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Japanese-Inspired Fragrances

Japanese aesthetics have exercised a profound and lasting influence on contemporary perfumery, introducing radically new values: absolute purity, emptiness as a positive form, the valorisation of the fleeting and the imperceptible over the ostentatious. Miyake's L'Eau d'Issey, launched in 1992, created a revolution by proposing a fragrance that smelled of air itself — a technical feat that prefigured an entire generation of aquatic and aerial fragrances. Kenzo's L'Eau par Kenzo explored the lotus flower and the clear river with unique poetic lightness. The philosophy of wabi-sabi — the beauty of the imperfect and ephemeral — is found in fragrances that prefer transparency to opulence, the natural to the artificial, a whisper to a shout. A perfumed school swimming against the excess that often dominates the market.