme in July and visit the lavender fields. Blue seas of lavender as far as the eye could see. I hold onto those memories as everlasting; it is my Proust's madeleine. Françoise Caron, perfumer and creator, among others, of Ça sent Beau by Kenzo, for Nose.
Thus Ça sent beau embodies, in a single perfume, the passions of Françoise Caron, its creator, and of Kenzo Takada, its founder, drawing quite simply on the most beautiful things nature has to offer.
Between flowers and fruit, Ça sent beau exhales the Kenzo style in a first poetic perfume
Quite naturally, the perfumer who composed Ça sent Beau used, for the most part, the purest essences of Grasse, which she had been close to since childhood, immersed in her father's flower cultivations. Rose, Jasmine, Carnation and even Tuberose enhance Ça sent Beau, lending it a poetic, fragrant vision of Kenzo's flowery and vividly colorful world.
Ça sent beau thus opens with citrus freshness and a touch of Aldehydes, lending additional strength to these lively citrus notes. At the heart, the beautiful flowers of Grasse mingle with Mediterranean fruit such as Apple, Plum and Pear, blending floral notes with a few original, sweet gourmand touches that well represent the distinctive style of the perfumer who also created Eau d'Orange Verte for Hermès. Finally, the woody power of Patchouli and Oakmoss, alongside Labdanum and Vanilla, forms a strong-tempered sillage for this Ça sent Beau woman, who will decidedly leave behind the olfactory memory of a woman quite unlike any other!