Kenzo World takes power! For many years, the house of Kenzo had accustomed us to a poetic and floral universe, particularly feminine, embodied to perfection by the perfume Flower by Kenzo.
When the great Kenzo Takada first took an interest in perfumery, it was clear that this would allow us to breathe into a bottle his passionate love for the blending of Asia and the West, a love so passionate that it inhabits all his creations, whether couture or fragranced. Yet with Kenzo World, the house of Kenzo's new artistic directors chose to move away from this fragrant blending of cultures while still offering singular notes meant to stand out in the olfactory landscape—and it was a huge success. What will become of this Kenzo Power, which also seems designed to create surprise?
When sweet-salty freedom becomes strength in Kenzo World Power
Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, the house of Kenzo's two new artistic directors, brought about decisive shifts in the Kenzo collections' choice of colors and materials in order to thoroughly modernize the blending of cultures so dear to Kenzo Takada. How, then, could one imagine that these two talented creatives would not do the same with the fragrances?
And so, in the midst of an offbeat and highly noticed advertising campaign, Kenzo World offered us, through the famous perfumer who created it (Francis Kurkdjian), its delicate notes of jasmine and peony tinged with the highly sensual, animalic warmth of ambroxan.
For this 2019 flanker, Kenzo World Power, things have changed. This time, it is perfumer Jerome Di Marino who worked on the fragrant composition of this Kenzo World, turning it into a surprising hot-cold contrast that pushes the radicalness of its choices to the limit—a feminine fragrance with no flower, would you believe it?
It is a fragrance with no flowers. A reinvented femininity with no floralcy... A rather unprecedented concept in perfumery. I wanted this fragrance to echo the values of Gen We. Optimistic, pluralistic, real: unfiltered! Jerome Di Marino on Kenzo World Power in La Dépêche.
Kenzo World Power, a feminine fragrance with no flower!
From Kenzo World, Jerome Di Marino extracted its striking ambroxan sensuality to keep it in Kenzo World Power—better yet, to enhance it by removing the peony and the jasmine in order to offer it a cocktail of woody notes.
Thus, rather surprisingly, Kenzo World Power opens on a note quite rare in feminine perfumery, cypress. Indeed rare, since the sharp cypress usually inhabits masculine fragrances, but for this Kenzo World Power, it proves to be unmistakably feminine alongside a heart note of salt crystals that asserts its woody power while tempering it with its briny strength. Finally, the animalic ambroxan of Kenzo World's original composition gives way, in this very power opus, to a tonka bean note that remains just as sensual but far more gourmand and rounded, transforming on contact with the aromatic-woody notes into a thoroughly seductive elixir.
Though this lovely Kenzo World Power contains no flower at all and plays with olfactory materials traditionally seen as feminine to surprise us, nothing will stop its heightened femininity from dazzling us with its singularity!