Violet Ida

Violet Ida reads like a love letter to old-fashioned face powder, the kind kept in enamelled compacts and applied with swansdown puffs. Mathieu Nardin has crafted something defiantly retro here—this is powdery in the purest sense, building its soft-focus haze through the unexpected marriage of carrot seed's earthy rootiness with orris butter's aristocratic cool. That carrot note works as more than mere novelty; its vegetal, slightly musty character adds ballast to what could easily have floated off into pure confection, grounding the violet and heliotrope in something almost savoury. The heliotrope brings its characteristic almond-marzipan facets, whilst the violet itself feels photorealistic rather than sugared, its green stems still attached. Orris butter—that most luxurious of iris derivatives—provides the powdery backbone, its lipstick-smooth texture amplified by vanilla that stays polite rather than cloying. The liquidambar (sweet gum resin) adds a balsamic warmth that stops this from reading as merely pretty, introducing a subtle spiced-wood quality that gives the composition unexpected backbone. This is for those who understand that "powdery" isn't an insult but a texture, a mood, a deliberate aesthetic choice. It suits cerebral dressers who favour natural fabrics and unstructured silhouettes, worn whilst reading in good light or browsing second-hand bookshops. Decidedly grown-up, yet never stuffy—a paradox wrapped in cashmere.