Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor
129 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
A burst of honeyed peach meets dry red rose, with lilac threading through as a cool, slightly herbal counterpoint. The spices—warm, peppery—immediately complicate the sweetness, preventing this from ever tilting towards candy or perfume counter cliché. It's bracing and elegant in equal measure.
The peach fades to background as jasmine and orchid emerge, creating a dense, almost creamy floral core. The spices integrate fully now, warming rather than piercing, whilst that powdery accord builds—you're smelling a fragrance that feels like wearing fine cashmere against skin, soft yet textured. The sweetness peaks here, honeyed but never cloying.
Vanilla and amber form a whisper-thin base, the cedar arriving like a ghost note that suggests woodiness without declaring it. Everything becomes increasingly skin-bound, almost indistinguishable from your own chemistry within an hour. What remains isn't a trail but a memory—a faint sweetness that only reveals itself when someone leans close.
Diamonds and Rubies arrives as a contradiction wrapped in silk—a fragrance that promises opulence whilst delivering something far more intimate and powder-dusted. Sophia Grojsman's construction is deceptively simple: she's taken peach and red rose and asked them to behave like jewels, catching light rather than demanding it. That peach opening isn't the juicy stone fruit of summer; it's been oxidised into something subtly spiced, almost candied, as if the fruit has been preserved in clove-studded amber. The red rose doesn't bloom theatrically but rather exhales with the restrained elegance of a dried petal sachet, its animalic depth heightened by those spices—cardamom, perhaps clove—that prevent it from becoming merely floral.
What's fascinating is the fragrance's commitment to softness. The jasmine and orchid in the heart don't amplify the florality but instead cushion it within a powdery, almost talc-like accord that speaks to the fragrance's 1990s sensibility. This is a scent for someone who buys luxury handbags but carries them lightly. It's unisex precisely because it refuses gender signalling; the sweetness (76% according to the accords) comes whispered, never shrieked.
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Jean-Louis Scherrer
3.9/5 (101)