Givenchy L’Interdit EDP. What is it if not love at first sight?
I have tried the sampler from this discovery set several times, the aroma varied quite a bit — but it is always intoxicating and making me lose my head. Or, instead, making me feel that I’m losing my head. I am a professional Chrono Agent, of course, always alert and ready to react. Probably that’s precisely why I love anything that gives me this sweet illusion of intoxication, being never able to give in to it for real.
As I tried L’Interdit for the first time, it was so overwhelming that I could barely describe it. White flowers, more like orange blossom than jasmine, something along these lines. I tried the fragrance before bedtime, so probably I fell asleep too fast and wasn’t able to follow its development.
Next time I tried it in the middle of the day, ready to note any distinctiveness. The sweet orange blossom smell disappeared very fast, leaving a very champagne-like aroma. Fun thing, I can never smell the real champagne. It’s golden, it’s bubbly, it’s tasty and fresh. But when I smell it, I don’t feel a thing. Strangely, this aroma made me think about champagne, made me believe that champagne must smell just like this. There was something else on top of it, a familiar and peculiar note that left me wondering, smelling my wrists again and again, and trying to remember where I encountered it before. In time, the answer came to me: Wild strawberries! And, partially, feijoas, their smell is quite similar to wild strawberries.
Still, even after remembering the scent, classifying it in a box, I was left wondering. L’Interdit didn’t lose an ounce of its mystery. Its name suits the perfume so good, there is something forbidden (no, everything is forbidden) in this fragrance. It makes your head dizzy, it is strangely alluring, it has something dark inside, something very dark and dangerous. One would think, “How can wild strawberries be any dangerous, even if we are talking about champagne-infused strawberries?” The orange blossoms, the berries, the champagne — it would seem that all of them should be the embodiment of brightness, so radiant, these festive bubbles in the champagne, the golden glow… Yet it is not so. You draw a deep breath, and there it is, in front of your eyes, all around you — the velvet darkness pulling you in. These are the strawberries Hades fed to Persephone. Did you think the story was about pomegranates? So did I, but now I have seen the light, it could have been only wild strawberries, the most delicious fruit to ever grow in the Underworld. And now they are Persephone’s wild strawberries, while L’Interdit is Persephone’s signature perfume, it embodies everything about her.
What do you say? YSL’s Black Opium? Well, I can’t but agree that there are some similarities. Black Opium is also an intoxicating fragrant flower in the darkness. A woman wearing Black Opium is dark and dangerous, she turns the heads on her way, she is ready for the kill. She is a femme fatale, no doubt of it. But that’s it; the Black Opium woman is just a femme fatale, beautiful and probably deadly, but merely mortal and very earthly. Persephone is a goddess, and L’Interdit is the only perfume that is worthy of a goddess. Should I add that Persephone has always been my favorite goddess and L’Interdit immediately rose to the top one position in my “to-buy” list?
Champagne, wild strawberries and petrichor, the forest floor right after a rain, drops of water still trembling on the leaves. Pleasant, divine grayness of a rainy day, with all its freshness, slowly growing into sweet darkness. With a full-sized bottle, I became the happiest woman in the world, but L’Interdit still had secrets to be unveiled.
For then summer was in full swing, with temperatures up to 100F and sometimes above it. In this year’s heatwave, L’Interdit showed me the brightest example of “scents change as seasons change” I’ve ever encountered.
The bottle itself smelled of grapes and grape jelly. Extremely sweet cotton candy grapes. Sangria with lots of honey. My house has good air conditioning, but somehow the perfume felt the raving heat outdoors and brought it to me. Gray and black? The world before my eyes turned golden yellow, the color of rays of sunshine and honey. Sandy beaches, translucent teal seawater, too hot to take a sunbath, time for siesta and afternoon doses of Aperol Spritz.
This aroma was rich and robust, and it brought some lovely reminiscences. I could go on with the analogy and imagine it telling about Persephone’s summer vacation in the mortal world. I could. But I won’t. This summer-sangria-siesta smell is very human, as human as it gets. And my Persephone is always a goddess, no matter where she chooses to go.
Shouldn’t I end this review on a positive note? I shall! September chills are here, and my beloved L’Interdit is wild strawberries and petrichor again!