Gigi Jardins d'Écrivains 2012

Gigi is referred to as a comedy; in any case, this short novella has been adapted for a musical and a film. Gigi was also performed as a boulevard comedy with Audrey Hepburn on Broadway with great success. A comedy is a drama that takes a witty-humorous course and must end happily. Gigi is about a naive young girl whom a man wants to claim as his mistress through an intriguing "arrangement" with Gigi's sister. Of course, Gigi knows nothing about it. When she realizes what a treacherous game is being played with her, the man feels sorry and formally asks for her hand.
It is quite strange that this heterosexual short story by the writer Colette has become so well-known, primarily in the USA.
Colette was a talented, respected, and honored writer of the early 20th century. I read her books when I was quite young; it was just "in" to read them in my circle of friends. Especially one friend, whom I admired greatly, encouraged me to read her books. But I found them boring, and little of it stuck with me. It all seemed too complicated, and I didn't understand what it was really about.
Colette, like all the fragrances from the perfume series "Jardins d'Écrivains" that I have tested so far, is about writers whose love lives and sexual dispositions did not conform to the norms of bourgeois society, nor do they still conform.
Colette was married several times, but she also had a lifelong friend who was her lover after her first marriage.
She was also part of the Moulin Rouge variety show for a while and performed, among other things, the pantomime "Rêve d'Égypte," where the women passionately kissed each other. There was a commotion, the police had to come, and the play was canceled and banned.
As I know today, I did not understand the many allusions Colette made to homosexuality, particularly among women. What did I know about it 50 years ago? Nothing! But my admired friend knew a lot about it. I didn't get that either. She seemed so knowledgeable and grown-up, mature, so it seemed to me. I only vaguely knew that she and her sister had been abused and mistreated by their father. But one must not tell anyone about such things; one would have been cruelly punished for such indecent and corrupt fantasies. The adults stuck together, and if something did happen, it was the dirty child/teenager's fault, and appropriate measures were taken. Among ourselves, we knew what was going on and revealed nothing. Much later, I understood what my friend particularly wanted to convey to me with Colette's books.
She left for good after graduating high school, supposedly to Paris, but who knows? Sigh! I had completely forgotten about her until just now.
What would have come of this indirect advertising from my friend if I hadn't been such a goose like Gigi?
Namely, when I reread Colette's biography, first on Wiki and then compared it with what I had to know inside out from my standard literature history as a bookseller apprentice, I could recognize the deceitful and sordid biography and the similarly biased literary review of Colette's books from back then. If something more precise had been written in the literature history, I would have wanted to know it even better; that's how I was then and still am. I thought of my friend first, how she got me to read Colette's books, and then I remembered many other things we did together. She was very attractive to the young men of that time, which, understandably, left her cold. I remembered the resignation before she completely disappeared from my life. I didn't understand it; it seemed so tempting: Paris, studying, the wide world. And I stayed in this backwater in the gloomy, dusty bookstore.
But this is about the perfume "Gigi." The scent of and for a very young naive ignorant woman, for example, like I was back then? I perceive "Gigi" as a more mature scent.
I certainly would not have understood "Gigi" back then and would have rejected it if it had even existed in our stuffy world.
Now "Gigi" is for me a developing feminine floral scent that leans towards the agreeable.
The overture features a jasmine that smells quite penetrating to me. This lasts for a good while. In the meantime, I have finished my research. The scent releases a beautiful tuberose for me. The tuberose largely eliminates the jasmine; I smell a bit of immortelle. Now it was time to take a look at the listed ingredients. I was almost right. Orange blossom can also smell very overwhelming. Now, after almost 3 hours, I can perceive a slight green hint, and something citrusy has developed as well. Overall, I assess "Gigi" as a lovely, delicate floral scent with light fruity undertones. The sillage is not excessive; I can already categorize the longevity as good, as the scent has a development and remains delicately intense. White musk and sandalwood are listed. White musk is sweet to me; I cannot perceive it individually; it is likely mixed with the floral scents as a reinforcement and fixative. I cannot perceive sandalwood, which I do not miss in "Gigi."
For all those who love jasmine and floral scents in general, this is a well-made subtle fragrance with a distinct character.
"Gigi" has given me a memory of something very distant and repressed, though not through its scent itself, but through my engagement with the writer Colette. Nevertheless: I do not wish to own the fragrance.