Perfume is almost always in the business of beginnings. Scents trade in first encounters and charged glances, in the delirium of not yet knowing where a new romance might lead. For her latest perfume, Victoria Beckham has done something a little different: she has made a fragrance about the part that comes afterwards – the deepening of a love story over time.
Hotel Portofino, out today, is Victoria Beckham Beauty‘s first extrait de parfum and marks Beckham’s fifth collaboration with Jérôme Epinette, master perfumer at Robertet. It returns to the same well as Portofino ’97 – the pair’s first fragrance collaboration that drew inspiration from the 1997 trip to the Italian Riviera that Beckham and her husband David took in the giddy early months of their relationship. However, the scent greatly diverges from the original. Ask her to sum it up in one word and she’ll tell you it’s “intensity”.
“Both stem from the same incredibly personal memory,” she says. “Hotel Portofino is its own experience entirely though, with different ingredients. It’s about that moment when infatuation tips into something far more intense.” The first fragrance was about falling; this one is about staying, and Beckham is refreshingly unromantic about what that actually entails. “That feeling doesn’t just switch off once you’ve settled into being together. It changes shape. Life gets busy. There are kids, work, a thousand small things pulling at your attention. You have to protect that closeness. I didn’t want to bottle a fragrance about the holiday itself, but the feeling beneath it – the one that’s still there when everything else is loud.”
This explains the leap to extrait, a format that packs in more perfume oil and refuses to be over by lunchtime – the olfactory equivalent, you might say, of sticking around. “We spent a long time getting Hotel Portofino right,” Beckham says. “An extrait is a different level of craft, so we wanted to do it justice. It lasts longer on the skin – hours later you still get that hit of black amber and incense. Longevity was a non-negotiable for me.”
Epinette, with whom Beckham has now built an entire scent wardrobe, works from feeling rather than formula. “Jérôme has a real gift,” the designer says. “I describe a feeling or memory to him and he somehow finds the ingredients that capture exactly that. I still find that process extraordinary every single time.” What he has conjured is a woody, spicy composition that opens sunlit and green with bergamot, basil and a thread of saffron, before thickening through wild fig, agarwood and a pinot noir accord. It then subsides into incense, papyrus and black amber – dark, resinous and disinclined to leave.
The bottle reprises the fluted gold of its predecessor, paperweight-heavy and finished with a turquoise label mirroring the colour of the sea. “This one needed to feel like its own treasured object, something with real weight behind it that represented its intensity,” Beckham says. “The gold and the fluted detail have that vintage glamour, almost like something you would find tucked away in an old jewellery box. It felt right for a fragrance built around a memory I’ve held onto for so long.”
The jewellery box is not incidental. Long before the beauty empire, before the fashion brand, before any of it, there was a girl arranging other people’s empties on her dressing table. “I collected empty perfume bottles for my vanity when I was a little girl, so it’s never just been about one scent for me. I’m always taking in scents and memories wherever I travel – you never know what will end up inspiring the next fragrance.”
What she is chasing, ultimately, is not a smell at all. “It’s that feeling of being so completely absorbed in where you are and who you’re with that nothing else exists. If Portofino ’97 is a fragrance about falling in love, I hope Hotel Portofino captures staying in it.” As for how she wears it, the answer is gratifyingly ordinary. “It’s always instinctive, a bit like getting dressed – I choose depending on my mood. Hotel Portofino is the one I reach for in the evening, when I want a bit more depth. Fragrance is always the final step. I won’t leave the house without it.”
Photography courtesy of Victoria Beckham Beauty. Hotel Portofino is available from today at victoriabeckhambeauty.com.
