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Don’t even bother looking: Guerlain’s $660 Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21 perfume simply cannot be duped.
This sentiment is shared by hundreds of Reddit users and fragrance snobs, who regularly post statements like “Guerlain DNA is pretty hard to reproduce” and “Guerlain’s private and extrait line cannot be duped, in fact any Guerlain [scent] probably cannot be duped as they manufacture and procure their own ingredients.” As beauty experts, we concur. While affordable replicas of the Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21 do exist, not a single one comes close to cloning Guerlain’s meticulous attention to detail, perfected across centuries.
Guerlain Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21
50 ml
Personalization options available
Price upon publish date of this article: $660
Courtesy Guerlain
The luxury perfume’s lucky number? 21, since it’s composed of a straight-from-Madagascar vanilla planifolia tincture that’s manually cold-soaked in alcohol for exactly three weeks. Said vanilla is hand-pollinated and hand-harvested, too, meaning a dedicated team of Guerlain experts comes together to complete a single bottle of the fragrance, all for the sake of you smelling utterly divine.
The adjective is not just a buzzword, as the gourmand notes here are full-bodied and underscored by intentional traces of the spicy, the musky, and the woody. This is vanilla “pushed to its farthest limit,” according to Guerlain, and it’s joined by another coveted ingredient: opopanine, an ambery accord that’s long been favored by the brand for creating a certain warm, layered coziness within its aromatic concoctions. Ultimately, Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21 pays homage to the so-called “Guerlinade”: which can be thought of as Guerlain’s olfactory autograph, blending bergamot, rose, jasmine, tonka bean, iris, and vanilla in a patented menagerie of pure splendor.
The Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21 extract, concentrated at 30 percent, is, in a way, the fullest realization of Shalimar: perfumer Jacques Guerlain’s signature invention, whose Art Nouveau bottle was designed by his nephew. The 1925 icon, worn by the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Frida Kahlo, was one of the first to employ the help of ethyl vanillin. Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21, though, wants nothing to do with the world of the synthetic, making it an even more delectable, unadulterated addition to your collection (and well worth that $515 price differential).
Given the sheer strength of the oils captured by the Guerlain product that took the world by storm since its unveiling a few years back, you will not only sniff out but see and feel the perfume on your skin after a single spritz: making the experience ever so sensorially rich. This potency similarly contributes to the longevity of the Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21, which grabs hold of your body and doesn’t let go for hours at a time — generating an enticing je ne sais quoi while letting you, and the trail of aroma you leave in your wake, stay in strangers’ memory for the longterm.
Famously, Guerlain likes to say that its clients are always the finishing-touch notes of any fragrance, implying that the Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21‘s molecules will mix and mingle differently on every person. This bespoke element is extended via an engraving option on Guerlain’s site, allowing shoppers to doll up the vessel with a significant phrase, word, name, or initials. The French maison also grants you full control over how your purchase’s cord, seal, and plate will end up looking: stamped with Guerlain’s calling card (the bee), croc-effect leather for a quiet-luxury flourish, or something else entirely.
Courtesy Guerlain
Per the circa-1828 premium beauty destination, the Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21 has been its top-selling offering for over five months, with sales tripling in the past year and the extract selling out multiple times since initial launch. Online data backs this up: Videos on TikTok in which influencers call the Vanille Planifolia their “most-complimented scent” are racking up hundreds of thousands of likes, and the product’s name witnessed a search uptick of over 1,000 percent this April year-to-date.
You can shop the high-end Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21 bestseller right on guerlain.com, where shipping is always complimentary and each order comes with two samples for discovering more of what makes Guerlain so legendary (and so inimitable).
Guerlain Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21
Price upon publish date of this article: $660
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Meet the Author
Stacia Datskovska is a Senior Commerce Writer at WWD. Previously, she worked at ELLE DECOR as an assistant digital editor, covering all things luxury, culture, and lifestyle through a design lens. Her bylines over the past five years have appeared in USA Today, Baltimore Sun, Teen Vogue, Boston Globe, Food & Wine, and more. Prior to joining ELLE DECOR, Datskovska learned the ins and outs of e-commerce at Mashable, where she tested products, covered tentpole sales events, and curated gift guide roundups. She graduated from NYU with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and international relations. Datskovska regularly reports on trending innovations in prestige beauty, Guerlain’s recent fragrances included.
