Miss Arpels by Van Cleef & Arpels

A gem, the perfect perfume for a young lady. Appreciating something like Miss Arpels requires forgetting today’s juvenile archetypes. Nowadays, any fifteen-year-old girl is sexualized, teenagers made up like doorstops and dressed like strippers. Look, this isn’t a critique, nor is it my role to tell anyone how to dress, nor do I know if this early sexualization is good or bad; besides, it’s a debate unrelated to what we’re discussing here: perfumes. But all fragrances make you visualize archetypes, styles, and ways of being… and this Miss Arpels is the perfume a girl who is no longer a child but not quite a woman would wear. It was fabulous. Miss Arpels played with clean notes of youth against more sensual ones; the blend was perfect: innocence and mischief, clean vegetal and soapy scents crowned by carnal peaks of a delicious kiss sweetness thanks to melon, peach, and lily. It was a French urban fragrance but with a beautiful countryside summer or autumn side, flashes of bucolic and romantic notes with memories of fruit peels, fallen leaves, white flowers, and herbal tisanes. It was lovely, a simple, charming perfume with a divine dirty-cleanliness. The ideal scent for that daughter you don’t want to have a boyfriend or leave the house, but oh Lord, she’s already tired of just kissing and wants them in that part of anatomy that looks south. But she won’t advertise it; Miss Arpels wears her skirt just a couple of fingers above the knee and never thinks of a plunging neckline. She prefers a twin set. Miss Arpels is more about hinting than showing, she prefers to make you wait. Miss Arpels is the promise of sex that requires work, the complete opposite of today’s sex that’s collected like Pokémon cards. This girl plays with what she provokes and knows it, if she has to make the aforementioned guy wait months with the appropriate heat that he can handle. In short, one of those perfumes that no longer exist, from the same breed as Kenzo’s Parfum D’Été, Duende, and so many others, fragrances for young girls, not clean enough to be for little girls, nor so heavy to make you think of an adult woman, creations for an age range that’s been lost. This was simply wonderful. P.S.: Let no one be offended; there’s no rejection of women’s emancipation or the use of their sexuality. But perfumes are also poetry and theater, and Miss Arpels is the perfume of a happy, cultivated girl who doesn’t give her body to the first fool, she saves it for someone who deserves it. It had something of that natural arrogance of French posh girls, those raised on the finest batiste sheets, those who brushed their long hair with a silver comb a hundred times a day while remembering the trot of the racehorse. I feel like the critique gets so sexual, but that’s just how it is.

A perfume that feels slightly mentholated when you first wear it, I suppose due to the basil; lemon is also noticeable. It smells like a 90s perfume, sweet like a peach and a bit talcum-powdered.