Sometimes the name and the press release throws me for such a loop I can’t give a perfume a proper assessment. Last fall’s By Kilian Voulz-Vous Coucher Avec Moi caused me this confusion. It has taken a few months for me to return to it with less personal baggage. What I found was a pretty faux-white floral.
Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi is the fifth perfume of In The Garden of Good and Evil collection. With a name like that I expected a collection of dangerous seductive fragrances. For the most part they have been more PG than R-rated. This latest release was maybe going to embrace those qualities I was looking for. Perfumer Alberto Morillas was present to follow-up his previous entry in this collection, Good Girl Gone Bad.
Alberto Morillas
The name comes from the song “Lady Marmalade” sung by Patti LaBelle in 1975 and done by the quartet of Christina Aguilera, Lil Kim, Mya and P!nk. The song is about a New Orleans prostitute. Her come on; Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi is repeated throughout the song. It translates to “Do you want to sleep with me tonight? It became the one French phrase armchair Lotharios added to their come-on in the 1970’s. It is almost impossible not to hear the song while wearing and writing about the perfume. Which was my mistake. The song and the perfume have nothing to do with each other.
Furthermore, the imagery on the By Kilian website has women also looking seductively in to the camera. All together with a note list featuring tuberose and gardenia I wanted a fishnet wearing sassy lady of the evening daring me to take her on. M. Morillas has composed something which is more about the demurest of the white flowers, orange blossom. The gardenia and tuberose are only there for support and not to be the focal points. Which makes the perfume more a pretty girl than a working girl. That was what I had to wrap my expectations around.
Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi opens with a lovely mandarin which disappears as the orange blossom arrives. The keynote in the heart is ylang-ylang in all its deep floralcy. The other floral is a Bulgarian rose which adds a pinch of spiciness. Not enough to make this even the slight bit sultry. In the base M. Morillas pulls out the vanilla. The overwhelming sweetness is cut a little bit by cedar but the end is very sweet. Very late on the softer white musks make an appearance.
Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi has 18-24 hour longevity and average sillage.
Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi is best described as a softly sweet floral. I wonder how different this would be had M. Morillas unleashed a gardenia and tuberose indolic swagger but that is a different perfume. The one which is here is a nicely constructed floral perfume which will only call to mind innocent beauty.
Disclosure: This review was based on a sample provided by By Kilian.
–Mark Behnke
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