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Coty L'Aimant Parfum de Toilette - 30 ml

£29.425£58.85Clearance
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Lovely trip down memory lane! It is a memory lane I wish to have experienced. However, I will say that the little glass jar of Avon Scented Creme that I was given (either empty or nearly) still smelled very strongly of the original scent, if a bit 'off'. But my impression was that it was far more potent and also more oil based than their current scented lotions Or perfumed skin softeners. (The skin softeners I LOVE, but they have no comparison with that vintage creme, strong and vibrant as it was!) Creams and oils alike remain an excellent way to scent the body, and can be both elegant AND potent. I bet lots of you have memories of L’Aimant, either because you wore it yourself, or because it calls to mind beloved grandmothers and aunts. I hope you’ll share some of those stories. Well, I could use some magnetizing. Who couldn’t? I remembered the bottle of vintage L’Aimant Eau de Toilette stashed in my perfume cupboard. It was time to put it to the test. Look what I found for you,” my coworker said and handed me a Coty L’Aimant perfume ad shrink-wrapped on cardboard. It was all in gold and red, featuring a woman in a 1950s coiffure gazing into a tiny stage peppered with various L’Aimant products, from perfume to compacts to body powder. Each product was adorned with a horseshoe magnet encompassing a heart. “To be a magnet — wear a magnet — always!” the copy said.

That’s not to say that L’Aimant is entirely easygoing. Twice when I’ve been wearing it, I’ve caught a whiff of fecal civet. Only a flash, though — it reared its head, then disappeared into the fragrance again. All in all, it’s a beautifully blended, well-behaved fragrance. For this type of fragrance, though, I’m still crazy about vintage Arpège. However, L’Aimant is a lot easier to come by. I try to keep my eyes open for vintage finds when I'm poking around antique stores in my travels. The hope is that I'll find some bottles in good condition that still contain fragrance. I feel that shop keepers are finally catching on to this concept, as more and more dealers seem to be featuring bottles with some fragrance still inside. Perhaps the days of collecting empty is bottles waning? In any event, I'm actually not a true vintage hunter, and our colleague Sergey is the real expert on vintages. Most fragrances I wear I prefer to be "fresh," or, as the maker intended them (to be worn around the time when they were made.) But having said that, I can't deny the fascinating "archeology" of vintage finds. These bottles are time capsules, in a sense. That part never ceases to amaze me. A few nerves were stimulated recently when I found a bottle of Coty's L'Aimant in an unusual form, the "Creamy" Skin Perfume.

Topic

This form of scenting the body still lives on in Middle Eastern perfumery to some extent, with a huge selection of oils at ever price point. Also, some brands carry either gel or 'cream' versions of their offerings. The creams -by Al Rehab - are fairly moderate in scent projection and the exact consistency of petroleum jelly, which indeed are their primary ingredient! Still, the jars - though plastic - are adorable and bring to mind another era. :D

François Coty and Vincent Roubert created L’Aimant over five years, and the fragrance launched in 1927 — for context, the same year that saw the birth of Lanvin Arpège, Caron Bellodgia, and Jean Patou Chaldée. In his book Perfume, Nigel Groom lists L’Aimant’s notes as bergamot, neroli, peach, strawberry, jasmine, rose, ylang ylang, vanilla, vetiver and sandalwood. The fragrance fell out of production, then relaunched in 1995, when Groom claims it became the most popular perfume in Great Britain. The center of the perfume is the main attraction, consisting of an orchid-vanilla accord joined with rose, ylang-ylang and some jasmine, which make a very delicious bouquet with just an edge of the sultry-exotic thrown in to throw us a bit off balance. Orchid (in perfumes) is always a tough note to understand, as it's rarely experienced in the hot-house orchids that we know from florists or the ones we can buy and bring home - they rarely smell of anything. But they are the flowers most closely associated with vanilla, and so we can detect this interesting botanical vanilla (something like a vanilla that hasn't gone through its entire aging process.) Rose adds sharpness and ylang-ylang its characteristic sweaty and sweet banana-like fragrance. Pulled all together, it has a distinctly raw and organic feel, almost a vegetable-like smell; pleasant, like the flesh from an uncooked butternut squash. This was nagging at me (where have I smelled this before?) And Lo! Then it came to me - it's reminiscent of Jacques Fath's Iris Gris - also created by Roubert. I was able to smell its recreation, L'Iris de Fath launched in 2018, and they both share that intriguing botanical center.

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