Guerlain x 5: when L’Art & La Matière whispers and Shalimar growls

If you think you already know Shalimar, pour a strip on your wrist and sit with it while you watch these five new pieces orbiting Guerlain. The contrast is delicious. The long-form ode to L’Art & La Matière is silk-gloved seduction, all chiaroscuro and texture; the four vignettes around Shalimar let the legend bare its teeth.

I’m picky about brand films, but I perk up when perfumers speak. Hearing Thierry Wasser and Delphine Jelk on Shalimar is a bit like eavesdropping in the lab. Wasser has that calm watchmaker energy, the kind that respects bergamot’s brightness without sanding down the smoky, vanillic swagger. Jelk, ever the modernist romantic, threads air into the corset, making the curve feel intentional rather than nostalgic. It’s not marketing when you can almost smell the tinctures on their sleeves.

Then there’s the face. Natalia Vodianova has fronted Shalimar for years, and yes, she still looks like she wandered out of a lacquered Art Deco dream. What works is the restraint. The camera doesn’t drown her in molten gold. It lets the perfume’s character do the talking, that cool-hot push and pull I recognize from my own bottle. Last week I wore it to buy dish soap. A stranger leaned in and said, quietly, “You smell like trouble.” That’s the point.

Context matters, and historian Elisabeth de Feydeau brings a welcome pulse check. She frames Shalimar not as a relic but as a ritual, the kind that survives trend storms because it knows what it is. I nodded along, remembering the first time I caught that tarry lick of smoke under the vanilla. Pretty is easy. Ravishing takes nerve.

And about L’Art & La Matière. The film is all surface, intentionally so, a mirror held up to craft. I don’t need it to tell me a story. I want it to make me crave touch, to imagine the weight of a bottle and the grain of a note. It does that. Quietly, insistently.

Five pieces, one message. Guerlain works when it stops apologizing for seduction and lets its materials speak. Shalimar still growls. L’Art & La Matière still whispers. My skin, caught in the middle, is happy to listen.