Valkyrie Sylvaine Delacourte 2018

The fragrance opens with jolly citrus-ginger bonbons. Vanilla also appears almost immediately. Then comes light fruitiness and a little bit of fresh green notes.
The heart is full of spices. It's creamy, slightly sweet. At the same time vanilla doesn’t get gourmand. The smell changes and evolves, but always stays soft and not provocative.
It gets darker towards the base, the woody smoke becomes prominent. This smoke is not incense or burnt type. In drydown I get soft musk and amber.

The performance is reasonable with moderate sillage.

In general, it is a very wearable everyday fragrance. Quite classic. Perhaps the most interesting one of the vanilla collection from the brand.

Sylvaine Delacourte perfumes have been on my radar for a hot minute. They've been on my feed and all I needed to hear was "vanilla", I was sold immediately. Finally, I had the opportunity to smell these amazing scents, because I found them at Perfumeria Impressium in Warsaw by chance.

You know how much I love vanilla and you know how much I love citrus, naturally, I got my hands on Valkyrie.
Valkyrie opens with a zesty and fruity lemon, yum! But soon vanilla reaches my nose too, and an interesting note like that of sandalwood, smoke or even burned wood. The note is sour, contrasting the delicacy of citrus and vanilla. Valkyrie is like its name, something to be feared!

After dry down, the sandalwood calms down and the three most prominent notes are in an equal balance. A unity of citrus, vanilla and sandalwood.
However, that doesn't remain so very long...
If you are looking for a citrus vanilla, like that of Davana & Vanille Bourbon by 100Bon, this isn't it. On me, Valkyrie becomes a solid sandalwood fragrance, with just a sweet touch of vanilla in the background.
It's beautiful and I imagine many being seduced by it if they are lovers of these notes. I am too, but I like my fragrances with a little bit more personality these days. Especially after visiting Sense Dubai and smelling amazing and mesmerising scents of ridiculous quality.
In the evening, ten hours or so after applying, Valkyrie is a wonderful pure vanilla fragrance, that I must admit. And to my surprise! I thought the sandalwood would have it's last say, but vanilla perseveres.

When my Delacourte discovery set arrived in the middle of winter, I tried everything in it and knew I would have to wait for warmer weather. It was a particularly cold winter and I knew some of these notes were not going to radiate from my skin the way they were intended to, especially Valkyrie. In the cold, all I could perceive was a gentle powder and soft vanilla.

Well, here we are in a "heat wave" in May (29C) and WOW. WOOOOOWWWW. I love this scent as a summer vanilla. It opens with citrus, yes something fresh and lime-y. I perceive the mint in the opening. It's smells like a cocktail! The powder is here, but it's a fine powder, not a vintage one at all. The vanilla is a subtle one. It's not a fatty, room clearing gourmand. It's perfect for the vanilla curious like myself who feel assaulted by the too-muchness of Lira Eau de Parfum. In fact, Valkyrie is what I wanted Lira to be.

The level of sweetness in the drydown reminds me of L'Instant de Guerlain Eau de Parfum, but it's not floral. It's the same perfumer and I'm realising how much I enjoy his perfumes. There's a gentle hint of something resinous like in Eau Nabati, which lends itself well to warm days. It's gorgeous. I'd go so far as to say it is a better summer vanilla than my recently acquired Aqua Allegoria Forte Bosca Vanilla , but I do feel like Bosca Vanilla really needs the heat. Maybe I would prefer it to Valkyrie in July or August for the aquatic notes? It remains to be seen.

The first few wears, I noticed a middle note that was a little bit plasticky, but somehow in a good way? I often get a plastic note from vanillas and I have to wear the fragrance a couple of times to see if it will go away or not. I can say that this note is still perceptible if I put my nose to where I sprayed, but it doesn't bother me like it has in many other fragrances.

Now the sillage - superb. The Delacourte scents I tried so far all have incredible silage for being such gentle and subtle scents. This is really a house for me. I bought a full bottle of Valkyrie and Vahina. Valkyrie was definitely better from the bottle. I think having a larger spray radius has helped somehow. The longevity has also been impressive. I just re-sprayed after 6 hours, not because I needed to, but because I kept getting hints of the scent and just wanted more.

I feel like I can part ways with some other fragrances and body sprays in my collection and just use these. They only come in a 30ml now and the price is about 40 for a bottle. It's about the price of some of the trendy new body sprays, but 1000 more artistic and beautiful as a scent. They are so satisfying, I think I found the warm weather vanillas I was craving for so long! I just wish there were a 100ml or even larger, because I'm going to be using mine up very quickly.

*UPDATE - Valkyrie doesn't work so well in temps close to 40C. In that case, I really do prefer Bosca vanilla, if I'm going for an evening summer vanilla. Valkyrie is perfect for in comfortably warm temps 17-25 but not desert style hot temps. The powder is not going to be refreshing then.

I am very taken with it. Especially, and perhaps precisely, in this heat. When I spray on “Valkyrie,” a large cool glass of freshly made lemonade appears before my inner eye. Its scent rises lightly to my nose. Above all, I smell lime, accompanied by bergamot and bitter orange. Shortly after, I can recognize the mint. The lemonade is only lightly sweetened. It is delicious. Then a hint of vermouth reveals itself: The basil seems to have only been in dried form, as it unfortunately smells a bit musty, lacking the peppery freshness. But maybe the galbanum is responsible for that too? However, the lime only allows that to come through briefly and pushes back to the forefront, so that the herbal note provides only a light background. At the bottom of the glass, when the lightly sweetened lemonade has warmed up a bit, gentle creamy vanilla appears, supported by sandalwood. Although I can't really smell the sandalwood. And even here, the lime peeks through again and again.

“Valkyrie” has won me over.

Addendum: The basil comes from the Comoros.

Addendum 2/201905: How temperatures can change a scent: Today I smell the sandalwood first.

As a confessed vanilla fan, I was very happy to test the vanilla collection as part of a letter campaign (many thanks to VentoAureo!). With "Valkyrie," I initially thought of something heavy and very feminine, after all, the Valkyries are the Nordic shield-maidens. But the fragrance surprised me in another way: While I usually know vanilla scents to be warm, cozy, slightly powdery, or gourmand-baking powder-like, this one hits me with a full blast of citrus upon application, mixed with a small hint of vanilla! Here, "Valkyrie" is a wonderful and unusual scent, perfect for summer. The lime and mint remind me of a summer cocktail party with an elegant white dress code: The air is already slightly cooled, beautiful people stand around a swimming pool with mojitos in hand. In the background, Bossa Nova plays. The sillage is relatively strong here.

This beautiful, summery image, which does not fit at all with my general idea of a vanilla scent, stays with me here in the cold December for about 1 1/2 hours. The fragrance weakens, becoming only perceptible close to the skin. Enter galbanum: The scent loses its mojito flair and becomes greener, perhaps a bit musty as well. I no longer smell vanilla; the scent here is almost a bit piercing and somewhat smoky. Like the smell after the cocktail party: The limes are squeezed dry, the rum is gone, a little of the smoke from the cigars and the extinguished garden lanterns lingers over the lawn. The night carries the scent of the nearby pine forest. Everything is quiet.

The scent remains like this for quite a while, oscillating between woody-musty-smoky and limey (those are the leftover mojito limes losing their remaining juice).
At some point, something like a very washed-out, sweet-herbaceous kind of vanilla crawls out of the morning mist. It seems a bit sleepy, still quiet, rubbing its eyes, the head still buzzing from the cocktails. She is the daughter of the house's owner, looking through the open living room door at the garden that still needs to be tidied up. For breakfast, she eats a vanilla pudding (a very slight pudding note actually emerges here). It still smells a bit like liquor in the apartment; they have plundered father's good Scottish whiskey. She stretches once more, then applies a luxurious, woody cream and lies back down.

****** A beautiful scent by Sylvaine Delacourte, my favorite from the collection after testing Vahina and Vanori. If only the beautiful top note lasted a bit longer and the mustiness in the heart note wasn't there, it would be a candidate for purchase. Longevity and sillage are in the middle range, but after the lovely top note, the scent quickly becomes close to the skin.