Hiris by Hermès (1999)
Olivia Giacobetti’s style unfailingly leaves a fine yet substantial impression, demonstrating the power to extract the scent of an atmosphere and bring them to the concentrated locus of a perfume. Her fragrances assume complexions which are pastel and mute, steeped in a gentle yet vibrant glow. Her signature is restrained and impeccable. They are perfumes that stir the tactile desire to touch and to move into; to be embraced despite its cerebral qualities. Marked with iris, its cool and strange surface attests to a delicate and sober character, in perfect consonance with this style. Giacobetti works amongst the pale and the dim, so that points of light have a more pronounced effect, and illumination feels like a deliberate aesthetic choice.
Hiris is enveloped in a veil of gossamer silk the colour of morning mist, the wrinkly petals and soft folds of the iris flower awakening, secreting their paradoxically dry and vegetal yet fresh and floral-green smell, in an atmosphere faintly reminiscent of ozone. Hiris is transparent yet powerful - and this is Giacobetti’s skill - who softens and fades opaque raw materials like a painter working on watercolour until its hues vanish into an aqueous wash, without losing the appearance of its form. Hiris has no weight nor outline, but its atmosphere is expansive. A lattice of crystalline iris, soapy neroli, and spicy carnation notes are enlivened with aldehydes, which beam a precise and rinsed light on the surface of these petals. Hiris is invisible in its base, which turns fortifying cedar wood into glass and ambrette seed to a fine musky-vegetal dust. And yet, Hiris is not airy like wisps of aromatic air, but a potent botanical extract that thinly emanates throughout space, refusing to abandon its natural reference point of iris. To view this radiant effect, one must attend to it at the perfect distance, which is intimately alongside this bouquet, so one can hear it secrete its secret smell. In Hiris, this atmosphere of scent concentrates towards a single point.
Hiris is an antidote to high impact fragrances. It is a private beauty along the order of subtlety. Its smell can only be taken in as a whole, like many whispers which become a singular voice that impossibly grows no louder. And because of this, you must take the time and care to listen to its sonorous voice. Giacobetti studies iris in all of its infinite delicacies, seamlessly formed into an expression that reveals the best qualities of the note in a single instance. In this sense, Hiris is an essence - and although it has all the idiosyncratic marks of its perfumer - this is of no issue whatsoever. It is an iris made in good taste.
