Acqua Alpes sounds like company making fresh, ice clear, cool scents. Actually, it is the only Austrian perfume company I know. When one checks out their homepage, one sees snow-capped mountains and information on crystal clear water. Nice branding, but luckily the scents are more refined than that.
I found the brand when looking for some scent with a sweet Marzipan touch in it. There are not too many and so Acqua Alpes popped up. Two scents were of interest and I wondered how to test them, because they are really a niche brand not usually sold by perfumeries, even the ones specialized in niche brands.
On a scorcher I tracked Acqua Alpes down, during a day trip to a wonderful town in the Southern part of Germany. I had carefully planned that trip to include the perfumery and also the visit of one of Germanys biggest palaces.
Close enough to Austria, no mountains to be seen, but a beautiful river.
I got my test stripe in a very renowned perfumery with at least 35 degrees Celsius brooding on outside, and the scent developed nicely. The perfume has the name “2334”. It seems this is the height in metres of the mountain “Hafelekar”, that’s what Acqua Alpes wrote on their homepage. I had never heard of that mountain before and the scents of the perfume you would rather not smell when climbing in the Alpes, I bet.
The perfume is warm and smooth and engulfing, has a strong marzipan feature, is very feminine and warmly elegant. The scent is great. It is not brassy and flashy, but has presence and it is just absolutely delightful.
Describing Acqua Alpes “2334”, I think without hesitation of Sandra Bucellato, one of the supporting figures in the Rocco Schiavone series. Rocco Schiavone is Antonio Manzinis bad-ass cop-hero, transferred from Rome to the cold and snowy Aosta valley at the Italian border to the French Alpes and Switzerland.
The books and the movies are highly recommended, Schiavone is no easy hero and as a woman one should better not get to close. But apart from that, the books are really beautiful, funny, intelligent, readable. The alpine landscape of Aosta, though, is painted as gloomy, grim even, cheerless and very cold.
Unfortunately, and on intention, they forget in the TV series that the sun is shining also in the Alpes and then a snowy landscape is just breathtakingly beautiful with pure white snow, especially when skiing, but that’s not the point here.
Rocco Schiavones Aosta valley hides its beauty.
Not so Sandra Buccellato. She is elegant and feminine, wears chic and warm clothes in the cold and feels totally at home in the Italian Alpes. She is the glittering part of Aosta, couldn’t be more at home anywhere else, bringing elegance to the cold. She is a strong willed, independent journalist who does not need to pretend, but is self-assured, sure of her attractiveness, her attitude and her appearance. She is played by beautiful, dark haired Italian actress Valeria Solarino.
For me she is totally Acqua Alpes “2334” as it is her personality. Warm and beautiful in a cold environment. Elegant and self-relying. Tender, but strong flowers engulfing her against the cold. Of rich background, but an ambitious lady of her own. Sometimes one forgets that Italy also has her part of the Alpes, and the people there have their own, different elegance from the Southern Italians.
It the case of this perfume, the sum is more than its parts, the scent pyramid given on Acqua Alpes homepage does not fully give it credit:
Lavender, bergamot, orange, jasmine, sage, cedarwood, amber, vanilla, vetiver
I smell lavender, sweet orange marzipan and no vetiver. The scent has the quality of rich eggnog liquor about it in my opinion.
It’s like the smell of a sunny flowerbed imported to a cold environment. Perfumes with lavender and sage, not overwhelming but in the background, usually hit a soft spot within me. The are so refined and so different to the mass and here the scents melt with marzipan.
The colour of the scent is warm pale yellow, as in eggnog or marzipan with these colourful accents of lilac blue lavender.
Trying it again, the perfume smells like a citrus tree blossoming mixed with marzipan scenting flowers, on a warm late autumn day when the grapes are ripe and the sun still strong, but the nights already icy cool.
I truly like this scent. It is the only one I own of the Acqua Alpes brand, I never wanted more. For me it is a stand-alone scent.
If you want to check out Rocco Schiavone and Sandra Buccellato, I recommend to look for the Italian TV series, which I bought on DVD or on Antonio Manzinis books that were translated in many languages. Sandra Buccellato plays a bigger role only in the newer books; she wasn’t part of the story from the start.