VOYAGES IMAGINAIRES
Voyages Imaginaires is the glorious creation of Camille Goutal, daughter of the legendary Annick, and Isabelle Doyen, inhouse Goutal perfumer and director of Les Nez Parfums D’Auteurs, whose Unicorn Spell, Manamoulia, Let Me Play The Lion, L’Antimatière and Turtle Vetiver are some of the most unique creations in olfaction. They are talented and enigmatic women, bringing a wealth of artistic experience to a collection of perfumes that never fails to dazzle and delight.
Together, at Annick Goutal they have maintained Annick’s reputation and ethos while laying down their own influences and a route map to chic, timeless elegance.
Now there is Voyages Imaginaires, an atelier of sensual perfumery where Camille and Isabelle indulge their own personal profound concepts honed and exalted over years of experience. The two women have intriguingly contrasting skills yet their combined approach to perfume has produced a collection of thoughtful and engrossing work, beautifully atmospheric, graceful and charismatic.
There are currently seven perfumes in the collection: Comme Un Gant, Le Grand Jeu, L’Echappée Sauvage, La Couleur de la Nuit, Tea + Rock ’n’ Roll, Azahar and L’Eau des Immortels. One of the key technical selling points is the 100% natural aspect of the scents. Camille and Isabelle have shunned the tricky landscapes of synthetics for a palette of all natural materials blended in wheat germ alcohol.
The results are noticeably unlike other brands, there is a delicious soft dreaminess to each of the compositions, fitting for a brand that uses phrases like olfactory head trip and land of sublimated memory. The way the perfumes melt onto skin, rising and falling like literary weather makes for beautiful, close wearing.
‘Before the destination, there is the path… the dream of arrival… A transcendent and personal exploration. A getaway, real or fanciful, each new creation is a skin-thin voyage reminiscent of something familiar even as it brings us into a new virgin land.’ From Voyages Imaginaires website
Many of us are armchair travellers, watching television, films, listening to podcasts and reading books and magazines about far flung places. The world of Voyages Imaginaires is the one before arrival, the anticipation of destination and the journey. It is not a new concept in perfumery, but more often that it is just a loose concept to hang notes on; Voyages Imaginaires is different. There is sublime abstraction in the travel. A diffuse longing and romantic yearning that Camille and Isabelle have nurtured with care and attention to detail.
Each perfume in the collection feels rare, this is a tricky thing to pull off. A lot of perfume houses like to present an exemplar of each genre, citrus, floral, rose, marine, gourmand, oud, incense, leather etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach but creating a more enhanced and leftfield assembly of thought-provoking scents allows contemporary perfume lovers the opportunity to sample a series of nostalgic and mysterious journeys to the shores of body and soul.
Camille and Isabelle are forging connections through scent, connecting mind and body, dreamtime and waking state, past, present and future. It is now an established fact how powerful scent is in exploration of time, place and people. As the only sense plugged directly into the limbic system, responsible for creating memory, the gathering of personal spatial souvenirs, we are projected to moments, meeting and lovers that have left traces,
The rich, embedded use of coconut, vanilla, white flowers, tropical spices and soft woods etc form part of a carefully considered and elegantly arranged palette of intricately crafted perfumes. What sets Voyage Imaginaires apart is the way Camille Goutal and Isabelle Doyenne have succeeded in fashioning a body of poetic and transformative perfumes using an array of tender, emotional materials. The collection holds together with chic allure and while each scent is its own beautiful thing, the collection displays the skill and dedication of two of the industry’s most gifted creatives.