III – I
L’ATTESA
On a summer night. Everything is ready for the rendez-vous…

 Act III scene I

L’Attesa – the wait – is the perfume opening the Act of Sentimental relationship: a fragrance consecrated to the moments before the first encounter with the beloved one. Imagine yourself at home, putting a fresh flower bouquet in the vase, opening the bottle of champagne, turning the music on… It’s a kind of magical moment.

L’Attesa was “the” occasion, the right brief to come up with something exceptional. That was to be MASQUE’s signature iris. More than that – Alessandro and Riccardo wanted to create an unprecedented iris+champagne combination.

From the very beginning of the project, Luca’s formulations were elegant, as he was working with an absolutely amiable raw material, which is iris concrete; he selected a Florentine Iris Root Butter with 15% concentration of irone (one of the highest you can get) – fatty, dusty, powdery…oh, so elegant and pleasant!

He added iris absolute from Florence. It’s a completely different both in nose and in the formula because it gives power, sillage and longlastiness.

Although Iris is a primadonna, which doesn’t love to be surrounded by other prominent flowers, its floral elegance is certainly enhanced by the skilful addiction, in the background, of the tried-and-true triptych: tuberose, ylang-ylang, sandalwood. Luca mastered this passage, which perfectly completed the iris side of the fragrance.

In the opening there is also a champagne accord. In the fragrance industry, there are quite a few fragrances listing champagne in the notes. In several cases, the approach followed by the perfumer was clearly focused on the bubbles, resulting in the use of materials or accords with fizzy and light nuances that could give the idea of the effervescence characterizing Champagne. On the contrary, the real quintessential element of champagne, which distinguishes it from other sparkling wines, is the smell of yeast.

To recreate the champagne note, Luca employed a super-critical CO2 extraction of a blend

of different kind of (previously fermented) beers, that has a bitter taste of hops, animalic nuances, but most noteworthy the beer yeast note; while it is listed as a top note, this material contributes to the volume in the drydown and has a nice powdery facet that perfectly matches the powdery facet of iris.