Guerlain Perfume & Women's Fragrance

Guerlain is an esteemed French perfume house founded in 1828. Their perfumes are recognized as some of the best in the world and over the nearly 200 years they have been in business they have a leader in innovation, being the first to experiment with synthetic substances in scents and introducing the gourmand fragrance.

The house can trace its origins to a small perfume studio opened by chemist Pierre Francois Pascale Guerlain. It wasn't long before Pierre's imaginative scent creations caught the interest of Paris most influential people and he was soon able to open a second store, finding himself creating bespoke perfumes and colognes for royals like Napoleon III and his wife, as well as Queen Victoria herself. The perfume Guerlain created for Napoleon III's wife Empress Eguenie is still available for purchase as Eau de Cologne Impériale (1860).

The role of master perfumer was inherited within the family. It was the third master perfumer of the Guerlain line who would really make the brands modern legacy. Jacques Guerlain was a classically educated and extremely secretive perfume genius who had been brought up to become master perfumer as his uncle had no offspring of his own. He would designed around four hundred influential perfumes, many which remain popular to this day, but he never held a interview or made public appearances. Many of his fragrances were directly inspired by literature and art. Among his most famous Guerlain perfumes are L’Heure Bleue (1912), a soft perfume with aniseed and floral notes inspired by impressionism, Mitsuoko (1919), an oriental mystery of a scent with cool notes of citrus, on warm cinnamon and wood and the powdery amber scent Shalimar (1925) which was one of the first fragrances to be based on vanilla which is commonplace now but extremely unusual at the time. The vanillin-drenched juice used to create Guerlains sweet fragrances was called Guerlinade and has been a part of most of their creations. The latter two are still among the Guerlains best-selling fragrances and especially Shalimar has endured and is considered the basis of modern women's perfumery by some.

He continued creating until the 1950's and his last perfume was created with his successor, grandson Jean-Paul Guerlain, who would be the last Guerlain master perfumer to be part of the family. Jean-Paul is behind scents like Chamade (1969) and the floral Samsara (1989), as well as a large number of fragrances for men.

Guerlain was acquired by the LVMH, the luxury conglomerate which owns Dior, Givenchy, Luis Vuitton and many others, in 1994. Many perfume fans feared that this would mean the brand would become commercial and cheap but Guerlain has carried on just as before. It is still largely managed independently but the change has meant that new perfumers have been brought in, including Olivier Cresp and Thierry Wasser, the new master perfumer. La Petite Robe Noire (2009), a lovely youthful perfume with cherry, liquorice, berries and bergamot, is a more modern Guerlain fragrance and has been very successful, being released in many limited editions since the debút.