Eau de Magnolia
Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle (2014)

Beautiful magnolia... but not something I'd personally desire to wear out. It's a nice bedtime scent for me but I'll probably never wear it for anything else.

Jasmin/celery jasmone/delphone. Very green aspect with the bitter metallic type of greenness as in PADMA, Green Ivy Givco, the green quality you get in air fresheners. Smells pleasant enough but I wouldn't pay a lot for it.

Bright and fresh bergamot, zesty lemon, crisp but not sharp, very refreshing. Flowers quickly join, especially magnolia and muguet to form a nicely balanced citrus floral combo that is sweet and invigorating at the same time, gorgeous!
This is backed up by white musk that provides a clean facet to this warm weather/sunny day go-to scent.
Not that they're similar or redundant, but Eau de Magnolia is doing with magnolia what Lys Mediterranee does with lily.

Lunch in the Garden BY Henri Lebasque

I'm having a hard time deciding if I like Eau de Magnolia or not. It's one of those perfumes that has a fairly direct smell (limpid flowers) but achieves that via an extremely complex support structure.

So what does it smell like, in depth? It goes on with lollipops of every possible flavor made petite and perfumey with soap and fabric softener musk. But the real star is a mix of orange blossom and rose, made to smell limpid and gorgeously watercolored by a carefully matched piquant vetiver. There's more (for instance a pesky pink pepper that only really shows in the sillage), but the whole point is how the florals are made to smell so evocatively watery with a combination of vetiver and cheap synthetics.

And that's where my problem lies. As much as I am in awe of the limpid florals, I'm turned off by the crass pink pepper/lollipop/fabric softener elements. It's like a fantastic statue carved of the finest marble, but then when you look up close, part of it is clearly made of cheaply molded plastic. If this were almost anyone except for Malle, I'd just vote thumbs up and leave, but I expect more from him. If anyone should be able to do this without stupid pink pepper and lolipops, it's him. So that's why I'm voting neutral.