Ropion Trilogy: Prologue

A LONG BEGINNING

This is personal.

Ever since my teenage years I’ve kept a small journal for sketching, jotting down interesting words and phrases, and dreaming of my future. Even when I grew up and became a sculptor, these notations from my youth were often starting points for new projects.

While learning English as a second language in the late 70’s, I often read newspaper or magazine articles from American publications as a way to grow more comfortable with my new language.

One serendipitous day I was reading a Newsweek article detailing a popular hairstyle and a phrase jumped off the page and into my imagination.  This lyrical phrase, “messy sexy just rolled out of bed” immediately painted a picture in my mind of an intimate moment in someone’s life.  I wrote it down in my journal so I wouldn’t forget.

In the 90’s I had a breakthrough with my sculptures when I started incorporating scent into the pieces. I began meeting with perfumers, which were always inspiring experiences. While their scents were magnetic, the industry itself felt so conservative and the marketing, so boring.

To have some fun, I decided to launch my first fragrance, S-perfume, which contains a semen note. My next two fragrances also celebrated the sex and sexuality that I felt was lacking in the perfume world; S-ex and 100% Love in the early 2000s.

That phrase I wrote in my journal almost 40 years ago, Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed, kept popping up in my mind as I continued to develop fragrances. I knew it would be a perfect name for a perfume, but I needed to wait for the perfect pairing.

A PARTNERSHIP YIELDS RESULTS

I began working with master perfumer Dominique Ropion in the early 2010’s. Dominique is a singular talent with an ability to balance ‘sexy’ ‘contemporary’ ‘feminine,’ and ‘chic’ in his fragrances all with a hint of naughtiness. No one does it like him.

Our first perfume, What We Do In Paris Is Secret, was a smash and highly sought after in both Paris (Colette) and Los Angeles (LuckyScent). After such a successful and fulfilling partnership it was a no-brainer to continue collaborating. He shared with me a few different directions of an intimate musk scent and I immediately gravitated to two in particular. One of the directions evolved into our second perfume, Mon Musc à Moi, which debuted in 2015.

I originally planned for the second direction to bear the name, Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed, but things don’t always go as planned. As Dominique started modifying, I asked him to add more neroli and orange flower and so less than a year into development we began to stray from the original concept. The result was a perfume that conjures up images of vintage Hollywood glam, someone like Faye Dunaway, languidly relaxing by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel in the early morning hours after winning the Oscar in 1977. We ended up calling it And The World Is Yours, releasing it in 2018.

A CHANGE IN PLANS… AND A NAME

While we worked to finetune what would eventually be And The World Is Yours, we decided to revisit the name Mon Musc à Moi. While charming and a bit silly, was this really the right name? What was the story we were trying to tell? Perfumes are so complex, each note works together to tell a complete story. Something wasn’t quite working here.

Instead of a musk forward story, this fragrance contains top notes of peach blossom and bergamot. Turkish rose and heliotrope come in in the mid notes. It is not until the bottom notes do the heady scents of musk, tonka bean, and amber come in to round it out. Had we been misreading it all along?

We needed to rewrite the story. One of sunlight hitting white sheets, like the brightness found in peach blossoms. Blankets still warm with sleep, cozy and sweet like heliotrope. And the intimacy of rumpled hair and a rumpled bed, perfectly captured in earthy, intoxicating musk. This was our perfect pairing all along. This was our Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out Bed.

Sometimes it just takes a few revisions (and 40 years) to write a perfect story.

NFS