Love In Paris (2004)
by Nina Ricci

Love in Paris is a tidy, smart floral, accessible yet creatively distinctive. The flower note is broad, a sort of idealized rich, dry white/pink flower. But if the flower is the noun, fruit and herb are the adjectives. The fruit Love gives you is more the flavorful scratchiness of fruit skin—peach? plum?---than the meat of the fruit. It keeps Love from veering anywhere near syrup. The sweetness comes from the anise, not the fruit. Fruity sweetness is a lingua franca of commercial feminine perfumery, but here sweetness and fruit flavor are separate elements combined to mimic a more vernacular sweetness. Clever, actually. It’s a sly sweetness that would appeal to many noses.

In most designer releases, sweetness is two-dimensional. More volume-up, volume-down than nuance. Do you prefer 8 lumps or 12? Love gives us a compact but more three-dimensional sweetness that is a perfect backdrop for the florals. Anise also lends that chilly feel that makes the flowers feel just pulled from the florist’s fridge.

I’m a fan of this perfumer, Aurélien Guichard. Love proves that he is able to work in designer, niche and traditional house (ie. Guerlain) with equal fluency. Love, Bond’s Chinatown, Guerlain’s Anisia Bella show some riffs on similar compositional themes without repetition or monotony. No mean trick in contemporary perfumery.

24th July, 2011. (Last Edited: 10th August, 2011.)

Ehm... it's ok. Fresh fruity stuff. Can be interpreted as:
a)fruit salad!
b)fruity scented shampoo

I enjoy it sometimes, cause it's fresh, and definetly not sweet, like some perfume that want to smell like fruits, but end up smelling like fruit syrup.

It smells like fruits. So it's foody!

...and yes, it does have strong peach and banana notes, among other things.

26th April, 2010.

Wearing Love in Paris is like experiencing feminine perfumery’s recent evolution in fast-forward. The fragrance enters on a genial, traditional, and perhaps even banal spiced bergamot and floral accord that quickly sheds its citrus note to settle on a simple, soapy rose. The rose’s most obvious – perhaps even its only – accompaniment is a cut-grass green note that renders the heart brisk and refreshing where it might otherwise have been cloying.

In both style and content this phase of Love in Paris echoes classic soapy green florals of the 1970s - including scents like Ivoire and Estée Lauder’s Private Collection - but it updates the conceit by paring down the structure and dispensing with its ancestors’ aldehydic overdoses. It’s essentially an old idea that’s sweetened and brightened for a younger generation. The facelift wipes away signs of age, but inevitably sacrifices a degree of character in the process. Yet if at its heart Love in Paris is a wee bit bare and bland next to its antecedents, I have to grant that it’s also much more lively.

The classicizing pastiche of an opening having stripped itself down to a heart of “modern” simplicity, the olfactory structure lightens and brightens, and sheds all pretense of floral naturalism. The base notes are a blend of unabashedly synthetic post-modern musks and reconstructed woods. Where the former can smell like fabric softener and the latter can feel like a blow to the head from a melamine slab, Love in Paris retains translucency and balance, and a hence a sense of poise uncommon in its breed. I admit I was prepared to hate this during the first fifteen minutes, but it evolves into a pleasant, unpretentious scent that’s well-suited to everyday wear.

1st February, 2010.

Wow, what a different nose-experience. Love in Paris to me is a really pretty floral with a clove, or carnation, note that gives it some brightness, it really stands out on the skin with me so I don't wear very much; but it's great for evening wear. I like it because it's not particularly soft, but it is not brash.

6th December, 2009.

I have never gotten as many compliments on my perfume as I have since I started wearing this one! I love it. It's light but lasts long. It's fresh but doesn't smell like just soap. It's feminine yet not sooo sweet or too flowery. I've gotten complimented on it from both men and women...and I've gotten asked "what perfume are you wearing?" even by salespeople at fragrance counters. I think it's very unique. My husband doesn't like heavily sweet perfumes (hated Hanae Mori Butterfly) but he loves Love In Paris. And some people who usually are very sensitive to smell (allergies) have said that it doesn't bother them.

9th June, 2009.

I have tried and tried to get this fragrance based upon the review in "The Guide" but all I get is watered down peach and shampoo. It is not pretty, it does not evolve in any fashion, and I wouldn't want anyone to catch me smelling of this!

28th March, 2009.