There are a few perfume brands which are attached to a specific place. As I sit here in the dog days of summer dreaming of vacations in places not here it doesn’t take much to let my mind wander. One perfume brand which always has me imagining the place where it comes from is Eau D’Italie. Co-Owners and Creative Directors Marina Sersale and Sebastian Alvarez Murena have produced a line of perfumes which have made the hotel which inspired it live in my mind. That hotel is La Sireneuse in Positano. The perfumes have always sparked my imagination of what the hotel looks like. The latest release called Morn to Dusk is an evocation of a day on holiday from morning until getting ready for the evening.
Sebastian Alvarez Murena and Marina Sersale
For Morn to Dusk the creative directors chose Annick Menardo to work with for the first time. Mme Menardo is another of those perfumers who spends most of her time on the more mainstream releases. I always look forward to the time she will take on a niche project. One common theme to her niche compositions is her ability to choose high quality raw materials and display them like fine jewels on black velvet. In Morn to Dusk she chose notes to represent the morning, mid-afternoon, and twilight.
Annick Menardo
The morning notes start with a sunburst of bergamot. Mme Menardo rapidly follows that up with the green floralcy of muguet. Lily of the Valley is one of those floral notes that seems so green while also containing a pretty floral character. Here Mme Menardo displays it as an early morning bloom as the daylight glitters off the petals. For the afternoon it is time for a treat as she uses vanilla as her heart note. This is a confectionary vanilla. It could represent a vanilla macaron or gelato. The muguet sticks around and that has the ability to pick up some of the deeper buried green facets from underneath the sweet in the vanilla. By twilight the day has left us ready for a shower before the evening. Mme Menardo uses a cocktail of synthetic musks to give that accord of warm skin to finish our day.
Morn to Dusk has 8-10 hour longevity and average sillage.
Morn to Dusk really did evoke a lazy day on holiday for me. It makes it one of those deceptively easy to wear fragrances that you can some time erroneously dismiss for that ease. It asks nothing more of you than to enjoy the day. Sometimes that is everything a perfume should ask of the wearer.
Disclosure: This review is based on a sample I purchased.
–Mark Behnke
