Bella Freud – warm and woody and resinous

Photo: perfumeniche

Every once in a while, I fantasize about having a perfumer create a perfume just for me. And there are plenty of perfumers out there who offer their services to create bespoke perfumes, but as Luca Turin opines:

“Bespoke perfume, as practiced by a few famous perfumers working for large firms, is tiresome nonsense. It is predicated on three unlikely notions all being true: 1- That there is one perfume that best fits your soul 2- That the perfumer will divine which it is in the course of a one-hour interview conducted in a limo coursing through Paris and 3- That she will set aside the much more urgent work her boss is nagging her about, i.e. that shampoo version of the big seller, and focus entirely on satisfying your little narcissistic fit. That will be $200,000, thank you. I wonder how much Paul Auster would charge to write a book just for one person.”

I don’t care who you are; that’s still a lotta cash! This is when the idea of a bespoke perfume gets back-burnered.

So, here I am today writing about Bella Freud’s signature scent, the one she had nose Azzi Glasser create for her because where I currently stand on the whole bespoke thing is, if I can’t move forward with having one made for me, then the next best thing is to find someone else’s I like, and I love Bella Freud perfume.

Great granddaughter of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and daughter of renowned British painter Lucian Freud and Bernardine Coverley, a writer, gardener and free-spirit, Bella Fraud studied fashion in Rome before starting her own design company in London in 1990. In 2014, Freud partnered with perfumer Azzi Glasser and launched Bella Freud Perfumes. Her Bella Freaud fragrance was launched in 2015.

It opens with a warm, sensual, sweet note of amber and nose-tingling bergamot. As the amber settles, it gets powdery. It’s just gorgeous – something I love the smell of without knowing how much I love it until I smelled it here. Pink pepper stills the amber, allowing the rosy aspect of the berry to introduce a floral heart of jasmine, ylang-ylang, geranium and osmanthus. Palmarosa, a species of grass native to India and Indochina, has a rosy aspect and a sweetness that it adds to the heart. The flowers are perfectly matched and together create a beautiful, heady, natural-smelling bouquet. As the fragrance develops, the base of rich, earthy patchouli mixed with vetiver and aromatic Tonka bean drifts up through the flowers. There’s amber here too, and sandalwood and musk, but the inclusion of smoky frankincense closes the deal for me.

Bella Freud EdP is a deliciously amber-centric scent that dries down to a uniquely warm, woody, resinous, sensuous skin scent.

I doubt I’ll ever have a fragrance made just for me and even if I did, I’d still wear Bella Freud, cause, well, why wouldn’t I? It's gorgeous!

Check out Bella Freud in our Shop.