L'Amandière Eau de Parfum
Heeley (2020)

Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez have an extraordinary turn of phrase, don’t they? One of the many things they have written that has lingered in my mind for years is their description of L’Eau d’Hiver (Frédéric Malle) as ‘an elegiac, powdery, almonds-and-water accord that takes its place next to Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée and Caron’s Farnesiana among the fragrance Ophelias of the world’ (Perfumes: The Guide, 2008), calling to mind Millais’ famous painting of the doomed Ophelia, kept afloat in a pond by flowers and tendrils of her own hair before being pulled to her ‘muddy death’. The association with the perfume is immediate – you understand, even without smelling it, that L’Eau d’Hiver is watery and delicate and even a little melancholic.

But L’Eau d’Hiver, while undoubtedly a lovely perfume, is as fragile and as milquetoast as its predecessor, Après L’Ondée, meaning that it works perfectly if you have a quiet space somewhere where you can appreciate its every nuance in slow motion, but tends to dissipate as rapidly as a mummy when exposed to the hoary breath of modern life. Both L’Eau Hiver and Après L’Ondée are a ‘bottled firefly’ type of smell that belongs more to the fairies at the bottom of a garden in Cottingley than to an irritated woman fighting her way through the crowd to get on her train to work.

Enter L’Amandière by Heeley Paris. With its boot polish lilacs, linden, hyacinths, maybe a smidge of rose, mint, and freshly cut grass, it shares the same watery translucence as L’Eau d’Hiver and Après L’Ondée, i.e., Spring incarnate, but is robust enough to stand up to modern life. It is certainly a watercolor fragrance, its soft daubs of blush pink, mint green, and duck egg blue qualifying it as one of Turin and Sanchez’ so-called ‘fragrance Ophelias’. But suffused with sturdy, air-conditioned musks and a green, unripe almond note, there is a slight thickness of body to L’Amandière that keeps it all from crumbling away into nothing.

There is also an undercurrent of sweetness in L’Amandière, but this is the faint natural sweetness you smell in crushed lilacs, green plant milk, and freshly trampled grass, rather than the sticky, all-encompassing sultriness of tonka-led takes on almond, which tend to lean towards cherry pit and marzipan. There is no fudge here, no extra weight. Above all, L’Amandière is the perfect reflection of the Heeley house style, which is discreet, refined, and vaguely pastoral, filtered through a modernist lens that allows for clarity. And this is definitely a soft, clear perfume. Nobody else but James Heeley could have, in my opinion, produced a fridge-cold spring floral with all the watery melancholia of an Après L’Ondée or a L’Eau d’Hiver that lasts longer than a sigh in the wind while sacrificing none of the ‘fairy dust’ translucence that makes those perfumes special in the first place.