Madame M from Astrophil & Stella: Paris night secrets

If a perfume were a dream (or at least an ultra high-res VR simulation), that’s the sequence that Madame M from Astrophil & Stella would immerse you into. It’s a new (came out towards the end of 2022) brilliant fragrant take on the topic of Parisian nights from one of my favorite perfumers, Nathalie Feisthauer.

It is chic? Very, the French kind of chic that is simultaneously both grand and nonchalant. Does it have a hint of risqué and danger? Yes, but nothing really violent or too controversial. Think Dita Von Teese in the famous martini glass type of burlesque – polished and tasteful, revealing just enough to be suggestive, but not enough to earn a full NC-17 (adults only) rating.

Does it repeat some famous clichés about France and Paris? You bet! Start with the name – Madame M – it couldn’t sound more French to a foreign ear. And even though there is no historic Madame M figure to tie the reference to, reading the label and seeing the red bottle (even without a clue about the official marketing story put together by Astrophil & Stella) you can’t help but picture some famous cabaret, red lipsticks, velvet gloves and the general Paris-by-night-romance atmosphere imprinted upon our shared cultural memory by countless books, films and advertising.

It’s very much about the cliché of sensuality, allure and seduction attributed to a certain type of Parisian femme fatale, who, according to the popular belief, can break hearts, manipulate minds and speed up the pulse of any man, be it a genius artist, a powerful politician or a simple family guy. (I once watched a documentary that interviewed French women about this sort of image a “French woman” often still has abroad – mostly they were flabbergasted by how anybody can believe all of it to be true.)

With Madame M from Astrophil & Stella, we are dealing with a beautiful, fragrant fantasy. So let’s dive in and see what the fragrance smells like.

» I find long note listings quite tedious, boring and, frankly, useless. So I won’t torture you with the complete gamut from bergamot to musk (those two are like the Alpha and Omega of perfumery – about 80% of fragrances start and end with them in the marketing write-ups – this alone shows how meaningless the “pyramid” descriptions really are). Instead, I always tell you how I experience the scent and its development over time through my somewhat trained nose and sensory associations. This way, you get a much better idea of what the perfume really is like.

Astrophil & Stella’s Madame M is walking the line between being a modern skin scent (I wrote extensively about the genre’s evolution here) and a very well blended abstract fruity-floral-vanilla (vanilla being one of the trendiest notes at the moment). Nathalie Feisthauer has (yet again) perfectly captured the spirit of our times and created a fragrance that is both acutely relevant and timeless.

Modern skin scents are characterized by their tactile quality. And Madame M is a very tactile fragrance. You definitely feel its soft, tantalizing powdery touch on your skin. So, cliché or not, this is indeed a highly sensual perfume.

Sensuality is emphasized by a good doze of vanilla (probably the only note prominent enough to be easily picked out on its own, the rest are embedded in the smooth blend created by the perfumer). Here, vanilla does not come from a pâtisserie, it’s not yummy or even edible. It originates from and invites you back to the boudoir – the private space with powder puffs, make-up brushes and lipsticks lining the dressing table next to love letters and pearls.

But before we get too sultry, Madame M is more about play than the actual heavy-handed seduction. Its playful side is represented by the tingling fruity-floral bubbles rising from the bottom of a champagne flute. The fruity-floral part is very abstract, it’s not about the individual botanical components, but the general feeling of joyful juicy fragrant experience. If I needed to provide a comparison, the closest thing would be a candied piece of pear dipped in elderberry syrup, but even this is terribly imprecise.

The sweetness is mediated by some deeply hidden woody accords and, surprisingly, a hint of chocolate. You know how superb hand-made chocolate truffles are often dusted with the cocoa powder ground so fine that it feels like velvet on your lips (and gets into the tiniest grooves of the skin on the fingers, probably making it a better finger-print-taking medium than ink)? That’s how delicate the sensation of tart dark cocoa is in Madame M. It’s not much, certainly not enough to create any gourmand vibes. But it helps to take the sweetness of vanilla and fruits down a notch to a very pleasant level.

The fragrance is playful, inviting, with a mystery at its heart. It touches you suggestively, but stops a long way before anything scandalous can occur. As perfumes go, this one is quite complex, but can feel simple if you don’t think too much about it. Either way, it’s a delight both on the surface and if you are ready to closely observe its depths.

Madame M is a very modern afternoon-to-night perfume. And a perfect evening companion to another work by Nathalie Feisthauer for Astrophil & Stella – Paris Cheri (reviewed here). They share the same recognizable, slightly powdery and very chic “Paris-DNA” that Nathalie has created for the brand. Paris Cheri evokes Parisian mornings and Madame M guides you through the nights. In terms of popular culture, think Emily in Paris for Paris Cheri and Dita Von Teese for Madame M. If you like one of them, I predict you’ll be getting the other one too.

Apropos getting it, aka shopping. Astrophil & Stella have done a great job at building an international distribution network (in my part of the world they are represented by La Parfumista), so their perfumes are likely to be easily available in your country. You can view the complete list of retailers (on- and off-line) here. To point out just a few: Spray Parfums in Torino, Italy, and the German Beauty Concept Shop that ships worldwide (and where the code YANA5 will get you a discount and some extra goodies).

What do you think about Madame M? Does it push the right buttons to get you into the seductive mood?

P.S. For the record, there are some “Madams M” that predate this perfume, but I would hardly call them universally well-known. They include a minor supporting character in Final Fantasy VII video game, an unidentified model of a Naïve portrait from Henri Rousseau, Mme Morillot – a wife of a wealthy French bureaucrat immortalized by Tamara De Lempicka, and a house owner from a contemporary children’s book featuring friendly monsters.

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