What about beautiful bonuses? With each 100 ml bottle they offer a 20 ml mini-spray of any other fragrance! In due time the sales assistants of the Montale boutique at Place Vendôme offered to make the fragrance of choice more concentrated by adding more perfume concentrate to a bottle, which could be too much for these very rich fragrances by Pierre Montale.
The Montale Paris house played on an oriental theme and very persistent perfumes along with Serge Lutens. Besides, together with M. Micallef, it became a pioneer of and helped popularize the oud theme in European perfumery, obtaining a lot of compliments for a bunch of Montale fragrances. These particular traits—Orientalism, persistence, awareness and oud—are the brand identity of Montale Paris. But having gained the reputation of a niche house and created an image of its bottles, Montale became frequent with new launches. A lack of original names emerged. Among original Montale fragrances there appeared scents that could be used in a show, “Name that Olfactive Tune.”
For example, a new fragrance launched in Spring 2013—Aoud Greedy. It’s an oriental mysterious scent. There is liquorice note that unites vetiver, caramel and amber in this perfume. Several other fragrances pop up in my mind. In due course Annick Ménardo perfectly updated Angel and A*Men Thierry Mugler by creating airily fresh gourmand masculine scent Lolita Lempicka Au Masculin—“a copy," as one would think.
No. Try these three fragrances at the same time on your skin. You will notice a resemblance of course; your nose doesn’t cheat you. But still, you can sense the difference if you really try to find it. Gentle nuances and diversity always exist; the basic principle of perfumery development is the slow perfection of a main theme. Ménardo’s fragrance is greener and more herbal; Montale’s fragrance combines amber and patchouli with liquorice's natural sweetness. As opposed to A*Men, Aoud Greedy’s patchouli-incarnating ambery note doesn’t recall some plastic chemicals. What is more surprising is the fact that Aoud Greedy doesn’t smell of oud oil itself (and this note is not listed among components), unlike, for example, Chocolate Greedy. The main principle of the composition deploys on contradiction: if with Chocolate Greedy we are fed up with chocolate in an extreme quantity, Aoud Greedy’s overwhelming sweetness is almost unbearable.
Another novelty, Intense Cafe Montale, is also from the East, for example from a Turkish coffee shop. It opens with an aromatic and sweet coffee dessert accompanied with vanilla pod and a pinch of saffron. If you try to keep your figure but cannot resist culinary temptation, keep Intense Cafe Montale with you and spray it when see another coffee or cake-shop on your way. It’s a pity that coffee accord is not very persistent and rather quickly turns to a typical amber-rose woody base fragrance. Just light caramel benzoin sweetness and oriental smoke of patchouli recall the coffee note.
The Gourmand theme is continued by Candy Rose Montale—a light and simple scent designed for young girls, if considering its fruity-berry opening and transparent flowery-musky drydown. This is a pink and naïve aroma of berries, flowers and purity, equally in mood and in components. The bottle should be accompanied by colored soap suds in order to make a perfect present for a girl under 16 who is ashamed of her numerous Barbie dolls already. The fragrance is surprisingly close to the luxury segment and mass-market.
For a boy of the same age Santal Wood Montale will match perfectly. It’s an unusually fresh sandalwood scent. Synthetic woody molecules create an image of warm milky sandal and green violet leaves. As a result we have fougère fragrance Santal 33 Le Labo or numerous new fougères. And again, as well as with Aoud Greedy, the similarity is not complete. Where other perfumers pay attention to nuances, slight differences and modulations, Pierre Montale offers perfect physical characteristics: persistence, diffusion and a strong drydown. Not many people will notice the light difference but everyone will surely notice the strength and three days' persistence. Pierre Montale wants to be closer to the people and that’s why he doesn’t create revolutionary three-act pieces but simplifies and popularizes the scents. Everything should be understood with a first try. Everyone should quickly understand if he/she likes or dislikes it.
One more fragrance, Aoud Ever Montale, can illustrate a typical formal way of creating a fragrance: collage. In due time Braque and Picasso started doing this in visual art: ready-made pictures and photos were taken to create a new sense of their parts joined together. Aoud Ever is an idea of a scaled-up European citrusy-spicy eau de cologne (lemon, bergamot, amber, pepper), to the woody-leathery (vetiver, sandal, patchouli, leather) drydown of which an oud accord is attached. Oud adds more dark character to the scent but doesn’t change its image totally. The most noticeable thing in this perfume is its persistence, which was never a strong side of citrusy eaux de cologne.
In conclusion, Montale Paris is interesting for a lot of people. It’s the best popularizer of niche perfumery. But it’s interesting for me because of its flagman vision. When other perfume brands are developing in extensive ways, it’s better to observe the houses that have evaluated this development and found its common factors. Today it’s evident that Montale launches new perfumes just for novelty's sake. Not to meet the public's needs, but just to create a cloud of new fragrances. Montale is not ashamed to compete with itself, launching two similar fragrances. One can easily find the fragrance of each olfactive family among Montale perfumes. Montale creates not the assortment but the whole perfume world. And this is the future of perfumery. It does not consist of thousands of perfumes. We will see a number of N+1 parallel perfume worlds where N is any given number of perfume houses.
