discontinued perfumes

Cote d’Amour by L’Artisan Parfumeur (Long Gone)
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Cote d’Amour by L’Artisan Parfumeur (Long Gone)

Hi Crew, Cote d’Amour byL’Artisan Parfumeur was released way back in 2009. I remember first trying it a few years later and it was already impossible to find, especially out here in Oz. Then it turned up on Surrender To Chance a few years later in the 8ml sale. So I bought some. My decant is nearly 2/3 gone and after that there will be no more. I thought you might like to enjoy one of my last ever wears of this beauty together.

It caught my eye that this is a Celine Ellena fragrance. Cool!

Cote d’Amour by L’Artisan Parfumeur 2009

Cote d’Amour by L'Artisan Parfumeur

Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Top: Rosemary Grapefruit Tangerine
Heart: Immortelle Cypress Rose
Base: Pine Woodsy Notes Laburnum

My memories of first smelling Cote d’Amour are very fuzzy now, the where is completely gone. I do remember being told that L’Artisan were trying an All Natural route but smelling its now that seems highly unlikely. What I do remember is thinking how differently the pieces were put together. That it smelled like pieces of things I knew but nothing smelled quite like it. Also the name, it felt like love as an adventure. Something you’d travel great distances to find. Haven’t we all?

Anyway, let’s smell this long lost beauty eh? The happily strange greenly herbaceous citrus is gone way too quickly and overtaken by crisp green woods. There are still tinges of the opening, hollow reminders. The immortelle is clean, all that gooey, sticky, stanky fabulousness shorn off. It’s still recognisable but barely. This is immortelle light and if its presence is often a huge no for you then this will sit quietly enough I’m sure. I’m getting some very vanilla vibes, and some cedar-ish pencil shavings. Funnily, Jin just bought persimmons and the scent is a little like them with woody overlay.

Cote d’Amour L'Artisan Parfumeur

Though this has very typically L’Artisan low longevity when it starts to fade off and meld with my scent it becomes a sexy me but WAY better. So manly. Well, clearly that’s some connection I’m making from past olfactory experience. Can’t place it but that soft overtone on my own smell is bloody good. Not fragrant anymore but a sheer overlay. Very cool.

Do you remember this? Did you get to try it?
Portia x

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Dreaded D-word and Back-up Bottles

Discontinuation is a horrifying word for many of us. More than once I caught myself feeling sad when I heard the news about perfumes being disconnected – sometimes even if those weren’t perfumes I loved or wore.

A while ago in the post on this topic Blacknall wrote:

Anyone who loves perfume tends to complain about the arbitrary way in which one scent after another can bite the dust, but we have to remember after all these are businesses, not revolving exhibitions. Either perfumers manage to stay current with public tastes and fashions or they don’t, and when they don’t, sales decline.

Even though I agreed with her in principle, something bothered me – so I kept thinking.

While discontinuation might be a necessary evil, a conspiracy theorist in me has a lot of doubts. Are those perfumes that get discontinued really worst sellers? Or, with everything else being equal, do companies put on the chopping block something that is more expensive to produce – be that due to costs of raw materials, bottle production, packaging or any other components that affect the bottom line? And isn’t it a negative reinforcement: companies train customers to like simpler perfumes that are cheap(er) to produce, put much more into promoting those – and as a result get lower sales for better perfumes and then discontinue them?

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I’m not even sure that reasons are the same for different companies in the same market. But I’m wondering if it is really in companies’ best interest to silently kill off the scent that didn’t meet whatever criteria are required for staying on the show for the next season. Is there really any downside to letting loyal fans know that the discontinuation is coming, which would allow them to stock up on their favorites? (And if we’re talking about the U.S., those would be acquired at full price since perfumes never go on sale in big department stores here.)

Whatever the truth is, I don’t expect to learn it from any of LVMH or Estee Lauder‘s companies. And since the reasons would be different for those brands, for which economies of scale do not apply, there’s not much sense in asking them either. So I’ll have to keep wondering until somebody publishes an all-revealing memoir.

When I recently heard of three of the perfumes I like being discontinued – Diptyque Volutes, Bvlgari Black and Tom Ford Fleur de Chine, – I realized that I wasn’t ready to buy a second bottle of any of them. Eau de Tommy Sooni II has disappeared with the brand, but even if I could find a bottle now, I’m not sure I would buy it. I might regret it one day but for now it feels like I have enough of them, taking into the account SABLE (Stash Above & Beyond Life Expectancy – Vanessa ©) state of my collection. I thought about it more and realized that Ormonde Jayne Ta’if is the only one, about which with a 100% certainty I can say that I’d buy a back-up bottle (or two) in a heartbeat at the first mentioning of the D-word.

Ormonde Jayne Ta'if

Look at your collection. Disregard decants, samples and “to buy” lists and concentrate only on full bottle of perfumes that are still in production. Now imagine that you learn that those all are being discontinued (not all at once: that would be too cruel even for a hypothetical question). Are there any perfumes for which you would buy a back-up bottle?

Images: my own