L’Eau de Chloé, to be even more free. Founded in 1952 by Gaby Aghion, a Parisian of Egyptian origin, the Chloé house quickly became the image of femininity par excellence.
The meeting between the Chloé perfume house and perfumer Michel Almairac gave rise to a great fragrant love story. After Chloé Signature and its three flankers, it was the beautiful Eau de Chloé that embodied the famous damascena rose so beloved by the one now known as Monsieur Rose. This time, the beautiful lady of the gardens becomes much crisper and slightly retro-chypre, like a summer lemonade one could not stop drinking through the nose.
L’Eau de Chloé fragrance, or Michel Almairac’s rose “declaration of freedom”
While during the 2000s the pretty rose had lost some of its aura from being overused for not always very elegant purposes, Michel Almairac was among the few who restored its former prestige, giving it a beautiful setting named Chloé Signature. The rose bloomed anew, and the perfumer, hopelessly in love with the beautiful thorny flower, carried us into his world filled with contrasting facets, offering Chloé perfumes each more wonderful than the last.
With Eau de Chloé, we discover once again, four years after the very first perfume, a new facet of the flower so beloved by Michel Almairac. Here the rose is green, crisp but also very natural, as if the perfumer had managed to take us directly into his imaginary garden. Which is, in fact, more or less the case, thanks to the manufacturing process of Eau de Chloé.
Indeed, Michel Almairac did not use the usual rose essence process for Eau de Chloé. He replaced the absolute with a rosewater obtained through distillation so that it would be directly incorporated into the base of the perfume. Thus, the water naturally contained in Eau de Chloé is replaced by rosewater, giving it a far more natural quality than usual. A feat of modern perfumery that nonetheless recalls the making of perfumes of old.
A modern, stylized chypre perfume for an Eau de Chloé with green freshness
If Eau de Chloé is a true and pure pleasure of rose, it is no less a perfume with character, make no mistake about it.
Bergamots and lemons, punctuated by powerful aldehydes, show us from the very start of this pretty Eau de Chloé that the sweet rose crafted by Michel Almairac has temperament and obvious dynamism. Like a dive into a summer lemonade, the top notes take flight to make way for an absolutely delicious floral heart of roses of course, but also jasmines, peonies, magnolias, freesias and lilies of the valley. All these lovely graceful flowers are framed by a green note. Then modernized patchouli blends with this dynamic rose to form chypre accords around oakmoss, labdanum and white musks.
This Eau de Chloé delivers, between classic or even retro rose accords, powerful chypre modernities, which might make one think that the declaration of freedom of the beautiful lady of the Chloé rose garden could have been played to a much more punk tune than it appears.