It’s a new year, a bright, sunny day, and I thought I would finally open the box of Mitsouko soap that was standing next to my bed.
Such a shame, in a way, to break through the wrapping and use up a vintage rarity that has been lying in wait for many years untouched (until I snatched it up at a flea market), but then these soaps were made for washing, to be used, and I found that today I couldn’t resist.
In the Golden Years, soaps by the loveliest perfume houses were really PERFUMED. And although this particular product may have lost some of its pungency (fresh off the Guerlain factory production line it must have been more bursting with perfumed oils), it still glowed from within the cellophane with a velvety, gourmand sliver of cake, Mitsouko as I like it best (in the parfum de toilette format preferably, when the rich and edible, friandise of Mitsouko’s sunnier elements – lost in the dour and unfriendly vintage parfum) come more to the fore, the sensuality more resplendent than the seriousness.
In the shower, the soap has a forest-white foam, lathering the skin intimately with a gentle chypre film of Guerlinade – luxuriant and pleasurable, inviting you extravagantly to begin the perfuming layer process, though with just one use, the letters you see inscribed in the hard, uninviolable flesh of the soap, have unfortunately already faded away.
