Aire Anthesis by Loewe

I liked it. It’s not the kind of perfume that turns your head, but it doesn’t need to be. Sometimes all I want is something that smells good, lasts, and feels like mine. This is exactly that. If you like the vibe of Waterlily Tea Dress, the Kenzos before they became too sweet, or that whole aquatic, clean, musky wave of the new millennium, this is a blind buy. For me, who loves that clean vibe, I jumped at it. I’m glad to find it among tons of launches with honey, vanilla, and other cloying paraphernalia. It opens with a milky greenery where muguet dominates, but it’s not that cloying muguet with aldehyde afternotes, like metallic milk; it’s an undefined white flower, like a green abstraction of jasmine and night-blooming cereus, without ever fully blooming. It’s supported by a cold, lactonic body thanks to the pear, which is there but doesn’t over-sweeten or take centre stage. Perhaps the rhubarb adds a fruity, speedy spark, but nothing notable. There might also be that peony I hate making a presence with a toasted floral flash, but like the rhubarb, nothing. Then comes an herbaceous and resinous accord; in my innocence, I identified it as calamus or cane, now I see it’s broom. The accord is high in perception, but if you told me it was frankincense plain and simple, I wouldn’t have caught it. Air Anthesis is light and pleasant: the muguet isn’t very muguet and the broom isn’t very broom, but the molecules recreating their scent are intensive, him like a water lily or water hyacinth and her like a reflection of a rush. The pear assembles them with its savoury milky quality. It’s a green aquatic floral with musky and woody afternotes that many will hate and others, me first, will love. I already know what my summer will smell like. UPDATE: after testing it on demand on my skin, the sour pear note is too prominent, which annoys me. Discarded. PD. The opening leans feminine but soon reveals itself as unisex. PD II. It bears no resemblance to Paula’s Ibiza. Not at all. It does remind me very distantly of Un Jardin sur le Nil by Ellena, which is a gem. This could be a distant relative, much less cluttered, fruitier, and, to put it bluntly, flatter. PD III. I totally agree with Lux’s review.

I love Nuria Cruelles’ creations, but this is the exception. It’s too expensive to be the aquatic version of Paula’s Ibiza Eclectic, and that one projects and lasts longer. Good heavens, what’s going on in commercial perfumery lately? From one disappointment to another, I’m fed up.