Bal a Versailles.

I was trying to decide which perfume to choose for my first review and then the answer came to me: with only one more sleep to the American premier of my adored "Versailles la Serie" it made sense to review the equally beautiful Bal a Versailles. So, this morning I grabbed my gorgeous vintage mini of the EDT from my dressing table and dabbed it on.

(The bottle poses atop one of my Paperblanks notebooks)

I know you may be thinking, 'but EDT's are so light, shouldn't you use something a little stronger for a review?' Well, not when it comes to vintage Bal a Versailles, a delightfully musky floral perfume first released in 1962. Eight hours after the first application and this juice is still going strong and projecting very nicely. I'm not sure I could handle anything stronger for fear of headaches and as the wonderful review on Perfume Posse suggests the pure perfume might be a little too umm...feral for my tastes.
Not that the EDT is low on animalic notes, no. As strongly as the fresh wafts of orange blossom, Jasmin, Neroli and Bergamot come through in the top notes, once we get down to the heart and base the leather, resin, musk and civet start to come through pretty strongly. Nothing wrong with that, if anything it helps to enhance that evocative "Versailles" feeling to the perfume because, lets be honest for all the silks and jewels at the court of The Sun King personal hygiene was a largely ignored idea and unwashed courtiers drowned their own body odours beneath layers of heady perfumes including, paradoxically, civet.
The perfect thing then to wear if you are going to indulge in "Versaille la Serie", making the series a full on sensory experience, or it would if the courtiers and royals in this T.V series were not suspiciously (if deliciously) well bathed and the perfume references were not so thin on the ground. A great shame given that Louis XIV's minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a great supporter of the perfume industry and, until a later life aversion, Louis was a pretty heavy perfume user himself (for more details on this see Denyse Beaulieu's wonderful book, "The Perfume Lover").