Bella Italia!
A while ago, I was taken on a tour of the Aqua di Parma flagship counter at Parkson Pavilion KL. I was quite keen because you see, I am slowly but surely leaning towards wearing fragrances from the niche perfume houses – proper perfume houses. Acqua di Parma started out in Parma, Italy as a little perfume house and still remains a perfume house, albeit having spread out to encompass other lifestyle elements that one associates with luxurious fragrances – spas, candles, bathrobes even leather goods! Their signature scent is Colonia and harkens from 1916! Like many niche perfume houses, they don’t segregate their scents into male and female scents. Just wear whichever catches your fancy! I love that 😀
One of their younger lines, the Blu Mediterraneo or Blue Mediterranean range recently got a face lift to standardize the design of the bottles with the rest of the line. I used to wonder why the bottles looked different (uglier in my view) but they now sport that sleek slightly trapezoid cylinder shape that we see in all AdP bottles. There are 5 fragrances in the range symbolic of the scents of Italy – oranges, figs, cypress to just name a few; of which Arancia di Capri is one of my faves because of the lovely citrus note that opens the fragrance.
The bottle is a translucent deep blue that evokes the blue of the Mediterranean sea. The bottles come in nestled in round cardboard cylinders wrapped with paper, which are apparently still hand wrapped, and the labels still hand pasted in a perfumery in Parma, Italy. I’m not very good with talking about notes and base notes and the nuances of the perfume so I’ll just tell you what this evokes for me.