Mitsouko is a

perfume Perfume (, ) is a mixture of fragrance, fragrant essential oils or aroma compounds (fragrances), Fixative (perfumery), fixatives and solvents, usually in liquid form, used to give the human body, animals, food, objects, and living-spaces an agre ...

by French perfume and cosmetics house Guerlain, created by Jacques Guerlain and first introduced in 1919. Its name is derived from the French

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...

of a Japanese female personal name Mitsuko. It is a fruity

chypre Chypre () is the name of a family (or ''concept'') of perfumes that are characterised by an accord composed of citrus top note (perfumery), notes, a middle centered on labdanum, cistus labdanum, and a mossy-animalic set of basenotes derived from oa ...

whose top

notes Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to: Music and entertainment * Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music * ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian * ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened versi ...

include bergamot, its middle notes

peach The peach (''Prunus persica'') is a deciduous tree first domesticated and Agriculture, cultivated in China. It bears edible juicy fruits with various characteristics, most called peaches and the glossy-skinned, non-fuzzy varieties called necta ...

rose A rose is either a woody perennial plant, perennial flowering plant of the genus ''Rosa'' (), in the family Rosaceae (), or the flower it bears. There are over three hundred Rose species, species and Garden roses, tens of thousands of cultivar ...

, iris,

clove Cloves are the aromatic flower buds of a tree in the family Myrtaceae, ''Syzygium aromaticum'' (). They are native to the Maluku Islands, or Moluccas, in Indonesia, and are commonly used as a spice, flavoring, or Aroma compound, fragrance in fin ...

, and

jasmine Jasmine (botanical name: ''Jasminum'', pronounced ) is a genus of shrubs and vines in the olive family of Oleaceae. It contains around 200 species native to tropical and warm temperate regions of Eurasia, Africa, and Oceania. Jasmines are wid ...

, and its base notes vetiver, oakmoss, and labdanum.

History

Mitsouko was created by perfumer Jacques Guerlain in 1919. The perfume has remained continuously available ever since. Mitsouko is preserved in its original 1919 formulation in the archives of the Osmothèque, donated to the collection by Guerlain in-house perfumer Thierry Wasser. It has been re-formulated several times in the modern era. It was a favorite fragrance of

Charlie Chaplin Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin (16 April 188925 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is considered o ...

Ingrid Bergman Ingrid Bergman (29 August 191529 August 1982) was a Swedish actress.Obituary ''Variety Obituaries, Variety'', 1 September 1982. With a career spanning five decades, Bergman is often regarded as one of the most influential screen figures in cin ...

Jean Harlow Jean Harlow (born Harlean Harlow Carpenter; March 3, 1911 – June 7, 1937) was an American actress. Known for her portrayal of "bad girl" characters, she was the leading sex symbol of the early 1930s and one of the defining figures of the ...

Sergei Diaghilev Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev ( ; rus, Серге́й Па́влович Дя́гилев, , sʲɪrˈɡʲej ˈpavləvʲɪdʑ ˈdʲæɡʲɪlʲɪf; 19 August 1929), also known as Serge Diaghilev, was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario an ...

, and Anaïs Nin.

Name

There is no definitive information on the origin of the name. One account of the origin of the name is that it was inspired by the name of the heroine of Claude Farrère's novel ''La bataille'' (''The Battle''). The novel is set in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

during the 1905

Russo-Japanese War The Russo-Japanese War (8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905) was fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and the Korean Empire. The major land battles of the war were fought on the ...

, and chronicles a fictional ''amour fou'' between a British Navy Officer and one "Mitsouko", the wife of Fleet Admiral Marquis Yorisaka. Both Yorisaka and the British officer sail to war, and Mitsouko awaits with reserve to see which of the two will return alive to her. The other possibility is that it was inspired by the story of Mitsuko Aoyama, the mother of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi.

References

{{Perfume Perfumes History of cosmetics Products introduced in 1919