Maison Tahité
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The vanilla blossom erupts with talc-like dryness, all white florality and powdered sugar. For fifteen minutes, you're wrapped in the scent of a vanity mirror's reflected light—clean, almost austere, with pralin notes creeping in like caramel dissolving in milk.
The composition relaxes into its true character as that initial floral diffidence vanishes. A creamy, praline-tinged sweetness settles across the skin, thickened by talcum's persistent veil, creating something that oscillates between a luxury cosmetic and a gourmand confection. The synthetic quality becomes unmistakable here—this smells like vanilla's Platonic ideal rather than anything grown.
Benzoin takes the wheel, reducing the composition to its essential sweetness whilst adding a papery, almost slightly smoky base. The praline and talc fade into suggestion, leaving only a soft, powdery sweetness that clings closer with each passing hour. Longevity falters considerably here, but what remains feels like the olfactory equivalent of a fading photograph.
Vanilla² wears its reductionism as a virtue rather than a limitation. Marie Duchêne has constructed something genuinely singular: a fragrance that doesn't attempt to disguise vanilla's inherent sweetness but rather interrogates it from every conceivable angle. The vanilla blossom opening immediately signals intent—this isn't the dark, cured vanilla of Madagascar or Tahitian pods, but the powdery, almost innocent scent of the flower itself, before fermentation does its work.
What emerges is a creamy synthesis that feels almost pharmaceutical in its precision. The heart's talcum accord doesn't cower beneath the vanilla-pralin combination; instead, it creates a peculiar tension—a sweetness that simultaneously suggests a freshly powdered skin and a fistful of caramelised hazelnuts. There's something decidedly artificial about this interplay, though not unpleasantly so. The synthetic accords (64%) prevent this from ever feeling natural or comforting in the manner of conventional gourmand fragrances. Rather, Vanilla² occupies an uncanny valley between cosmetic counter and patisserie.
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4.0/5 (170)