In the world of PerfumeTok, Delina went viral with 105.6 million posts for its fruity floral fragrance that wraps skin in rose, rhubarb and vanilla.
Parfums de Marly’s Palatine, the brand’s latest perfume, is poised to become just as Internet famous thanks to clever chemistry and a backstory that will make you smile with every spritz.
As expected, its elaborate, tasseled glass bottle with bejewelled crystal lid gives a nod to the lavishness of an 18th century French chateau. But in the same way that Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette mixes period pieces with new wave music from the ‘70s and ’80s, Palatine takes an old-school raw perfume ingredient and gives it a modern lease of life.
Let me explain. In perfumery, violet petals have traditionally been used to lend a certain type of frilly sweetness to a scent. Imagine spritzing great big powdery wafts of Parma Violets sweets onto your pulse points, and you get the picture. It earned perfumes that go heavy on violet a reputation for being dowdy, fusty and, above all, old-fashioned.
But Palatine is different. The actual smell of violet petals isn’t the result of plucking the flower to extract the fragrance. Instead, breakthrough Headspace technology was used, where the flower’s scent is released under a glass dome and the molecules in the air are measured.
This allowed Julien Sprecher, founder and artistic director of Parfums de Marly, to move the scent away from smelling like your grandmother’s wardrobe or to be too much like a skin scent. Instead the violet petals have been re-interpreted to smell slightly sweet but also tart, so that they have this really edible, binge-worthy appeal.
Then in an interesting feminist plot twist, Parfums de Marly’s Palatine took a traditionally masculine note in colognes – lavandin – and dropped it into the heart of this overtly feminine perfume to really amplify the sharp tang of these violet petals.
Pretty clever, no? It’s also fitting as the perfume’s namesake was Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria, a.k.a Princess Palatine, who was renowned for her free spirit and independence in Chateau de Marly’s court – a rarity for a woman in the 17th century.
“To celebrate that audacity, I wanted to revisit the violet petal, a note that tends to be perceived as traditional, and make it the heroine of a composition that is, on the contrary, quite contemporary and unexpected,” says Julien.
What does Parfums de Marly’s Palatine smell like?
I’m not typically a floral perfume lover but there’s just something about Palatine that draws me in for a second, third…and fourth sniff. I think the biggest reason for this, is that it doesn’t lean into classic jasmine, rose or lily.
