All five fragrances in the collection come in a silver glass bottle with an atomiser in a high-quality wooden box. A dream come true for vanilla lovers.14 November 2020 – Launch of Act of Dreams
Masque Milano is an Italian niche fragrance brand founded in Milan in 2010 by co-founders Alessandro Brun and Riccardo Tedeschi. The brand is now sold in 45 countries and is well known among fragrance lovers and enthusiasts around the world. All the fragrances are linked by a common thread, as they are scenes from the same fragrance opera. The perfumers are like actors on stage, interpreting the script written by playwrights Riccardo and Alessandro. All the perfumers selected to represent this fragrant opera are young and talented. Alessandro and Riccardo wanted to work with the female perfumers on the team again to launch a new collection. The idea was to create a women's collection with more feminine compositions... created exclusively by female perfumers.
The fragrances are arranged in groups of four, each representing an act in Masque's opera. After ‘experiences’, ‘inner monologues’ and ‘sentimental relationships’, it is now time to begin the fourth and final act:
Act IV – Dreams
Do dreams have a smell? Some dreams are so realistic that they must have a scent. How can you capture the scent of a dream?
Obsessed with these questions, Alessandro and Riccardo challenged four talented perfumers to recreate dreamlike sensations, bring them to life and make them breathe again by engaging the nose in a game that takes place in an imaginary world, far-fetched and rather strange, but more real than life itself.
A fluorescent, sparkling, extraterrestrial flower
A dream. A flower with an incredibly intense scent. And huge, enormous. Not a normal flower like those found on Earth. This flower emits an astonishingly bright light. As time passed and the light became even brighter, the flower began to melt, dripping like honey from a rich and soft honeycomb.
‘For this new chapter in the collection, we decided to create an ‘alien flower’, a floral perfume that has never been smelled before.’ – Alessandro and Riccardo
I was immediately interested in working on the concept of mimosa because, on a personal level, mimosa was a flower that was completely foreign to me before I came to Europe. I only discovered this flower during my perfume studies in Grasse. In Tanneron, a small town on the Côte d'Azur, I always admired the endless golden hills of flowering mimosa. I always wondered why so few fragrances focusing on mimosa had been created in the history of perfumery.
During the years I shared my passion for perfumery, I also discovered that I was not alone and that many people had little idea about this flower – it was truly an unfamiliar flower to many people around the world. I sought the context to tell the story of this flower. Call it kismet or fate, this commission gave me the opportunity to do so.
During the briefing, the word ‘neon’ was the shade Masque Milano wanted for their perfume. The idea of a bright golden, orange neon mimosa became the image I wanted to translate. – Alex Lee
‘I love playing with overdoses and creating paradoxes by trying to find unexpected associations with the ingredients.’ – Alex Lee
The breathtaking mimosa from Tanneron
"At the beginning of each year, fresh mimosa is harvested by a grower in Tanneron and immediately extracted at Mane's factory just a few kilometres away to ensure that we capture all the beauty of the flower. I wanted to offer Masque Milano fans a true mimosa fragrance, so I opted for an overdose of Mane's mimosa absolute, which best represents the natural scent of mimosa. It is a quality as rich as the natural head of mimosa with an elegant powdery facet.
Mimosa blossom also has a cucumber-like texture. I used a touch of Manes‘ violet leaf absolute for its green, moist nuances to better achieve this hyper-realistic representation of the flower.’ – Alex Lee
Honey and mandarin
Every successful fragrance is successful because it is ‘addictive’. We wanted a particularly seductive accord in our creation that would make you want to smell the fragrance again and again, without venturing into the gourmand realm (i.e. avoiding the excessive use of modern cotton candy notes from ethyl maltol). One idea was to use natural honey for this unexpected addictiveness – and Alex wanted to use a lot of it. The golden colour of the honey would enhance the luminosity of the fragrance. When we smelled some of the variations, we had the impression of taking a bath in a giant jar of honey. – Alessandro and Riccardo
Initially, my instinct told me to follow my strength and create a heavy, sweet oriental fragrance, but in the end I wanted to counteract that and create an ultra-fresh interpretation of the flower. I used an overdose of yellow mandarin essential oil to create another neon orange burst of freshness (a more mature version compared to green mandarin essential oil). – Alex Lee
Cardamom and cedarwood
"The pillars of the fragrance notes, the skeleton of the perfume, were set. I worked on a sun accord plus Mane's cardamom essence to convey the feeling of the warm sun of the Côte d'Azur. And finally, I added an exquisite quality of cedarwood essential oil to create the smell of mimosa tree trunks and branches that you would smell if you were standing in the middle of the mimosa forest in Tanneron. Imagine a dream in which you are sunbathing on the French Riviera, surrounded by mimosa trees. This is exactly the scent of that dream.’ – Alex Lee
Each bottle contains 30 ml, which together makes 150 ml of vanilla dreams.
