There is nothing quite like the magic of being on holiday. Taking a stroll along the beach or enjoying a soothing cup of tea while sunlight streaks in is just the absolute best way to unwind. That feeling of freedom and reverie. Now, Aesop has bottled that feeling up, in their newest genderless fragrance: Virēre.
For their new Virēre Eau de Parfum, the Australian skincare brand has teamed up with fragrance expert Barnabé Fillion once again (the pair have been previously worked together on other scents for the label). The brand new fragrance draws inspiration from holidaying in the Mediterranean, and the captivating energies of steeping tea, and personal stories from Fillion himself.
Below, we chat with the French perfumer on how he came to craft this fresh, green fragrance, and how this new scent will perform in Singapore’s humid weather.
GRAZIA Singapore (GS): The new Virēre Eau de Parfum is inspired by a sun-soaked vacation in the Mediterranean. How do the notes in the perfume evoke this feeling?
Barnabé Fillion (BF): Virēre Eau de Parfum is a fresh and verdant fragrance, inspired by moments spent under an arbour of fig trees. A sip of green tea. The gentle creak of branches in a morning breeze. An interlude of treasured simplicity.
The idea is to celebrate the acts and gestures around tea. My inspiration was a green tea with a fresh fig flesh infusion: the idea of texture, connection and transformation, connecting the green tea, the fresh green fig—steeping and infusing—transformed by steam. There is this beautiful balance between a very sophisticated ceremony with tea which then meets something which is quite familiar, and common to people’s memory—nostalgia, memories of the Mediterranean, memories of nature in the summer. There is something poetic to me about taking time to be under the (fig) tree and taking the time to make the right tea.
GS: Did any personal memories inspire this fragrance?
BF: I wanted to recreate [the idea of] fig trees on the streets in the summer, especially in Europe, around September. The smell of a fig tree is very noticeable on the streets, even when you are passing by with a bicycle, or sitting under the tree. And in my head, the unique smell of it evokes the memories and reminiscences of summer, connected to moments of sharing, celebrating, or simply having a refreshing, healthy meal. So to bring this to life, it is all about creating a balanced aroma that reflects those elements, bringing to mind the tea infusion from dry leaf to fresh tea, the aroma of the fig trees in the air: a precious moment and memory to cherish.
This is certainly the perfect time for Virēre’s launch, because Virēre talks about the memories of summer, the nostalgia. The idea of this fragrance is a conjunction and layering of an ideal summer in the Mediterranean, with the symbolic fig tree with no fruits, but its leaves—capturing the almost peppery green freshness. This is the key imagery. So even though summer has passed by now, through the aroma of Virēre, we attempted to stretch and prolong the summer, while evoking the desire and nostalgia for the season. The summer memories linger through the smell of Virēre, we could revisit and enjoy them time after time.
GS: What was the most challenging part of creating this perfume?
BF: It was an exciting process, with lots of challenges, of course. We did extensive research on tea, and the different styles of tea—including sourcing the essence of tea, because it is not easy to extract tea. Through CO2 extraction technology, we are able to extract the smell of it as it appears in nature—the closest to when you actually smell green tea. We composed different expressions of tea, working on the balance of wood, a small input of spice, but making sure that the tea—and its resonant herbal accords—is the protagonist in the opening notes as well as the base.
There are challenges in representing fig leaves, simply because the fig [has] this side of something very peppery, something lactic, milky. When you cut the fig leaf, you always see this white liquid, and there is a bit of that smell in the figs too. There was a careful process to create this effect in the fragrance, though perhaps we would not so much call it a challenge, but more like a creative process—the art of recreating and expressing something familiar to give a new impression of it, somehow. So when we reproduce the fig, we do so with combinations of notes and accords, for example: facets of peppery spice through inclusion of pink pepper, resonant herbal notes from ingredients such as green maté which brings aromatic and phenolic notes that have compelling herbaceous, vegetal character.
GS: How does this perfume stand apart from the other Aesop fragrances that you’ve developed?
BF: The creation of fragrance is always highly collaborative, and the development of Virēre Eau de Parfum was no exception. The initial brief from Aesop was a simple one, centred on ‘green’—both imagery and points of aromatic inspiration informed the process to reach the final formulation. Throughout, there was a development of knowledge and understanding with Aesop to create a fragrance resolutely fresh and verdant in character, yet possessing welcoming layers of depth and nuance.
Virēre Eau de Parfum is part of the classic range, focused more on one memory, one destination with a few manners, but it didn’t require going into that level of research in literature like the Othertopias range. To me, it is more direct and almost more innocent.
GS: How does this perfume perform in humid climates like Singapore? How would you describe the sillage of Virēre, and how do the notes in this fragrance transform over time on the skin?
BF: Of course, the heat outside, an individual’s skin, the moisture or humidity in the air are definitely a few things that will potentially affect longevity. We did assess this and see some subtle differences in evolution, but not significantly so, no more than would be expressed by any fragrance on different individuals and under differing conditions.
The fragrance has this bright, freshness at the beginning, and then depth of long-lasting notes, which come from the different types of cedar, as well as the green maté absolute. So there are many different types of heavy molecules, which definitely will stay and confer longevity regardless of environment.
GS: How should Virēre EDP be worn?
BF: Looking at a scent that evokes summer memories, I can see it worn on light clothes. I think it could be something you wear when you meet the summer light, in the specific European blue sky, but you can wear it night and day, depending when you want to connect with this memory, on your clothes, on your friends, on your bag, in the storm or in the dark, during lunch or dinner.
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