Issey Miyake has launched its new fragrance Lumière d'Issey just in time for Spring
et there be light. Japanese fragrance house Issey Miyake has welcomed a new addition to its lineup of iconic scents, Lumière d'Issey. Effervescent and citrus-led, the perfume is built around a single idea: bottling light, and translating the energising
optimism of the morning sun into a scent.
Fragrance has a rare power. It can shift our mental state, transport the imagination and trigger memory with a single spritz. Nobody understood this better than Issey Miyake. His first entry into the category, L'Eau d'Issey in 1992, disrupted a landscape then dominated by heady orientals and chypres, offering instead a crystalline scent the house described as evoking "a drop of water on a woman's skin". The bottle became its own story: Miyake conceived its sharp, slender silhouette and crowning glass orb after watching the full moon rise above the Eiffel Tower one Paris night.
Lumière d'Issey continues that decades-long dialogue with the natural world. Composed by perfumers Fabrice Pellegrin and Marie Salamagne from ingredients of natural origin, it's a scent built to brighten and comfort, much like sunlight itself. Orange blossom is the star of the show (fitting, given it's a flower that needs abundant light to flourish). At first spritz, green mandarin fizzes on the skin before a solar orange blossom settles in, sweet and sun-warmed.
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Citrus is always a spring and summer favourite but it requires a delicate hand. Get the balance wrong, and a citrus scent can quickly tip from radiant to astringent – you want to scintillate the nostrils, not singe them. Pellegrin and Salamagne have used pistachio as an unexpected ballast here, lending an unexpected salty, nutty undertone as the scent dries down that’s totally moreish. The Lumière scent story is a little like morning sunlight filtering through leaves and warming the soft earth beneath your feet: airy, sweet, and comforting, with all the promise of a new day.
The concept of light extends to the bottle itself. Six years in development, its faceted glass draws on “kiriko”, a traditional Japanese cutting technique in which precise triangular facets are carved into the surface to catch and refract light. A fitting vessel for a fragrance built on the idea of illumination.
In aromatherapy, citrus is used to energise and instil a positive mindset, and we can attest this scent's instant brightening effect on the mood.
This is a fragrance with long sillage, the kind that lingers in a room long after you've gone. One spritz and you can expect the "what are you wearing?" questions to roll in. Lumière d'Issey is every bit as luminous as its name promises, the scent we’ll be reaching for to see out winter and welcome spring. Lumière d'Issey is now available at participating retailers; shop the scent.
