A fairy named Nina
I have often wondered if appearances correspond to the reality or essence of a personality and vice versa, as I am sure you have too. The duality of a person is always fascinating to unravel. And an inconsistency often contributes to a greater fascination. Whether one will tolerate one in favor of another is entirely a personal matter.
Nina, the new perfume by Nina Ricci is such a case.
Created as a perfume to evoke in ladies' minds a modern fairy tale for “all young women searching for surprise and fantasy… in a wonderland where dreams dress reality”, as the advertising tells us, it promises to be magical and enchanting. Full of charm and seductiveness.
Fairy tales are the escapism valves of modern hectic lifestyles and if one is so easily within one's grasp it seems like a much healthier idea than downing a couple of pills, don't you agree?
The store in which I went in search for it had an entire window devoted to the new launch: a huge silver tree was posing, with factice bottles resembling glorious red apples hanging from its branches like magical instruments of witchcraft and pieces of ivory organza interlaid on a silvery snowy ground in the middle of summer.
It was beautiful….
The bottle, designed by French agency LOVE, is indeed one of the most gorgeous of recent years, paying homage to Hypnotic Poison, Lolita Lempicka and Be delicious, but managing to be more friendly that any of those and less heavy than the former two. It is also reminiscent of another great bottle that has launched very recently, Delices de Cartier.Made of transparent glass and silver metal it becomes raspberry red by the inclusion of the bright-hued juice. On the top, silver leaves crown an ergonomic sprayer that sprays a fine mist.
The fragrance itself is touted as the brand's single most important release in 10 years, after several trials that didn’t take off as expected. Premier Jour and its variations – let’s face it- never took off (the same goes for Les Belles, 3 variations in similar bottles) although it’s a likeable perfume and the name of Nina Ricci has remained in its dove garlanded laurels for too long.
Nina was composed by noses Olivier Cresp (the nose behind Angel, revamped Femme and Noa) and Jacques Cavallier (of Eau d’Issey, Feu d’Issey, Ferragamo woman and Poeme fame) of Firmenich with the Asian consumer in mind. I am not sure if by Asian they mean Chinese, Japanese, Thai people etc or they mean Middle-east and India, but the perfume could accommodate both tastes being tied with neither tradition or culture.
The brand is simply hoping to strengthen their appeal in the international fragrance market and in particular in Asia, which is the sleeping giant of consumerism, it seems.
Nina has a rich tradition to follow: Nina Ricci was one of the most popular couturiers in the mid-20th century fashion scene. Born in Turin in January 1883 she started as a highly talented apprentice, before devoting herself entirely to design.
She formed a partnership with her only son Robert in order to open her own Haute Couture house at 20, Rue des Capucines, in Paris. Her effort paid off well in quick success and just before the war the NINA RICCI firm occupied 11 floors and its workshops were filled with 450 workers.
Madame Ricci had a flair for highlighting the personality of her clients, resulting in very becoming dresses. She always favoured femininity over trends and elegance over dare. Ricci tried her hand in perfume making with the iconic spicy floral L’air du temps, a fantasia of delicate undertones and tender warmth encased in the gorgeous Lalique bottle with the pair of doves on the stopper, that has been worn by our dearest and nearest for years. It managed to inspire numerous mysterious florals, Fijdi and Anais Anais being two of those and it became a bestseller in many countries, managing to sell one bottle every 3 minutes somewhere around the world.
Alas, it has been so tampered with in its present version, as to render whiffs of it unrecognisable to the olfactory memory of our minds, failing to bring back the images of those loving female figures in our lives. A pity…
Farouche and Coeur Joie are another two legendary Nina Ricci perfumes that remain in the confines of the vast vault of on-line auction shopping.
Robert Ricci , however, Nina’s son, created the original NINA perfume, a powdery floral with fruits and woodsy, green notes in homage to his late mother in 1987. Very recent in perfume terms.
The experiment was very successful artistically, however the business end was not met satisfactorily, resulting in a semi-retirement of the old version, which is not so readily available anymore. Whether it will be retired for good in prospect of substituting it with the new namesake remains to be seen, although the lovely girls who helped me had both versions in the store.
The new Nina bears no resemblance to the older one, but the identical name will surely cause trouble to the consumer and confuse those who like to order things by the phone or on-line.
Whereas the old version was an affair of traditional elegance with a rich sparkle of aldehydes in the opening and a green chypre accord that was quite popular in the 1980’s ( if one considers the success of Diva by Ungaro), the new one is very different. The overall effect of the older version was delicately powdery and it smelled the way all perfumes smell in a young child’s mind: sophisticated, fabricated, not found in nature.
It used costly ingredients that managed to evolve and mingle with one another in trails of white light.
The new one is predictably a fruity floral with a gourmand touch. It opens on a very pleasing initial note of hesperidic fruits that cascade off the bottle in rapid succession: lemon, bergamot, mandarin and lime Caipirinha. The effect is sharp and uplifting and mouthwatering like the drink that inpsired the note, like that of another pleasing fruity floral: Gucci Eau de parfum II (the lilac-pink juice in the heavy crystal lid square bottle).
The heart accord of red toffee apple with moonflower (which is an abnormality of nature, a new breed after a tornado at the Mohave desert, from what I recall from The Body Shop version ) and peony is nicely balanced, quite sweet though, with a little vanillic veil that heralds the base of white cedar and cotton musk. That last ingredient alludes to lab work that produces the bulk of synthetic musks today. It manages to smell soft and enveloping, with an average tenacity on the skin, although on the blotter the candy and cedarwood effect are what remains mostly after the more effervescent notes have vanished and it remains poised for hours. The drydown is vaguely reminiscent of the base of Mugler’s Innocent , a perfume variant on the Angel recipe without the patchouli, more orientalised/gourmand than Nina, surely, but with the same praline afterthought that makes it delicious.
I haven’t smelled apple tree wood (I mean, I never actively sought to smell it, because never thought it went into the composition of any perfume, now go figure they mimicked that one too!) so I can’t judge conclusively, but the official info says there is a note of it.
So overall, although it will disappoint those who expected something similar to the older version, it is not a bad orchestration of the fruity floral recipe that has been so popular these past seasons. It’s actually quite a pleasant one in the midst of many generic ones ( I can name a few….) although I can’t bring myself to say I am in love with it. The bottle however is another story…..
The new Nina is available in eau de parfum of 30ml for 33 euros, 50ml for 45 euros and 80 ml for 55 euros. It will launch in US and UK in September. You can pre-order it from Escentual.co.uk
Artwork: Mother and Child by Klimt (courtesy of allposters.com)
Some info on history of Nina Ricci by Toutenparfum
two commentsCan I still buy the old Nina fragrance? Where? I loved it so!
Dilly - 27 03 09
ugg boots
lanruo () - 15 08 09
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