Valentino Beauty Revives Vendetta, With Dakota Johnson and Alexander Skarsgård Fronting the Campaign
The house's first new Prestige fragrance in six years borrows its name and its intensity from a 1991 original.
Valentino Beauty hasn’t launched a new Prestige fragrance franchise in six years, and it’s chosen to mark the gap by digging into its own archive rather than starting from scratch.
Vendetta takes its name from a scent Valentino Garavani put out in 1991, and has now become a duo – Vendetta Donna and Vendetta Uomo. The launch is fronted by Dakota Johnson and Alexander Skarsgård and has been shot by Inez & Vinoodh.
To reinvent the juice for Vendetta Donna, master perfumer Dominique Ropion teamed up with Andrew Everett to tackle tuberose, a flower with a notorious reputation for being incredibly heavy and difficult to tame. They modernised it using an extraction method called Tuberose Osmobloom, which uses a gentle air-capture technology to harvest the scent molecules without solvents, replicating the exact, crisp aroma of the flower at the moment it opens at dawn. Everett then slices through that creamy floral core with a sharp top note of Tarocco Rosso blood orange, cutting the sweetness with a thread of salt.
Rather than creating a standard “his-and-hers” mirror image, perfumer Marie Salamagne built Vendetta Uomo to stand completely on its own. The fragrance opens with a hit of Peruvian ginger CO2 and bright Italian citrus before shifting gears into a warm, boozy cinnamon liquor accord. It is a highly textured spice note that feels more like a sophisticated cocktail than a kitchen rack, eventually settling down into a raw, earthy patchouli base.
The bottles carry a graphic V through the glass, with a pleated cap referencing the folds in Valentino’s couture.
Vendetta Donna and Uomo Eau de Parfum launch 19 August at Boots.
Credits:
Images courtesy of Valentino Beauty
Words: Roisin Teeling @roisinteeling
Valentino.com
