The perfume festival, Salon de Parfum, opens tomorrow, the 19th, at Isetan.
This year's Salon de Parfum is especially exciting since it's the first one in three years because of COVID, and the niche fragrance label we carry at Lounge Sai, Liquides Imaginaires has a booth there too.
So, I went ahead and stopped by today's press preview on the 18th, a day early.
You can try the full Liquides Imaginaires lineup at booth 2 in the 6th-floor event space, so if you're planning to go, please be sure to stop by.
It's an impressive lineup, with everything from niche fragrances to luxury brand perfumes lined up one after another.
Each brand had prepared various things for the event — new releases, directors or perfumers visiting from overseas to work the booths themselves, purchase bonuses, and more.
As for Liquides Imaginaires, they launched a new scent called LIQUIDE, ahead of the rest of the world.
This LIQUIDE scent — if you're a fan of Liquides Imaginaires, some of you might be thinking, "wait, haven't I seen this before?"
And with good reason.
This bottle.
This is the silver bottle called LIQUIDE Limited Edition 2020, sold worldwide in a limited run of 925 bottles back in 2020.
Some Lounge Sai customers tried it or bought it at our pop-ups too.
Built around the concept of the scent of "silver" — something that wouldn't normally have a smell at all — it's a cool, sharp fragrance, and taking its cue from the sterling silver (925) used in silver jewelry, it was sold in a run limited to 925 bottles as well. (It's currently sold out.)
And timed with this year's Salon, they've given an early release to LIQUIDE Limited Edition 2022 in a gold package — a bottle limited to 999 pieces worldwide.
Since it shares the same name, you might assume it's just a repackaged version of the 2020 scent — but it's not just the packaging that's different, the scent is different too.
This time, in complete contrast to the silver LIQUIDE, my first impression was of a fruity scent with mandarin, simply and straightforwardly good.
I think many of you who know or wear Liquides Imaginaires would agree — this brand tends to have scents with a bit of an edge to them, so a scent that's simply and straightforwardly good is, if anything, rare for them.
After that, once it's actually on the skin for a while, the fruitiness softens but lingers, and I felt it shift into something more like the scent of water.
It's close to how the silver bottle depicted the scent of silver, something that shouldn't really have a smell at all — and water, too, is a similar kind of presence, with a scent that's almost not there. Moving from a fruity, juicy scent (to me, it evokes something tropical) into a world of scented scentlessness, it's a conceptual bottle, true to Liquides Imaginaires, that doesn't just stop at being a nice-smelling perfume.
That's the impression I ended up with, in the end.
As I mentioned earlier, this LIQUIDE is limited to 999 bottles.
We'll be carrying this gold edition at Lounge Sai's online store as well.
Stock should probably arrive sometime after the Salon wraps up.
We should have everything ready for sale online, including ordering scent strips, sometime around late October to early November, so we'll make another announcement when sales begin.
Getting back to the Salon — it's also a chance to discover plenty of perfumes beyond Liquides Imaginaires.
Also on hand with a full lineup is çanoma — carried by Context Tokyo, a select shop I'm personally close with. On top of that, çanoma's creator, Watanabe-san, along with perfumer Jean-Michel Duriez, have specially come to Japan and are working the booth themselves, so if you're interested, why not stop by?
As they say, leave it to the experts — I hope the genre of "niche fragrance," perfume made by perfume specialists, becomes more recognized and takes off even more in Japan.
At Lounge Sai's online store, we'll soon have some other appealing scents in, separate from this LIQUIDE, so please look forward to those as well.
