Why Smell Rich When You Can Smell Royal?

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Fragrance trends are moving fast and furious these days. There’s the whole “mob wife” fragrance trend, highlighting scents that pair well with leopard print and fur. The gourmand fragrances, like vanilla and pistachio. And “rich” fragrances, which call upon expensive-smelling juices like Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540. I’d like to propose a new era: royal fragrances, courtesy of legendary fragrance house Krigler’s revamped Extraordinaire Camelia 209 perfume.

Aristocrats and legendary screen stars are among Krigler’s high-end clientele, from Grace Kelly to Jackie Kennedy to Audrey Hepburn. It’s safe to say the century-old fragrance house—founded in 1904 by Berlin-born Albert Krigler and now run by his great-grandson Ben Krigler—reigns when it comes to royal scents.

Krigler created Extraordinaire Camelia 209—inspired by his great-grandfather’s favorite flower, the camellia—with his mother in 2009, for the brand’s 105th anniversary. The scent was dubbed “the ‘princess fragrance’ after Princess Charlene of Monaco wore it religiously,” Krigler tells Bazaar. “It became an instant success and one of our top fragrances.”

When it came time to revamp the scent 15 years later, Krigler went back to the brand’s royal roots—specifically, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, better known as Sissi. “My family has history in Vienna, so I wanted to contribute to the revival of Austria and Sissi, especially since she was known for her style and beauty,” he says. Furthering the Austrian connection, the brand’s boutique is at the Anantara Palais Hansen hotel in Vienna.

Even 125 years after her death in 1898, fascination with Sissi continues. Her life has been the subject of two recent onscreen adaptations, Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s 2022 film Corsage and Netflix’s German-language series The Empress, released later that year. Now there’s Krigler’s latest limited-edition scent, as well.

“Sissi was an icon, because she was really the first person to make Austrian royalty so important,” Krigler explains, noting that the empress was ahead of her time in the world of beauty. (She even had a cold-plunge bath in her apartment in Vienna.) And her legacy lives on with the new, modern Extraordinaire Camelia 209.

The original juice boasts notes of bergamot, musk, peppercorn, vanilla, and—of course—camellia flower, and the new limited-edition version hews close to original formula, but is just a bit stronger, which Krigler says brings to mind Sissi’s own sensibilities. “The original base of the Extraordinare Camelia 209 had macerated like a good wine for 14 years in our atelier, and when we rediscovered it, we noticed the ingredients really popped out and became very beautiful and intense,” says Krigler, adding that the powerful formula was discovered by one of the heads of the brand’s atelier in Paris as a happy accident. The result is a muskier floral with lush citrus that is both elegant and powerful—in other words: regal, like an empress.

Even the packaging reflects the Austrian icon’s style. “We worked with a local Austrian artisan to create a bottle based on elements from Sissi’s tapestries in her home in the center of Vienna,” Krigler says. In true royal fashion, the house is producing only 600 gold-swirl-adorned bottles of the potent—and exclusive—juice.

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