The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Balliamo. It means "let's dance!" in Italian, and the name is the brief. The house handed perfumer Suzy Le Helley an invitation to compose something festive and sensual at once. Released in 2026 as part of the Alta collection, it positions itself between celebration and intimacy, a fragrance that treats festivity as something you can wear rather than something you perform. White fig carries the composition's bright, leafy center, its green lift cutting through the warmer elements with the clarity of fruit picked before it fully ripens. American cedarwood grounds the base, giving the scent its structural weight and its quiet authority. The concept is movement: a perfume that opens bright and pulls you somewhere deeper before the night ends.
What separates Balliamo from the usual fig-and-cedar pairing is the restraint on the fig. Most fig compositions lean sweet, milky, or coconut-adjacent. Here, the Italian white fig stays unripe, almost herbal, cushioned by myrtle and lavender absolute rather than surrounded by syrupy gourmands. Ambronova, a synthetic amber-woody molecule, does quiet structural work in the base. The pepper at the top is black and sharp enough to cut the citrus rather than support it. Every note earns its place in a structure designed for movement.
The evolution
The first thirty minutes are loud and bright. Citron and honey pomelo burst forward, sharpened by pepper that prickles briefly at the back of the nose and disappears before it can settle. The lavender and myrtle arrive within the first hour, cooling everything down and pulling the fig forward. Not the ripe, jammy fig. The green, almost leafy kind, the kind of fruit skin you can smell under a tree in late afternoon. Around the three-hour mark, the cedarwood and vetiver take over, and the scent loses its citrus edge entirely. The warmth comes from Ambronova, a smooth amber-woody layer that softens the cedar's sharper edges and wraps the whole composition in something quieter. By hour six, what's left is a skin-close blend of cedar and fig leaf, a hushed, low-pitched hum.
Cultural impact
Balliamo reads as a green, unsweetened take on fig, and that choice alone does a lot of the talking. Where many fig compositions lean sweet, almost dessert-like, this one stays closer to the tree, closer to the leaf, closer to the fruit before it ripens. The result feels architectural, built rather than painted, with each note placed deliberately against the next. There's a clarity here that rewards attention: the white fig at the center, the American cedarwood holding the structure, the Ambronova warming the base without burying it.
