Cacharel Amor Amor

Cacharel was founded in 1962 by Jean Bousquet in Nimes and took its name from a small wild duck of the Camargue. Its perfume history is more consequential than the label's low price suggests: Anais Anais, in 1978, became one of the best-selling florals ever made and helped invent the soft, romantic, youth-facing style that dominated the 1980s. Amor Amor, from 2003, is the house doing the same thing for a different generation. The composition is commonly attributed to Laurent Bruyere and Dominique Ropion. Its pyramid, as widely published, is generous rather than minimal. Blackcurrant, orange, mandarin, grapefruit, cassia and bergamot open it. Rose, apricot, jasmine, lily and lily of the valley fill the heart. Vanilla, tonka bean, musk, amber and Virginia cedar close it. Worn, it is unashamedly a fruity floral and unusually well constructed for one. The opening is a rush of citrus and blackcurrant, tart and slightly green, which lasts only a few minutes before the fruit turns soft. The heart is where it lives: a rounded, apricot-tinted rose and jasmine that reads warm rather than dewy, with lily of the valley keeping it from becoming heavy. Then it settles quickly into vanilla and tonka with a powdery musk, and stays there. It is sweet, it is comforting, and it has none of the sugary sharpness that later fruity florals brought to the category. It was built for evenings and for young wearers, and it still fits that. It is at its best in cooler weather, since the vanilla base amplifies in heat; a Cape winter evening suits it better than a Durban afternoon. Its reputation as a date fragrance is earned rather than invented. Performance is respectable rather than exceptional. The eau de toilette runs about five to seven hours, loud for sixty minutes, then sweet and pressed against the skin. Applying to hair and clothing extends it considerably. Two points of honesty. Amor Amor has never left the shelves since 2003 and, like almost every fragrance of that vintage, current bottles are reported by longtime wearers as sweeter and slightly thinner than early ones. And Cacharel has since added an eau de parfum version of Amor Amor, which is a different concentration and a different experience, so read the label rather than the bottle shape.