When Alessandro Michele joined the fashion house as creative director, the beauty industry was delighted to learn that he was a fragrance aficionado as well as a fashion innovator. The Alchemist Garden Collection was created in partnership with perfumer Alberto Morillas. The apothecary-style collection features seven perfumes, three scented water, and four perfumed oils, each with a different Gucci animal personality. All are designed to be layered to create bespoke scents, with 48 different combinations possible.
“Gucci The Alchemist’s Garden is about raw materials and each of the stories magnifies a hero ingredient. Oud, amber, violet, iris, mimosa, rose, and woods,” says Morillas. “Each fragrance is linked to a memory—a walk in the forest, a tour in the center of Rome when the mimosa is in bloom, the purity of the rose just before its harvest in the field… Just play with the scent to find your favorite, as an alchemist would work to find the gold formula.“
The year, Gucci Garden Eau de Parfum joins The Alchemist’s Garden to celebrate the place from which it takes its name, Gucci Garden boutique in Florence. The key ingredient in the Gucci Garden fragrance is the broom flower, which was traditionally associated with magic and alchemy, and was used in spells for purification and protection. Broom has a sweet, long-lasting, and voluptuous note: floral, sweet, honey-like, and fruity, with a hint of bitterness and with warm tobacco-like nuances.
The fragrance is underlined with the sensuality of violet and benzoin, which extend its delicate signature. The violet flower note is floral, powdery, and slightly sweet iris-like scent; while benzoin, a balsamic resin collected from the barks of species of trees in the Styrax genus has a sweet, warm, and vanilla-like aroma. It is delicate, with cinnamon and amber-like balsamic facets. The combined effect of these three ingredients is a sophisticated floral scent.
With only 1,000 of these being made, the new limited-edition fragrance comes in a covetable lacquered glass bottle in black that will surely appeal to those who value the idiosyncratic aesthetic of objects that bring to mind the decorative eye of the artisan. “Gucci Garden” is written in gold lettering on the front in the Gucci Garden script and is surrounded by a vegetal crown decorative motif, while on the back a white black-framed label bears the ingredients list in a vintage newspaper font, with a smaller label below displaying the hand-written identity number.
All bottles come inside a black moiré pouch with the same Gucci Garden gold lettering and vegetal crown design. The carton is a white black-framed box displaying “Gucci Garden” in the Gucci Garden script in black, and the emblematic Gucci Eye and Stars motif, also in black.
The new Gucci Garden Eau de Parfum is available at Gucci Greenbelt 4, Shangri-La Plaza East Wing, and Rustan’s. To know more, follow @ssilifeph on Instagram or visit www.ssilife.com.ph
