100% Love by S-Perfume

You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you, Peter Pan. That's where I'll be waiting. Tinkerbell, Hook 100% Love is a part of S-Perfume collection, produced by Shaping Room, by their own admission, “the world's smallest fragrance house”. S-Perfume comprises the creations of such celebrated perfumers as Alberto Morillas, Christophe Laudamiel, and Sophia Grojsman. The latter is the nose behind 100% Love, and that came as a surprise to me, because the scent could not be more different from Grojsman’s other perfumes, Paris, Eternity, Tresor, Jaipur, and Yvresse. Where her other creations are bright, heady, lush, “substantial”, 100% Love is incredibly subtle and delicate. Only a few of my favorite fragrances have been “love at first sniff”; more often than not, it takes several tastings for me to grow to like a scent. 100% Love however was one of those rare cases, where as soon as I smelled it on my skin, I knew I was smitten. Without being quite like anyting I have ever smelled before, 100% Love was familiar and comforting, like coming back to a place I did not remember until now but that was strangely recognizable to me. 100% Love starts on my skin with a wonderfully tart, astringent cranberry accord. It is soon joined by a delicate rose note and a whisper of chocolate. My nose may be completely making it up but I think that there is a myrrh note in 100% Love, among the middle notes. There is often a peppery (Caron Parfum Sacre) or a medicinal (Serge Lutens La Myrrhe) undertone to a myrrh note, but in certain fragrances, like L’Occitane’s new Eau d’Iparie, myrrh smells gently sweet, almost fruity, and this is the accord that my nose picks up in 100% Love. When the drydown comes, the rose note becomes more prominent and the perfume acquires a very slightly powdery smell not unlike that of vintage lipsticks and powders, only much more subtle. 100% Love is a scent of twilight; like another favorite, Jo Malone’s Pomegranate Noir, it manages to be dark and transparent at the same time. It is a childlike and yet strangely ageless and eternal scent of weightless shadows that inhabit the place Tinkerbell describes to Peter Pan, a comfortable, familiar place “between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming”. 100% Love is available at s-perfume.com, $67.00 for 60ml of Eau de Toilette. According to Now Smell This, an Eau de Parfum version will be available in time for Valentine’s Day. If my Valentine is reading this, he should be making notes. *The photo of 100% Love is from s-perfume.com and is here by a kind permission of S-Perfume. *The painting is Mysterious Rose Garden by Aubrey Beardsley.