Rrose Sélavy was the pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp’s female persona. The old prankster made sure it could mean many things, possibly an ironic take on rose-tinted glasses commonly used to look at life. MCG has named her soliflore after her. The list of materials reads like a Dada poem:
Rose petals
Turkish rose
May rose
Rose accord
Michelle rose
Rose stems
Rose leaves
Rose is a hard thing to get right, because none of the materials actually smell like the flower and therefore all roses are imagined reconstructions of some ideal thing. The question is, which ideal thing? If you’re lucky enough to walk around the Rose Garden in London’s Regent’s Park in June and you manage to smell a few roses without angering bumblebees, you will see that the range of rose smells is huge. It goes from prim, soapy, greenish affairs to the sultriest orientals, laden with cloves and sweets. RS is a green-peppery rose that hangs together wonderfully on skin and is remarkable for the quality of its composition, and for the fact that MCG has resisted (or maybe it’s there and I’m anosmic to it) the cliché of a huge musk in the drydown. Instead, RS drifts languidly towards woody-spicy. I do not remember ever smelling a better rose fragrance. I was —for once— wondering who should wear this. Once I managed to banish all thoughts of Barbara Cartland from my mind, I came to the conclusion that this would make a formidably effective masculine, provided you look like a Cretan brigand.
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