Magie Noire Parfum by Lancôme

Featured review The most detailed of the latest reviews.

I want to write a long and dense review; I don’t know if you’ll forgive me, but I want to talk about this eau de parfum, which isn’t here but I had the same bottle, all glass without the black part, to remember my father who is no longer with us. Many years ago, when I was twelve and a girl wanting to be a woman, a bit obsessed with perfumes, on a trip with my father from Barcelona to Andorra, I tested this fragrance. My father, the little man, was busy buying things for my mother and something for himself, insisting all morning that he wanted me to gift him a perfume as if it were a serious matter; the poor man agreed to take me to a perfumery. There was my first encounter with Magie Noire eau de parfum, and totally in love, I said: ‘Papa, I want this one’. Right in front of the cashier, he didn’t object to paying 2,500 pesetas years ago, but the poor man was speechless all the way home. Upon arriving home, my mother asked for explanations as to why he had conceded in such a foolishness but couldn’t explain; he only said it smells very well. I will always be grateful to him; I suppose, being often a bit rough and straight, he wanted to show that a little girl’s dream could be fulfilled if she was his daughter, even if just once. My sister, who was twenty-four when she saw the perfume, was dying of rage, a contained and cheerful rage with the warmth of a sister, and me taking revenge regarding her other perfumes she never let me wear excessively because evidently I was twelve, so she didn’t let me use it always… And the poor one would sneak to put it on because she loved it. We were born almost the same day with a twelve-year difference, and we have always had very similar tastes. So much did this perfume cause that one of the times she secretly wore it, it broke when it fell to the floor from the nerves, and I, very angry but laughing, said, ‘Now what!!’, and we went to buy it both. Since then, that perfume was always something special, and I can say that evidently it has a black magic to which many people fall without remedy, both my father and my sister. And both me and her have always gifted it to each other over the years to recall the months when our room smelled of that black magic that invaded us all. I have used the eau de toilette of now but it is not like the eau de parfum or eau de toilette of so many years ago; the current one is rougher and shriller, more masculine (I like it equally because it is deep), the eau de parfum is oriental with a delicacy and splendour that few can preserve today. I imagine myself today sometimes with this perfume at twelve and I start laughing, being a person like me with undistinguished dressing forms, at twelve showing signs, but finally my final projection has been another, more sporty and undistinguished, that’s true my nose still likes to find treasures like this, even if just to enjoy them, because it is, it is a treasure.

• Sillage