La Vie est Belle

“La vie est belle” — life is beautiful. With a name like that, Lancôme couldn’t settle for just another fragrance. The house wanted a statement: an ode to happiness and to the freedom to choose one’s own life. To compose it, it brought together three great names of French perfumery: Olivier Polge, Dominique Ropion and Anne Flipo.

The work took three years. More than five thousand trials were needed to reach the final formula, built with only some sixty raw materials — a rare commitment to simplicity. At its center is iris, a noble, powdery material that the three perfumers dared to pair with a gourmand base of praline, vanilla, tonka bean and patchouli. Lancôme presented the result as perfumery’s first “gourmand iris.”

The bottle tells another, older story. In 1949, Lancôme founder Armand Petitjean asked his art director Georges Delhomme to design a bottle celebrating women’s happiness after the war years: “the crystal smile.” More than sixty years later, that design was reborn for La Vie est Belle — a crystal square whose curves evoke a smile, tied with a pearl-gray ribbon.

Launched in 2012 with Julia Roberts as its face, the fragrance quickly became one of the best-selling in the world and gave rise to a whole family of flankers.