Frederic Malle with Acne Studios

Before we delve into this new collaboration between Acne Studios (to my mind, a really unfortunate name) and Frederic Malle, I just have to crow about our recent beautiful weather – consistently warm and sunny, just perfect – and my lily of the valley bloom. I’ve got a fair number of LotV plants coming up this year, but I only have two bloom spikes so far.

When one of them finally had enough open bells to smell, I did. And, boy – boy, boy, boy. I had forgotten how incredibly LotV smells in the flesh: so so pretty, but with an incredible musky dirty knickers aspect under that pretty. Just wow. What a springtime treat.

But, onward.

I grabbed a sample of Acne Studios after reading that this is the last Malle fragrance that he’ll be involved with. I saw this on a perfume blog I generally trust and it does seem to be out there on Google. The writer wasn’t sure if this was part of Malle’s contract with Estee Lauder or something else. I do wonder what will happen to a brand that I have a lot of time for.

In any case, he piloted Editions de Parfums for 25 years and released a lot of really great stuff.

I knew nothing about Acne Studio as a brand – had to have a look at the website. If you are familiar with it maybe the fragrance will make a lot of sense. As to the clothing offered I am definitely not their demographic – either style-wise or based on price point.

For me, this is something of a departure from many Malles and I find it quite perplexing.

Per the marketing guff, ‘this embodies the bold alliance between fashion, perfumery and art’. Sigh.

Released this year, the nose is Suzy Le Helley from Symrise. I have never heard of her. It is posited as an aldehydic floral by Fragrantica and the notes list includes aldehydes, rose, violet, orange blossom, vanilla, peach, sandalwood, frankincense and musks.

The bottle label is white vs black for all other Malles I’ve seen.

It opens on me peach/very strong caramel/powder with a whisper of something citrus. And that initial caramel sort of comes out of nowhere given the notes list.

It calms down fairly quickly into floral peach powder and the aldehydes make it smell quite artificial and chemical – and I don’t mean in a new and unique way.

I found the opening of this really hard to take. But, I persevered.

As it warms up, the aldehydes really do recede, making this easier to deal with and making the notes more individually accessible. I still get a lot of peach … a lot. I really enjoy peach as a perfume note. But, I am not sure peach and powder in this configuration works that well. It’s, well, cute rather than luscious.

As we move along I get peach with mint and pepper, with no real discernible florals. And oddly the mint is fairly prominent. But, there’s also a whisper of almond.

Longevity is fine – several hours at least — and the drydown does actually become pretty in an utterly mainstream way, which I can’t imagine Acne was after: a gently musky peach with an almond-vanilla aspect.

Bottle prices are £200 and £290 for 50 and 100ml sizes of EdP.

Sampling this made me wonder whether I should think seriously about forking out the £200 for a 50ml bottle of Carnal Flower soon (to go along with my 10ml travel size) – ie, if this is the direction of the brand from here (ie, post Malle) I feel I need to at least preserve that love in its current iteration – before someone thinks of tinkering with it.

And, the fragrance made me oddly sad. Everything Malle has done is via collaboration. That’s the whole point. But as a swansong, this feels like going out with a whisper (or even a whimper) rather than a bang.

Anyone else tried this yet?

Pics: Pexels and mine