Mitsouko

When I was a child my grandmother gave me a perfume sample she didn’t much care for, but I fell in love with. I would obsessively remove the cap, smell, and then replace the cap as not to lose a drop of it.

This perfume, as it turns out, was Mitsouko. I’ve recently started to explore fragrances more after starting with BVLGARI’s Au Thé Vert and decided to get it on a whim because I love Guerlain and like chypres. I blind bought it a few days ago after getting home from a party and worried about it—would it be too sweet? too old fashioned? too Guerlain?

I’m not going to deny that’s an old-fashioned perfume. To me it smells like my grandmother’s vanity, suggestions of my great aunt’s living room, or a museum filled with classical paintings. Old, but enduring. Of things that kept happening in spite of perfection.

The oakmoss base note is magnificent and is as enchanting as it was when I smelled it the first time some fifteen years ago. I wish I still had my old sample to compare (and to finally use some of it!).

Mitsouko being what got me interested in perfumes in the first place before becoming a milestone for me after I started learning about perfumes is beautiful—hopefully it will turn out to be my last fragrance; I struggle to think of something more beautiful than a life bookended by one of the greatest perfumes of all time.