Lena

Lancome's La Vie Est Belle opens with sweet, juicy pear and blackcurrant before a heart of iris, jasmine and orange blossom, settling into a gourmand base of patchouli, tonka bean, vanilla and praline that gave the modern gourmand-floral genre its defining hit. Lena, inspired by it, swaps pear for hazelnut in the opening, a change that pushes the gourmand character forward earlier than the original does, alongside blackcurrant and orange blossom that keep some of the same fruity-floral framing. The jasmine sambac-orris heart is a fair, if lighter, take on Lancome's iris-driven middle, and the praline-vanilla-tonka base is genuinely close to the designer version's signature sweetness. What is missing is the original's luminous, juicy pear top note and the fuller powdery iris that gives La Vie Est Belle its sense of depth - here it reads as a simpler, more one-note sweet gourmand that also fades noticeably faster than Lancome's ten-plus-hour original.