Alien Eau de Parfum

Thierry Mugler had already broken the rules once. Angel, in 1992, put chocolate and caramel into fine fragrance and effectively invented the modern gourmand. Alien, in 2005, was the follow-up, and it is just as uncompromising in a completely different direction. Mugler credits it to Dominique Ropion and Laurent Bruyere, and describes it as a woody solar fragrance built around a radiant, enveloping warmth. The composition is famously short. Mugler publishes three things: jasmine sambac at the top, cashmeran, which the house calls cashmere wood, at the heart, and white amber at the base. That is the whole architecture. There is no citrus opening, no clever transition, no gradual reveal. You spray it and you are immediately inside it. The jasmine is the point of contention, and it is why people either love this or cannot go near it. It is enormous, indolic, almost purple in feel, sweetened and blurred rather than dewy or fresh. Cashmeran gives it that peculiar dry, musky, slightly resinous wood quality that reads as warm skin. The amber underneath is powdery and long. The overall effect is dense, strange and completely distinctive, and it smells like nothing that came before it or, arguably, after it. Even people who dislike it can name it blind, which is the real measure of a signature. This is not an office fragrance. It is for evenings, for cold weather, for occasions where you want to be the most memorable thing in the room. On a Cape winter night it is magnificent. On a humid Durban afternoon it can become overwhelming within minutes, and one spray is genuinely the correct dose. Performance is at the top of the market. Ten to twelve hours on skin is routine and clothing holds it for a week. Projection is heavy for the first three hours and remains detectable long after. Mugler has kept the fragrance in continuous production and now sells it in a refillable bottle, with refills available at the brand's fountains and in refill bottles, a system Mugler has run since long before refills were fashionable. The line has also grown very large, with numerous related releases, so make sure you are buying the original Alien eau de parfum rather than one of its relatives.