Frédéric Malle adds Northern Love to the Editions de Parfums in September, composed by Bruno Jovanovic. Robin at Now Smell This ran the press release on 5 August and hung a footnote off it: if the notes are right, this is "probably a re-do of Dries Van Noten par Frédéric Malle". Fragrantica hedged the same way, saying it appears to revisit Jovanovic's original composition.

The evidence for that has been sitting on Malle's own site for thirteen years. The portrait page written for Dries Van Noten has Jovanovic allying sandalwood's milky aspect "with vanilla, saffron and sacrasol," tempering it with jasmine, for "a lasting effect of buttery warmth, reminiscent of milky tea and speculoos biscuits." Northern Love's published pyramid opens on saffron over a speculoos accord, puts jasmine absolute and vanilla at the heart, and lists sacrasol in the base under creamy sandalwood. Speculoos and sacrasol are not words that turn up in perfume copy by accident, and here they are twice, from the same perfumer, either side of thirteen years.

What changed in between was the name on the front. Van Noten sold a majority stake in his company to Puig in 2018 and launched his own ten-fragrance line with the group in March 2022, which left Malle selling a bottle with a competitor's label running across it. That bottle went out of production, which regulars took to be the first deletion the line had ever made, though Malle has never confirmed it. Neither house has spelled out why, and the chronology doesn't prove the composition was the problem, but the new one carries only the house and its perfumer, which is a thing Malle can keep selling indefinitely.

Which leaves the question of whether a revisit is a restoration or a dilution. I came to the original late, and the discouraging precedent for what happens next is on my own shelf. Maison Francis Kurkdjian stopped making Ciel de Gum, then brought out Reflets d'Ambre in 2024 as a Harrods exclusive to stand where it had been. The critic Persolaise put the consensus plainly: people who smelled the 2013 original say the new one is "essentially the same composition, made quieter and sweeter." Every comparison since agrees on the direction, lighter and airier and softer, and the note lists offer a mechanism: Reflets carries hedione where Ciel's has none, and hedione is what you reach for to open a composition out. When I ordered the sample it read as quite similar. Worn against each other it isn't similar so much as evacuated, the same shape with the amber pushed back off the skin and none of the density that made me buy the first one. My bottle of Ciel stays nearly full because I ration it, which tells you what I concluded.

The two cases aren't the same shape. Kurkdjian rebuilt an amber to fill a retail slot with nothing in production to be measured against, and a Harrods exclusive has commercial reason to be agreeable. Northern Love puts the original perfumer back on his own formula, in a line that has never run flankers and rarely withdraws anything. Chanel ran the manoeuvre on Bois Noir in 1987, bringing the sandalwood back three years later as Égoïste, and the second version was the one that worked.

The worry sits in the list rather than the house. Dries Van Noten opened on bergamot and lemon and carried cloves, tonka bean, guaiac wood and musk. None of those appear in Northern Love. Leather accord and styrax resinoid do, and neither was listed before.

That opening was the part people had to get past. One long Fragrantica review calls it "arguably the most difficult to digest," medicinal and spicy, and credits the steamed-milk effect underneath to Sulfurol, though that is the reviewer's identification and not the house's. Sanding down a difficult entrance is exactly what Reflets did to Ciel, and the sanding is the loss. Leather and styrax could instead push the weight lower and keep it. Both bottles would have to be on one wrist to know, and one of them stopped being sold years ago.

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