Jo's Scent Notes: Estée Lauder Glimmer

My first reaction when I got to the launch for Estée Lauder Glimmer was: ‘I hope it’s named after “glimmers”!’

Sarah (Stacey) has written a lot about glimmers on this website – here and here, for instance – and they’re a wonderful thing. Maybe it’s seeing the smile on a friend’s face when you bump into them. A sunset, or seeing a new plant bloom for the first time. Finding a fiver in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn in a long time! Gosh, that’s a good one.

Anyway, because I’m so attuned to glimmers – and just feel they make life worth living, in a world when it sometimes seems all doom and gloom – this first fragrance for Estée Lauder in 12 years (after Modern Muse), by the name of ‘Glimmer’, had a LOT to live up to. But you know what? It really doesn’t disappoint; in fact, I’ve probably worn this on 12 of the 14 days since that launch lunch.

For background: Estée Lauder used to be incredibly famous for their fragrances. Think: Estée Lauder Youth Dew, the ground-breaking fragrance cleverly marketed as a bath oil, initially, thereby removing the guilt women felt about buying their own perfume. (It is one of the great honours of my writing career to have been given a bottle personally by Estée Lauder herself, in New York, when interviewing her over tea.) Then came Cinnabar, Alliage, Private Collection, and onwards to White Linen, Beautiful and Pleasures... All fragrances that I have worn (and in many cases, truly loved), at some point in time.

After Estée’s death, the totally inspiring Evelyn Lauder – who we got to know quite well – was the flag-waver for fragrance, in the company. She worked alongside uber-creative Karyn Khoury, a genius with smells, and for many years in charge of fragrance development for Lauder, globally. (Karyn also developed the Tom Ford line.)

But Karyn retired. (We’re still in touch, NB.) And then – Bronze Goddess aside – it all went a bit low-key on the launch front. (Albeit at the same time, the Lauder empire was busy snapping up other well-known fragrance names, including Jo Malone London, Éditions de Parfums Frédéric Malle and Kilian.)

Well, the wonderful thing about this belated launch is that it a) feels completely contemporary, and b) feels completely ‘Estée Lauder’. (Can’t help feeling that Estée and Evelyn would have loved it.) It’s incredibly pretty and wearable – and that is absolutely not damning with faint praise. There’s nothing wrong with wearability!

Unsurprisingly, there were some big scent guns behind it: Dominique Ropion (creator of Portrait of a Lady, among other masterpieces), Anne Flipo and Jean-Marc Chaillan, all of fragrance house IFF.

Glimmer… well, it sparkles, actually. If you want the technical bit, it’s ‘an amber floral with a gourmand twist, built around macaron rose, luminous patchouli and a warm amber accord.’ But that doesn’t do it justice. And – as a fan of the Chypre family – I’d say that what this also has is a flourish of Chypre sophistication. Dominique Ropion says, in fact, that he was part-inspired by Clinique Aromatics when he created this – and that’s as classic a Chypre as it gets.

You can certainly make out the soft, sweet rosiness, here, which sweetens and softens (in an elegant way) as it develops on skin. The base is equally great – and it lasts for hours, holding onto an ambery woodiness that feels super-sophisticated.

I have also to give a shout-out to the bottle itself (not to mention the fact that this comes in a 10ml, 30ml, 50ml and a 100ml size – all of them quite reasonably priced). These highly tactile pieces are hefty, beautiful, dressing table-worthy, and (as you can see from the picture that I took above), get a bit of sunshine on it and the flacon really does glimmer.

But above all, it’s the idea behind Estée Lauder Glimmer that I love, and why, for me, it will be a keeper. We can’t change the big things in this world. We get to vote maybe once every five years, and perhaps we can sign an online petition or get involved locally, in our community, to make it a better place.

But what truly makes life magical is those little ‘glimmers’ – in this case, the spirit-lifting gesture of spraying a truly gorgeous perfume, and taking a moment for yourself.

I can’t recommend it too highly.

Estée Lauder Glimmer/£125 for 100ml – buy here

£95 for 50ml – buy here

£67 for 30ml – buy here

£25 for 10ml travel size – buy here