Antigua

• Festive
• Casual

Antigua offers something more exuberant than the house’s meditative creations: a luminous, almost festive fragrance that conjures up a sun-drenched tropical island.

From the opening, you are struck by an explosion of fruit and citrus. Guava and grapefruit lead, joined by lime and bergamot, creating a juicy, tangy, very lively effect. The whole gives an immediate feeling of sweet, sunny freshness, almost like a fruity cocktail served at the height of summer.

The fragrance soon gains texture as a softer, slightly green heart arrives. Peach and fig leaf bring a rounder, more natural facet, while rose smooths the whole with a bright, elegant touch. It stays fruity, but more nuanced, less dazzling, calmer.

Over time, Antigua turns into a warmer, more structured base. Musk and vanilla wrap the skin in softness, while patchouli, vetiver and oakmoss lay down a chypre foundation, slightly earthy and elegant. The result is an interesting contrast: a fragrance that is fun and sunny at first, then becomes deeper and more sophisticated as it dries down.

Phaedon Paris is a French perfume house founded in the mid-2000s by two Parisian aesthetes, great travellers with a passion for ancient cultures. Its name was chosen with care: Phaedo of Elis, a Greek slave born in 400 BC, taken prisoner during the war between Elis and Sparta. Bought back by a friend of Socrates, he was serving at table one evening when, answering a question put by a guest, he was overheard by Socrates himself. Phaedo would later give his name to one of Plato's most famous dialogues. It is this emblem, of freedom won through intelligence and beauty, that the house chose for its name. Phaedon's visual identity expresses the same depth: two Assyrian griffins taken from a bas-relief from the palace of Darius, on display at the Louvre, crown the logo. The whole aesthetic embraces what the house calls 'baroque naturalism', a richly coloured blend of Etruscan motifs, fig leaves, irises and reeds, and a dreamlike bestiary between the Mediterranean and Asia, laid out like a travel journal crossed with an Art Deco botanical plate. Since the early 2010s, the fragrances have been produced under the artistic direction of perfumer Pierre Guillaume, in his workshops in France. A house that composes its fragrances the way one brings rare objects back from a journey: with memory, precision and a keen sense of what resembles nothing else.