Picture this: You’re riding a horse in Tuscany at night. The animal’s mane feels soft as your fingers comb through it, and the light from the moon is casting a glow, guiding your way through the darkness. You pass through blue-hued fields of orris, a scent that smells a bit like a mix of cereals (i.e. slightly sweet) and wood.
You are not a fairy, and this is not a snippet of life in A Court of Thorns and Roses, but you are instead smelling the inspiration behind Gucci’s newest scent, Vanilla Firenze. If it all sounds a little bit dreamy and like magic, it’s intentional, as the perfume is part of The Alchemist’s Garden, a collection of fragrances that draw upon the history of Florence (the brand’s birthplace). Each perfume is linked to the idea of transmutation, and the alchemic study of changing base materials and metals into other precious substances.
Perfumer Véronique Nyberg imagined Vanilla Firenze as an earthy perfume with three different types of vanilla, myrr (a type of woody resin), and orris. As the rise in popularity of vanilla perfumes confirms, vanilla is alchemic in and of itself, for its ability to conjure feelings of comfort and nostalgia, something that Nyberg agrees with. She calls the ingredient “the queen of our subconscious, a universal madeleine de Proust—a comforting childhood memory that resonates with everyone.” To make the formula feel a bit more sophisticated, she combined vanilla absolute, vanilla infusion, and the intriguingly named vanilla jungle essence™, a new type of gas-extracted formation, which adds spicy notes.
Orris comes from the iris plant, and the extraction process took some alchemy and effort. Nyberg tells me that orris was kept in Florence’s artisanal caves, and that obtaining a butter format required years of cultivation and drying to retain its noble and earthy characteristics. To me, the scent smells a mix of the familiar and unusual. It’s not quite vanilla, but a dry and sweet scent, as sophisticated as a white wine.
I picture this being the day-to-night scent of a fairy queen, who sits confidently on a throne, and whose afternoon activity includes feeding crisp, sweet biscuits to her horses (let us pretend for a moment that supernatural horses can eat cookies). For me, Vanilla Firenze is a cozy cashmere scent, the kind you spray on the neck of a sweater, while eating fancy imported Scandinavian licorice. The end result is a fragrance that smells powerful and like home—which is magical in and of itself.
