LANCOME
LA VIE EST BELLE VANILLE NUDE
2025
solar jasmine
glazed vanilla
white musk
‘Want a taste of Happiness? Inspired by the finest French Patisserie, La vie est belle Vanille Nude is a deliciously creamy, long-lasting perfume that melts on your skin revealing your most irresistible self. It blends high-quality ingredients for a deeply intimate and irresistible experience. A perfume for choosing yourself and indulging in life’s most irresistible pleasures. La vie est belle Vanille Nude enhances your unique scent, creating a fragrance that is truly YOU! Solar Jasmine, from our Domaine de la Rose, and glazed Vanilla culminates in an overdose of creamy White Musk. This sensual and powerful feeling inspires you to seize life’s every pleasure. Indulge your senses and let happiness become your second skin.’ – Lancome
Lancome La Vie Est Belle Vanille Nude L’Eau De Parfum Sensuelle. A lot of words and a lot of anticipation since it’s announcement. As someone who’s found a lot of the La Vie Est Belle cloyingly sweet (admittedly, I barely tested them properly), I didn’t have that anticipation. However, I’m happy to say that this flanker takes the sweetness in the right direction. Not the loud, bubblegummy ‘Sephora-essence’ that has dominated the women’s designer space, but dry, powdery vanilla.
La Vie Est Belle Vanille Nude is for fans of light, musky, skin-scents. The first hour of this could be the lighter, hair-mist version of Dior Bois D’Argent and Van Cleef & Arpels Bois D’Iris for example, with powdery vanilla, but after that, I started noticing the white florals coming through a bit.
At first, the jasmine practicially eluded me completeely on my first time wearing it and generally, it felt like a unified, simple fragrance: If you like powdery & vanilla and you’re not looking for loud performance, you will likely love this opening. I would prefer it over a Matiere Premiere Vanilla Powder or Acqua Di Parma Vaniglia.
The musk doesn’t give off too strong of a laundry detergent vibe, but there is an overall cleanliness to it; perhaps pulling the vanilla in a slightly more traditionally feminine leaning direction, like a Les Soeurs de Noe Mitsio Vanille. There’s a faint hint of spiciness and dry paper/woody/earthiness that you usually get in these types of scents.
As mentioned, the florals do come through (or I start detecting them) later on. As it dries down, 1-2 hours into the wear, the straight-forward vanilla scent starts to fall apart just a tad, as some of the sharpness of the white florals seems to pierce through. Where they seemed almost non-existent, now I can see smell a powdery jasmine, maybe some violet. It’s still very subtle and pleasant though; a bit more in line with what I expected beforehand.
It’s thin, airy, but up close, the vanilla is prominent for several hours. It grows smoother, but it never gets dense or creamy on me, it stays airy and dry (without feeling too screechy or harsh mind you).
While I can easily see why some people wouldn’t be impressed with this (if you’re the type that wants to be noticed by everyone as you walk in the room, this fragrance isn’t going to do it), I think it’s one of the better designer releases in a while. I’m definitely not putting La Vie Est Belle Vanille Nude on the same level as my Bois D’Argent or Bois D’Iris for a powdery sweet scent, and the more non-descript ‘designer jasmine’ almost always pales in comparison to some of my favorite jasmines, but overall, there aren’t that many fragrances in its category that I can think of that I would prefer over this. I also think it’s a breath of fresh air to have such an understated scent in this collection and in women’s designer releases in general. More of this please.