Feminine Fragrance-Van Cleef & Arpels.

Oriens is the latest feminine fragrance launch this spring 2010 by Van Cleef and Arpels who stress that they were the first jewelry house to associate their name with a perfume named First, introduced in 1976. The brand is also readying for a masculine release later this year. Oriens comes after a more youth-directed composition, Féérie (2008) while borrowing from similar codes, i.e., fruity-floral notes. Like for Féérie and pushed to a greater degree, the bottle of Oriens takes center stage and offers the vision of what you could call a "statement bottle." It is hefty, its cabochon is huge and expertly colored by designer Joël Desgrippes to imitate a watermelon tourmaline

While there are no doubt marketing reasons for the introduction of a perfume which pays homage to the Orient as Asia and the Middle East are revealing themselves to be emerging dynamic markets, I prefer to concentrate for the purpose of this review on the manner in which the idea - and as it turns out - the purported tastes of the Orient, have been interpreted into a perfume composition with a global reach.

The tension one feels readily in the composition is the one existing between the oriental motif which has its tradition and expectations in Western perfumery and the tastes of the potential wearers from the global arena. It might sound pretentious to attempt to discern a planetary trend developing across all markets, but I am ready to bite the bullet by saying that if there is a universal one, that would be the greater seriousness accorded the creation of lightly textured perfumes. Since perfumery, like its companion fashion is both commerce and art, it ensues inevitably that there are both money and aesthetic interests developing around that future of perfumery. It is as if the prescience that world demography is going to explode is bringing new realities in, like the collective need to tune down our scents so as not to stifle the atmosphere and deplete both the good-will of planet earth inhabitants and the soundness of the atmospheric layers. Despite strongholds of potent perfumery, we have seen more and more a perfumery that becomes ever more polite and self-effacing.