Amour – Kenzo

Kenzo

Release Date – 2006

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Amour by Kenzo arrived with all the makings of a potential favourite. Its note pyramid spoke of rice and heliotrope (always a persuasive pairing), while the bottle, all mauve-crimson curves, promised undeniable shelf presence, which is no small feat on my already overwhelmed perfume shelf.

Sharing that same crowded shelf are two Kenzo fragrances I’ve already come to know and love: Flower, a classic for a reason, and Rêve Lotus, imaginative, memory-soaked, and alive with the narrative quality that made me fall in love with fragrance in the first place.

Perhaps Amour was always going to struggle beneath the weight of those expectations. Even so, for a fragrance named after love, it left me remarkably unmoved.

In the blunt shorthand of online fragrance circles, it was a scrubber. Dun dun dun.

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This little heartbreak came into my life via JoyBuy (if you’re not familiar – think Amazon, but perhaps a bit less soulless and with far more tempting detours for the fragrance-addled mind).

It arrived within a day, which is marvellous service but also dreadful news for anyone prone to 3am Fragrantica spirals and impulsive perfume decisions (ahem – me).

Naturally, when that knock came no less than twenty-four hours later, I was excited to liberate Amour from its box and admire her in all her fuchsia splendour.

And visually, she is fabulous. The contoured, brilliant pink bottle is striking and statuesque, a delightful deviation from the standard glass brick so many perfumes seem resigned to inhabit.

For a 50ml, she stands oddly tall, towering over the rest of my shelf and just about matching the height of her 100ml sister, Flower. It’s safe to say that her branding prepared me for something unusual and transportive.

Fragrantica’s description of Amour as “savoury” conjured a vision of creamy rice swathed in pale, milky starch, its vanilla warmed and deepened by toasted grains and rich rice milk, with frangipani, cherry blossom, and heliotrope lending a touch of floral sweetness.

I began to anticipate a milky, sweet-yet-savoury concoction that would soon earn its place among my favourites.

Reader, it did not.

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First Impressions

The first spray hit me like Play-Doh (bad) left to sit too close to a vodka tonic (so much worse).

What reached my nose was doughy yet saline, steeped in the cloying stickiness of synthetic almond.

It smelled, to me, like marzipan handled by someone wearing surgical gloves in a room that had very recently been cleaned.

Or a sugared confection left too long in the vicinity of school glue and spilt alcopops.

However entertaining the imagery, it was enough to tell me that this was not the velvety, close-to-the-skin sensuality I had been expecting.

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Sweet…Something?

Any hopes I’d had for Amour were quickly undone by that sharp opening, and I was left feeling rather aggrieved after seeing so many glowing accounts of its pudding-like warmth just hours before.

Was it authentic? I turned the box over, looking for trademarks and logos of legitimacy, all of which were present.

So, naturally, I returned to the very reviews that had persuaded me to buy it in the first place… at the deeply respectable hour of 3am. To those reviewers who promised comfort and creaminess, I can only ask: on what grounds?

With wear, it did eventually settle into smoother, nuttier territory, and an almond-vanilla creaminess began to take shape. I can see why some found it comforting. For me, though, it never quite found its balance.

The promised savoury nuance was nowhere to be found, and the sweetness arrived with such force that it overwhelmed everything else.

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The Trouble With a Beautiful Benchmark

I suspect part of my disappointment stems from the fact that I was hoping for a toasted rice note more in the vein of Diptyque’s L’Eau Papier – a true savoury beauty, all blonde woods, sesame, and curls of rice steam.

The first time I smelled it, I was floored. It was so intimate and unlike anything I had smelled before that it reminded me why fragrance is such a thrilling art form and, in the process, pushed the door wide open to chasing that same high of discovery elsewhere.

So no, it’s not entirely fair to hold Amour up against it, but L’Eau Papier was my first encounter with rice in fragrance, and I foolishly assumed all rice notes might carry the same warmth.

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All Dressed Up, Nowhere to Go

Once the opening of Amour had finally screeched and settled, it became just… ordinary. I felt as though I’d smelled versions of this profile countless times before from more affordable houses – Tesori d’Oriente came to mind.

And that is not necessarily an insult, because there are some excellent budget scents out there, but when a fragrance arrives wearing the costume of something distinctive, I do expect it to do more than rehash a well-trodden powdery vanilla-floral script.

Still, I left it on my skin for another ten minutes before checking again, just in case the promised milky richness was simply taking its time.

By then, Amour had faded so dramatically that I was left wondering whether I’d gone anosmic. I know skin chemistry can be cruel, and perhaps a period of maceration might coax more from it, but first impressions are first impressions.

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Final Thoughts

So yes, I’m sad to say this was a disappointment. The idea of creamy rice pudding with a savoury twist could have been so compelling: maybe some salt or grain to keep the sweetness in check.

Instead, it was a faint almond-floral vanilla I’ve smelled a dozen times before, gone almost as soon as it arrived.

That is not to say the perfume is bad at all. If anything, I suspect I approached it from entirely the wrong angle: my expectations were too high, and I had already decided, rather unfairly, how I wanted it to smell.

Pretty bottle, promising concept, but on my skin it amounted to very little.

4 sniffs out of ten.

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