With the arrival of spring and the slow yet steady approach of summer, I've turned my attention to making my beauty routine more warm-weather-friendly—starting with the best summer fragrances to channel the season. This year, I already have a go-to summer perfume months in advance: Kérylos, L'Objet's new collaboration with master perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena.
Beauty obsessives know Ellena as the nose behind legendary fragrances from Hermès, Bulgari, Van Cleef, and more. I could sense his influence in just a few whiffs of the new scent.
Kérylos starts with pleasant grapefruit top notes that are overshadowed by santal, and later white musk, within an hour of application. In the few days since I started wearing Kérylos, I've marveled at how refreshing the blend of yuzu, mandarin, and grapefruit smells on my skin (it's rare for me to enjoy a citrus perfume), as well as how beautiful the deep blue bottle looks sitting on my shelf.
My first impression highlights how the collaboration stands apart from L'Objet's four other scents.
"This is a very personal fragrance to me," Elad Yifrach, founder and creative director of L'Objet, exclusively tells Marie Claire. The citrus-musk scent is rooted in his childhood in the Mediterranean, where he would skip school to play in orange groves with his friends. The fruit would get overripe on the tree and fall onto the hot rocks—resulting in an "explosion" of scent.
To channel his childhood in perfume form, Yifrach spent a day with Ellena in Grasse, France, describing his sensory memories. From there, Ellena crafted a simple yet powerful blend of yuzu, sedra, mandarin, grapefruit, wild herbs, and musk.
Sedra, in particular, felt sentimental for Yifrach, who was raised in Israel. The fruit plays a ceremonial role in the Jewish holiday Sukkot, which falls just after the Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur.
"I remember my grandfather always taking the sedra, which was unripe, rubbing it, and then letting us smell that kind of bitter citrus," Yifrach shares. "Right away, [Ellena] knew what I was talking about when I told him."
L'Objet also hoped to bring high aesthetic standards to the fragrance's bottle. Fully crafted in the Mediterranean, the bottle caps get their cracked marble effect from an organic process forcing together two layers of wooden lacquer. Since no two turn out alike, "Each piece has its own soul," Yifrach says.
While L'Objet historically packages its perfumes in black, this time, Yifrach and Ellena opted for ergonomic violet glass made from recycled apothecary bottles. The result still evokes the Mediterranean—and protects the formula itself from aging, the founder claims.
"The magic really happens when the function and the design have a beautiful synergy," Yifrach notes. Having tried the scent myself, I can't help but agree.
