Little sister

If you’re a certain age – let’s say between 20 and 45 – you’ve probably had some experience with The Body Shop’s White Musk perfume. For me, who’s placed somewhere around the middle of that age spectrum (okay, maybe not exactly the middle), it’s via a cousin, who made it her signature scent for most of our teenage years. Those years are long behind us now but White Musk remains as youthful as ever, even as it notched up its 30th anniversary last year.

To celebrate such longevity in an industry that frankly rewards the new and the fresh, The Body Shop has given White Musk a perky little sister, White Musk Libertine. Formulated by perfumer Vincent Schäller, it balances the obvious musk notes of the original with sweet notes of Turkish delight and Chantilly cream to create a truly gourmand scent that forms the basis of an EDP, EDT, body wash, lotion and other products.

At a lunch late last year, Vincent told me and other beauty eds that it took him approximately one minute to come up with the idea for the scent after receiving The Body Shop’s brief. “It was quite clear to associate musk with the Chantilly cream,” he told us. “Then the Turkish delight accord came later.”

One minute seems kind of fast, but he assured us that subsequent research took the better part of a year. “I went to the Chateau de Chantilly [outside] Paris and saw the original recipe for Chantilly cream, discovered by Louis XIV. I came back to my lab where I tried to reconstitute this recipe. It’s not just cream and sugar, it’s much more complex – you have to use double cream, shake it on ice and then put in caramelised sugar and vanilla and put it in the fridge for two days, shake it again. Here I used vanilla, sugar, praline and milky notes to get this accord. It was the first time that a Chantilly cream accord was used in a fragrance and I thought it would match well with the musk. It took a lot of trials to find a perfect balance.”

When he’s not cooking up a storm in the lab, Vincent usually travels further afield for inspiration. “Creating fragrances, we do travel a lot and use ingredients from different parts of the world. That’s been very interesting but in the end, of course, what’s the most exciting is to share an emotion – it’s a generous act to create a fragrance. It’s not for me, it’s for you.”

He imagines the “you” who might wear White Musk Libertine is feminine, youthful and confident but above all “free”. The gourmand notes put me in mind of Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, dressed in frou frou pastels and surrounded by tables piled with cupcakes and profiteroles. Sweet, youthful, delicious, White Musk Libertine could be the scent to capture another generation.

The White Musk Libertine Collection is on sale in Australia from February 2 but I’ve heard that “spritzing squads” will be on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne this Friday and Saturday – more details are on The Body Shop’s Twitter feed.