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Vivienne Westwood is inspired by the storybook Alice

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A Day in a Life with…

Ô DE LANCÔME

 

From name to bottle

Ô… as in Ô what nerve it must have taken, but what a brilliant idea!
A single letter to express the concepts of water (“eau” in French), freshness, surprise and even a dash of impertinence… Topped with an elegant, distinguished circumflex accent to identify it as both French and as part of the Lancôme brand’s genetic heritage… Plus a frosted bottle with an emblematic design, the ideograms in relief evoking waves spreading across the surface of a liquid…
If this Story of Ô can still attract our attention, almost 40 years later (in the midst of a wave of commemorations of ‘68), it is precisely because the fragrance draws on that period of upheaval. Launched in ‘69, the project “grew up” in the era of Woodstock, war resistance and Women’s Lib.
All that in a fresh “little” eau?
Well, yes! Three years after Dior’s Eau Sauvage, which paired hedione (a green, jasmine-like note, and an amazing freshness booster) with a high-fidelity woody-chypre base for the first time, Little Miss Ô de Lancôme took the exploration of this new approach to fragrance one step further. The hedonic pursuit of freshness that you wore essentially for your own pleasure; a certain distance from the statutory way of wearing perfume, which had been codified by the big couture houses and the emblematic fragrance brands. In the midst of the hippie revolution, Lancôme staked a claim for freedom, movement and even back to nature… The fragrance’s first ad campaign is eloquent in that sense: 2 young women in the countryside – hair “blowing in the wind,” – walking with their bikes and incarnating a carefree “joie de vivre” in an atmosphere like a cross between David Hamilton and a romantic French film…



 
From bottle to scent

Faster than a time machine, Ô de Lancôme brings me right back to my childhood! I’m about 10 years old, it’s almost summer, and I’m about to step into the bath. Through the open window, I can hear the sounds of rustling leaves and lawnmowers. Breathing in the warm, damp air, I recognize the scent of my mother’s eau de toilette. A neat, precise, and delightfully tangy impression of cleanliness. A sun-and-lemon trail that still shivers in the air, like a sort of carpet of liquid shade… Nothing like the eau de colognes whose fleeting impression fades so quickly from our memories. In this case, I can still conjure up the sensation of a long blade of crabgrass, crushed with a zest of bergamot and honeysuckle petals. Then very quickly, the alchemy of woods – vetiver and patchouli – interwoven with damp mosses, and a promise of freshness that won’t go away. That’s what makes it so extraordinary, that olfactory space where they suddenly transgress the laws of the ephemeral to capture a moment of euphoria, the grace of a pastoral landscape or a teardrop of light. A small revolution of its own – far from the demonstrators in the streets – that takes advantage of the latest advances in perfumery, which is also starting to emancipate itself. For Ô de Lancôme didn’t invent the idea of a fresh eau: eau de cologne had long attracted those looking for a sense of well-being… and of discretion. What it did introduce, on the other hand, in Dior’s Eau Sauvage’s footsteps, was the idea that freshness doesn’t have to be synonymous with goodbye to long-lastingness, or to a genuine signature. A new olfactory adventure had been launched, and perfumery would continue to explore its charms and powers until the early 80’s: Eau de Rochas, de Courrèges, de Guerlain, de Patou, de Givenchy, Eau d’Hadrien (Annick Goutal), Eau de Cologne d’Hermès, and even Cristalle (Chanel) and Diorella (Dior) would successfully pick up the gauntlet of those fresh, signature thrills that left their mark on an entire generation.
 

 



In a nutshell

Name: Ô
Brand: Lancôme
Size(s), price(s): Eau de Toilette in a 2.5-oz. (€48.50)
or 4.2-oz. (€64.10)spray.
Concentration: Eau de Toilette
Gender: Marketed to women, it’s impeccable for men, too!
“Official” olfactory family: Citrus-aromatic
Perceived olfactory family: Fresh, with a chypre signature
For whom: Everyone looking for freshness!

 
Sex-appeal factor:

Beside the point, as sex-appeal is rarely what fresh eaus are about…
Evolution: It starts out quite zesty (lemon, bergamot, mandarin orange), then goes woodsy and slightly chypry almost immediately: this surprisingly lively formula’s dynamic is based on that refreshingly sparkling elan…
Long-lastingness: Taking its olfactory family into account, the signature’s persistence is actually quite surprising… This paradox can be explained both by the presence of certain ingredients like patchouli, vetiver and moss and by the composition uniquely characteristic identity.



 
 
Innovation potential:
    
     
 


 




Fabienne ANTONIEWSKI
Fragrance journalist

From marketing to journalism, the world of cosmetics and fragrance has been the common thread in her career for over twenty years.
A frequent contributor to Elle magazine’s ‘Beauté’ column since 1995, she reconnected through her writing with one of her first loves: perfume.
Helping readers smell and dream, inventing new scenarios, putting feelings into words; she aims to evoke the most intimate and emotional facets of a fragrance, the better to resist reducing it to a banal consumer product.
She still considers that defending the artistic side of perfumery and encouraging creativity and the search for meaning and quality is one of the main points of her profession.