Love Don't Be Shy

Love, don't be shy is presented by KILIAN PARIS as the first perfume created by Kilian Hennessy under his own name. The house reports its founder's original intention: to compose a gourmand without resorting to ethyl maltol or patchouli, two markers that had become customary to the genre. The perfume was released in 2007 as part of the L'Œuvre Noire collection, the brand's inaugural series whose inspiration is tied to the poètes maudits, and whose compositions were entrusted to Calice Becker and Sidonie Lancesseur. The specialized press of the time places the release schedule in September for France and October at Bergdorf Goodman, where the collection was introduced.

The composition is signed Calice Becker. Offered as an Eau de Parfum, Love, don't be shy is now classified by the house under The Narcotics family, one of the groupings by which KILIAN PARIS reorganizes its catalogue, and belongs to a gourmand floral style; Fragrantica for its part classifies it among vanilla orientals.

The official pyramid communicated by the brand shows neroli in the opening, rose and honeysuckle at the heart, marshmallow and cistus labdanum in the base, with orange blossom and marshmallow among the raw materials that the house highlights as signatures of the perfume. Other facets, noted by Fragrantica without confirmation from the brand, complete this reading: bergamot, pink pepper and coriander at the attack, jasmine and iris alongside white flowers, then sugar, vanilla, caramel, musk and civet in the trail. A retailer specifies origins for some of these raw materials — bergamot from Calabria, neroli from Tunisia, jasmine from Egypt, rose from Bulgaria, iris absolute — and ties the sugary accord to the idea of caramelized marshmallow. The whole rests on the meeting of a citrus and orange blossom freshness with a candied base that labdanum comes to amber.

The bottle follows the color code that the house associates with its olfactory families: white lacquer for The Narcotics, while The Smokes, with Back to Black, receives black lacquer and a silver metal plate. Here, the metal plate is gold and hand-engraved with the perfume's name. Each side of the bottle bears the depiction of the shield of Achilles, a motif also found engraved on the house's black-lacquered Talisman spray bottle. The bottle is manufactured in France and designed to be refilled indefinitely, a principle the brand applies across its entire range.

The perfume has given rise to flankers entrusted to the same perfumer: an Extreme version, built on an overdose of Bulgarian rose, and an Eau Fraîche, which calls on North African neroli and Paraguayan petitgrain. For its fifteenth anniversary, it was the subject of an anniversary set combining a refillable 50 ml bottle and a 7.5 ml black-lacquered Talisman spray bottle, with a design inspired by the Eiffel Tower.