A Return To Riches.(perfumes and fragrance candles)

A Return To Riches

"Clean" and "fresh" are starting to feel stale. The latest fragrances are opulent, sophisticated, and anything but light. By Cara Birnbaum

Scarlett Johansson was a precocious child -- or at least she smelled like one. "My mother gave me a tester bottle of Angel when I was little, and the scent of it still reminds me of being young," says the actress, recalling its caramelized chocolate notes and the smell she describes as "sweet, overpowering." Like the rest of us, she eventually embraced the clean, citrus fragrance revolution of the 1990s, but now, at the ripe old age of 19, Johansson is again ready for perfumes that are as voluptuous as she is -- and last longer on the skin than body spray. "It's refreshing to put something on and not have it disappear," she says. "I want to go through the lovely phases of it smelling strong in the morning and then smelling it on my pillow at night." If her taste seems to have undergone several 180-degree shifts, she's not the only one. "People are fed up with the anorexic, unnoticeable scents of the last several years," says Michel Girard, perfumer at Quest International, which makes fragrances such as Burberry Tender Touch and Givenchy Extravagance. "Now they want something with more identity, depth, and emotion." Perfumers have responded, creating new scents that smell somewhat like the rich old classics lined up on your grandmother's vanity table -- if your grandmother happened to be Jeanne Moreau. Of course, the new scents offer the flavor of those originals without the fustiness. To create Guerlain Shalimar Light, perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain chose softer versions of the notes his grandfather mixed into the 1925 original -- for example, jasmine petals rather than the flower's more intense inner blossom. And next year, Lancome perfumers will unveil aired-out versions of four of their vintage scents -- the exotically named Magie (from 1950), Climat (1967), Sikkim (1971), and Sagamore (1985). Even fragrances that are brand-new aim not to smell that way. Marc Jacobs, whose clothes incorporate elements of vintage styles, says he wanted his new fragrance, Blush, "to feel like it had always been there. I didn't want to startle or shock." In other words, no avant-garde wasabi or cucumber notes here -- just straight-ahead classic jasmine. "I like things that go back to what seems like, in my imagination anyway, a simpler time," he says. Olivier Theyskens, the 27-year-old designer hired last year to reinvigorate the revered fashion-and-fragrance house Rochas, was inspired by its perfume Femme (his aunt's favorite back in 1945) when he created his new, flirtier fragrance, Poupee. The juicy pineapple and orange blossom in the scent may be modern, but "at its heart, the fragrance has classic notes like gardenia and ...