Thierry Mugler has produced some singular perfumes under his fragrance label. Angel and A*Men are scents that elicit sharply divided opinions but they smelled like nothing else out there when they appeared. Most recently Thierry Mugler has been happily producing some of the best flankers of those fragrances as the recent A*Men Pure Malt and Alien Sunessence releases were very good examples of how to make a flanker and not keep is so slavishly akin to its parent. Starting in March of this year Thierry Mugler began to beat the drums about their new fragrance, Womanity. They started by creating a website to allow women to express themselves. Something I thought was done regularly on Facebook but perhaps not. Finally they started to let out snippets of what Womanity the fragrance was all about. In typical Thierry Mugler fashion it was full of flowery language and felt like it should have ended like the old opening to Star Trek with “To Boldly Go Where No Woman Has Gone Before!” Then the note list arrived and while there was much there that was familiar there was something there that was definitely a new, if not final, frontier in perfumery; a caviar accord. A caviar accord in a women’s fragrance? I felt like I might have changed the channel on my imaginary television and Saturday Night Live had come on and it was like a “Bass-O-Matic” commercial or Amy Pohler going, “Really Thierry Mugler do you think a woman wants to smell like fish eggs…really!” The truth is that Womanity and the caviar accord with it are much more subdued than you would expect and that quietness is perhaps the most surprising thing about Womanity.
Because it is the most unique thing about Womanity and like all good Star Trek episodes there is just an amount of technobabble that is necessary to move the plot forward so it is with this caviar accord. Here is the explanation of the exclusive Mane molecular extraction method by Pierre Aulas Olfactive Director of Clarins Fragrance Group, from the press materials, don’t say I didn’t warn you;
“The principle of molecular extraction is not to observe the surrounding air, but to steep the ingredient that you want to analyze into an inert and totally harmless gas. The raw material is thus immersed in a gas in a liquid state, in which it will macerate for a certain amount of time. Then the liquid gas evaporates, leaving only two drops of the olfactory quintessence in liquid form, which will be analyzed by gas phase chromatography; it is much more precise than the former “Head space”-type methods because you totally immerse the substance in this liquid gas; much greater interactions take place and you can capture elements from the top, heart and base alike, with a great deal of precision. This molecular extraction results in olfactory reconstitutions that enable us to create an accord extremely close to the element in its natural state.”
The two ingredients they inflicted this molecular extraction process on were fig and caviar. The idea was to create a sweet and savory fragrance. On that score I think they failed and, Fabrice Pellegrin and his team, instead created a fruity marine fragrance that is not bad if not as bold as I might have hoped for.
The thing I liked most about this year’s Alien Sunessence was a bright pink grapefruit note that seemed impossibly bright for that kind of note. It re-appears in the opening of Womanity and as I was already pre-disposed to liking it that made the opening stages of Womanity hopeful. The molecularly tortured fig showed up next and I found it to be a very green fig, on my skin it blended nicely with the pink grapefruit and it added sweetness without turning it into cotton candy on my skin. Now the “caviar” accord appears and it is like the Star Trek Transporter materialized it without all of its elements. After going through the Mane molecular extractor, caviar becomes a deep briny marine accord. There is nothing even remotely fish-like about it. Instead it has that fresh sea spray kind of aspect that really added an unusual aspect to Womanity that I found I liked quite a bit. The fig and the sanitized caviar accord combine quite beautifully. The base goes towards the promised fig wood and this is where I would’ve liked to see a deeper woodiness appear. Something along the lines of the lemon wood basenotes of, another fig fragrance from earlier this year, Annick Goutal Ninfeo Mio. Womanity chooses a lighter woodiness and for many I think that will be more enjoyable especially in these last days of summer.
Womanity has excellent longevity and average sillage compared to all fragrances but perhaps the least sillage of any fragrance to carry the Thierry Mugler label.
Womanity in the end does not push the envelope as much as other fragrances from Thierry Mugler have in the past and perhaps that is good. If Thierry Mugler wanted to create a fragrance that is more easily wearable by more women without the “love it or hate it” divide Angel and/or Alien evoke then I think Womanity fulfills that mission. No technobabble necessary to understand that.
Disclosure: This review was based on a sample of Womanity supplied by Thierry Mugler.
-Mark Behnke, Managing Editor