Burberry Her Intense – An Edible Car Air Freshener With No Signature ~ Fragrance Reviews

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Perfumer Francis Kurkdjian openly stated how important the idea of ‘signature’ was to the development process of Burberry’s 2018 Her. In the press packet, he is quoted as saying,

“Her Eau de Parfum by Burberry is unique because it is a memorable signature. To achieve that, you need a strong accord, an olfactory story that translates your vision. The combination of these sunburst berries and British spirit blended with the ambery musky accord brings this very unique signature. You can immediately recognize when someone is wearing it. It is a signature scent.”

Whilst enticing on first read, Kurkdjian’s conception of signature is incoherent for falsely advertising correlation as equivalence. All scents with signature will be unique, but not every unique scent has signature as, technically, every perfume on the market possesses a unique formula. Along the same thread, whilst the quality of being memorable is inherent to an instantly recognisable formula (often considered the essence of what signature means), not all unique scents are instantly recognisable.

In addition, the perfumer implies that he can encapsulate “British spirit” by including materials that are part of the collective consciousness of Britain, which may be true under certain conditions but does not necessarily equal signature, reflective of a position that situates meaning entirely within iconography and identification rather than style and gesture. For example, would a scent communicate Brazilian identity simply by including Brazilian materials or by expressing what Brazilians love about scented materials – their aesthetic philosophy? Sometimes it’s the same, sometimes it’s not.

I haven’t met anyone that thought Her possessed signature, nor its younger sibling My Burberry which was based on the commercially unfriendly concept of a British garden at different times of the day – extremely hard to get across in a smell at all, let alone in the Duty Free section; particularly disappointing from someone that has made scents with some of the most unique, memorable and recognisable signatures of the last 25 years (Le Male, Baccarat Rouge 540).

Unfortunately, Her Intense falls with the same fold as its predecessor – forgettable, harsh, and basic in conception.

Blueprint

The brand says,

“Meet the bold new addition to the Her collection. Rich, fruity and complex – notes of blackberry and jasmine meld with cherry and cedarwood.

Her Intense, a bold fragrance capturing the powerful energy of London – intense yet elegant. Dark and fruity, the original Eau de Parfum is intensified with … warm benzoin … The bottle, inspired by an archival Burberry fragrance design, is sublimated in this darker look”.

Olfactory Pyramid

Top: blackberry, red fruits

Heart: jasmine

Base: benzoin

Execution

Elena beautifully detailed in her review that the original Her is essentially “a berry fragrance with a hint of forest”. Her Intense successfully portrays a similar DNA but darker in colour – there is more of a blackberry jelly feel than the strawberry jam of version one, firmer and heavier with less light and more shadow. With that territory comes a sour cherry aspect and hint of spicy amber that makes the whole far more serious and far less playful than Her.

Significance

Her Intense lacks the storytelling and picture-painting of its more settled and evocative parent, taking the smell into more abstract territory but at the same time pushing it into the margins of generic and duplicate thoughtlessness. The oakmoss-cashmeran combination in Her imparted impressive sillage and a strawberry-in-Wonderland feeling; Her Intense is straight-up Haribo, or a car air freshener that you can eat. You get everything you’ll ever get with the smell straight off the bat with no development later on and nothing more to discover. I don’t see how Her Intense will gain new customers nor how it would satisfy buyers of the original. My issue is – if you liked Her, would you bother buying Her Intense?

Top image by Elena Knezevic of Fragrantica