I’m terribly behind on all my reviews and features, owing to the shiny new positions where I am still unfurling my wings. It was the long-awaited return of spring, and with it the unearthing of my most beloved DvF dress that brought to my attention the fact that I had not written one peep past the original tweets about Francis Kurkdjian’s lovely not-so-new-anymore duo, Amyris.

For Francis Kurkdjian, setting off for the day without a drop of scent on him would be tentamount to walking out of the house clad in nothing but his birthday suit: quite inconcievable. He needs nearly no presentation. One of perfume’s wunderkinds, at the still tender age of 43, he already has quite a few hits already to his name, like Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Le Male, L’Odeur de l’argent with artist Sophie Calle or even scenting the gardens of Versailles, as well as his own house since 2009. In person, Kurkdjian cuts a dashing but unassuming figure in a milieu that used to have more to do with laboratories than design, making each meeting with him is an experience unto itself.

But enough about the mindless fan-girling. For now.

Each perfume that he designs is approached much in the way a garment would be: tailoring is key. It is hardly surprising for one who extolls reminisces fondly on his grandfather’s furrier days. Amyris, his latest duo, is a scent that embottles Parisian spirit. Yes, singular. Despite their separate existences and formulations, Kurkdjian’s scent couples can be envisioned as a singular entity, one that feels somehow incomplete without the other.

The starting point of Amyris, Kurkdjian explained, was a blind sniffing session where he drew up a blank on a particular woody scent. Its name: amyris, a Jamaican tree best known under its other names: sandalwood or Jamaican rosewood, a raw material so gorged with oil that it is used to wrap cigars and ignites at the slightest lick of a frame. To accompany it, he chose iris, a raw material he doesn’t particularly like and had last worked years before with Iris Nobile. “A gram of iris is as expensive as cocaine,” he drops. A presentation with this straight-talking perfumer is the stuff of dreams. Not only does he talk about the details, but he relishes a bon mot.

This storyline fits Kurkdjian more than any other that he has built before, with its innate urbanity. Around his initial inspiration, he assembled an intense and graphic evocation of the city, its sophisticated and layered nature revealing surprises such as the lemon blossom used -an artificial recreation of it, as these are never plucked, producing the lemons.

For her, Amyris describes the bouncy, joyful feeling of the early days of Fall, when the weather invites to a promenade along the banks of the Seine, a jaunty scarf looped in a bow around the neck and a full skirt flouncing with every step. It may have taken an entire sentence in English to express this, but Kurkdjian dropped only one word in French: “primesautière”. Visually, he recalled a Saint-Laurent ad featuring a large dotted bow, as a gaggle of girlfriends, chatting. He went on to describe it as being a bottled version of that French je-ne-sais-quoi that has myriads of others gagging for it, that seemingly effortless reappropriation of “La Mode” into something for daily consumption. Fittingly, the perfume is silky, round yet sharply defined. There’s no complacence here.

As for him, the most immediate impression is that of a well-manucured bad boy, whose masculinity includes not only traditional male pursuits like sports and fast cars, but also an interest in the latest threads. Amyris pour homme has that greasy oil-slick punch, sweetly leathery, and that speaks of fast-paced life in the city. “The face of a hitman but the heart of a lamb,” says Kurkdjian as a description.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to loop a silk scarf around my neck as Amyris and spring have put a new spring in my step.