Miss Arpels by Van Cleef & Arpels

A gem, the ideal perfume for a young lady. To appreciate something like Miss Arpels, one must forget today’s juvenile archetypes. Nowadays, any fifteen-year-old girl is sexualised, teenagers made-up like doors and dressed like strippers. Mind you, this isn’t a criticism, nor is it my role to tell anyone how to dress; I also don’t know if this early sexualisation is good or bad, besides it’s a debate alien to what we’re talking about here: perfumes. But all fragrances make you visualise archetypes, styles and ways of being… and this Miss Arpels is the perfume a girl would wear who is no longer a child but not yet a woman. It was fabulous. Miss Arpels played with clean notes of youth against others that were more sexual; the blend was perfect: innocence and mischief, vegetable and soapy cleanliness crowned by carnal peaks of savoury kiss sweetness thanks to melon, peach and lily. It was a French urban fragrance but with a lovely countryside summer or autumn side, flashes of bucolic and romantic notes with memories of fruit rinds, fallen leaves, white flowers and tisanes. It was precious, a simple, charming perfume with a divine dirty cleanliness. The ideal perfume for that daughter you don’t want to have a boyfriend or leave the house, but oh Lord, she’s already tired of giving pecks and wants them in that part of the anatomy that looks south. But she won’t advertise it; Miss Arpels wears her skirt only a couple of fingers above the knee and never even thinks of a plunging top. She prefers a twin set. Miss Arpels is more about insinuation than showing, she prefers to make one wait. Miss Arpels is the promise of sex that costs work, quite the opposite of today’s sex that is collected like Pokémon cards. This girl plays with what she provokes and knows it, if she has to make the aforementioned wait months with the pertinent heat that he endures. In short, one of those perfumes that no longer exist, of the same breed as Kenzo’s Parfum D’Eté, Duende and so many others, fragrances for young girls, not clean enough to be for children, nor so heavy to make you think of an adult woman, creations for an age range that is lost. This was simply wonderful. PS: Let no one be offended, there is no rejection of women’s emancipation nor the use of their sexuality. But perfumes are also poetry and theatre, and Miss Arpels is that of a happy and cultured girl who doesn’t give her body to the first fool, she keeps it for those who deserve it. It had something of that natural arrogance of French pijeas, the ones raised on the best batiste sheets, those who brushed their ponytails with a silver comb a hundred times a day while remembering the trot of the racehorse. I feel the review gets so sexual, but that’s what there is.

A perfume that feels slightly mentholated when first worn, I suppose due to the basil, lemon is also noticeable. Smells like a 90s perfume, sweet like a peach and slightly talcum.