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 One last perfume review before we take off for France and land in the capital of perfumes. We adore Paris and its Eden-like public gardens in the spring. There is also a less glamorous side to Paris as well that has come to the forefront of the news: the riots and the projects that are less than scintillating and postcard-like. I would recommend watching Mathieu Kassowitz's movie entitled "La Haine" or "Hate" in English if you want to open a vista onto the world of the under-privileged Parisian "banlieues" and appraise the tears in the French social fabric. It paradoxically turns out to be a beautiful movie, turning boredom, dullness, quotidian dreariness into objects of aesthetic contemplation and emotion. If it were a perfume, you would need a cement note to convey the starkness of those lives.
Spring came early in Boston; my whole body felt lulled by the new softness of the air which was already suffused with a different summery quality of light that anticipated the New England dog days while we were still all standing at the cold cusp of winter. So on my recent quest for a spring fragrance I happened upon Poupée by Rochas. I found its name to be somewhat unusual, enticing, suggesting both a pretty child's toy, a doll, and a certain type of prettiness that is, in essence, cute. The conflation of these two universes, that of childhood and of sophisticated womanhood made this scent stand out and piqued my interest. Or maybe it was the pink. No, but really, this name, I feel, is quite unusual for a fragrance...
Continue reading "Perfume Review & Musings: Poupée by Rochas" »
"It's Good to Stare", an article by Craig McQueen in today's Daily Record detailing the biological and social reasons for which women are attracted to certain men and vice-versa:
Daily Record
I will be posting again regularly after April 10. If I get a chance, I'll upload some pictures from Paris, otherwise I'll recount my trip and perfume experiences (I also need to get some work done that's not perfume-related) when I get back to the States.
Poster from filmsdefrance.com
"(...) Noble sirs, how does the Tathagata Sugandhakuta teach his Dharma?
They replied the Tathagata does not teach the Dharma by means of sound and language. He disciplines the bodhisattvas only by means of perfumes. At the foot of each perfume-tree sits a bodhisattva and the trees emit perfumes like this one. From the moment they smell that perfume, the boddhisattvas attain the concentration called "the source of all bodhisattvas-virtues. From the moment they attain that concentration all the bodhisattvas-virtues are produced in them."
The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti
Translation by Robert A. F. Thurman
"Women should have a wardrobe of scents that they change. It's not about putting on a pretty smell that you really like. You need to think specifically about what you want, and how you want to feel - just as you do with your clothes. The French and Italians do that, yet I think we are quite scared about it. It's so much part of our outfit."
Painting by Natalie Armstrong
You can purchase this print at http://en.easyart.com
 Jicky was created in 1889 by Aimé Guerlain. It is not only considered to be the first modern fragrance through its invention of the now classic 3-tiered structure comprising the head, heart, and base notes, as well as the introduction of the combined use of synthetics and natural essences, it is also a perfume that attempted to reverse a trend that rested on the rigid codification of gender categories. This conservative trend emerged in France after 1820, during the Second Restoration, when the bourgeois mentality imposed its mark more decisively upon society, moralizing the use of perfumes and deriving its ideas about the propriety of certain scents from the triumphant hygienist movement. In this context, Aimé Guerlain is reported to have said that he wanted to create,
"an audacious, vigorous, and quasi revolutionary perfume: the perfume of an amazon, difficult to decipher, of which you wouldn't be really able to tell whether it was meant to be for a man or a woman."
And so it was; disconcerted by the novelty of the concept, women started adopting it en masse only after 1910 while men, meanwhile, decided it would be theirs. Today, despite Aimé Guerlain's efforts at creating a unisex fragrance, Jicky is still not considered to be gender-free and in a new historical twist, has mostly come to be considered a feminine fragrance and marketed as such.
 Apparently, these soaps are so good, they send people head over heels. They are not just content to flirt with them, they want to marry them, for all eternity. The other day, I happened on a press article about the couple that makes these soaps in Missouri and then went to read the testimonials on their website....and thought I had mistakingly clicked on a soap cult website. It sounds like we all need to try these soaps before we die!!! From the standpoint of scents, the line appears to be rather unsurprising albeit very fresh-smelling. The Black Forest Chamomille one sounds interesting in its purported attempt to capture the scent of a country; it is said to combine the "traditional scents of Germany, bergamot, cinnamon, lavender, lemongrass and orange." They also have an Old Fashioned Lye Soap which may be helpful to those of us who are looking for an unscented soap to serve as a discrete base for perfume-wearing; I'm always looking for one of those personally. The line is composed of 6 different soaps having different properties.
Herbaria
 "I've never wanted a different mother. I just want my mother to be different.
Get in line, right?
(...)
But she smells great.
Know the way a person smells when they've been outside on a chilly fall day? That's how Mom smells all the time. Like rain, and wind, and leaf mold, and a faint hint of wood smoke. Hardly the way a woman is supposed to smell, but trust me: if the Glad Air Fresheners people could bottle her scent, you'd have her hanging in your car and your bathroom and your kitchen.
Sorry, I didn't mean to get all oedipal on you.
Anyway."
Leave Myself Behind
Picture from www.boldts.com
  In today's New York Times, Ruth LaFerla writes a story on a growing trend: the gender-free approach to perfume.Scent of a Person
Carnal Flower....as the story goes, it nearly came to be named otherwise, but its French name equivalent, Fleur Charnelle would have sounded too much like Serge Lutens Tubéreuse Criminelle, hence the resort to English. Another story, posted on Basenotes, which is also unverifiable and somewhat contradicts the first story, has it that CF was composed in honor of Candice Bergen, Frederic Malle's aunt, and in particular, in reference to her role in the movie Carnal Knowledge. Hmm, do you call this unfettered creativity as the EdP are supposed to leave complete creative freedom to their perfumers? Stories, myths, and lore abound in the world of perfumery and this is what makes it what it is, secret, charming, magical, and for ever vacillating between fact and fiction. I have come to think that a folkloric study of perfume industry lore is in order. To paraphrase someone who said that perfume was emotion in a liquid form, I would be tempted to say that perfume is myth in a liquid form...
Continue reading "Perfume Review & Musings: Carnal Flower by Dominique Ropion for Frédéric Malle" »
"Real musk is the one that gives off its perfume and not the one which is boasted by the druggist."
Persian proverb
 There is a terrific article on perfumes and the perfume industry by Geraldine Bendell in The Observer, Sunday, December 19, 2004:
 
"Depth, warmth, an indefinable rounded quality (about the qualities of a good perfume) (...) A rolling smoothness about it, like holding an egg. It should satisfy all the senses and seem to have no beginning and no end. So many are jagged and rough. It should be adaptable to any occasion. And you should never be quite sure whether you like it: you should remain slightly unsure of it."
 An article about the cultivation and distillation of the queen of lavenders, Lavandula Angustifolia, in the Drome Valley, in France. It reads almost like an ethnographic account.
"...certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphta winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to absolute Zero..." Gravity's RainbowPainting by David Caspar Friedrich, from otosell
Advertising Formats on The Scented Salamander (rates are available upon request)
• Simple text ad link lower left column: -Homepage: /per link per month -Site-wide: /per link per month
• 160 x 120 upper part left column: 1 linked image or 2 text links - Homepage: /week – Site-wide: /week
• 160 x 600 skyscraper – top left column: 1 linked image or 8 links: /week
• 728 x 90 banner – Top middle: 1 linked image: /week
• 350 x 200 under the first post in the middle column: /week
You will find that the juice contained in the bottle of Agent Provocateur is less dangerous than its name seems to indicate and less explosive than the shape of the bottle seems to imply. Some people have compared the bottle to an egg, even Agent Provocateur themselves; I have always seen a fleshy breast coupled with a hand grenade allusion. Please refer yourselves to the black ribbon on the side -- the subliminal advertisement on Agent Provocateur's website clarifies the association as we see a woman holding AP close to her partially naked breast, echoing its image as if in a mirror. Therefore, one can only say that it makes sense for a lingerie brand headed by Joseph Corre, the son of Vivienne Westwood, to promote this shape however slyly or unconsciously........
Continue reading "Perfume Review & Musings: Agent Provocateur by Agent Provocateur" »
"My earliest perfume memory: probably that of my mother when she would come to kiss me good night. A silky blend of fabrics and scents from a perfume whose name I have forgotten. It does not matter, really; I remember that it was mauve, tender, powdered with trails of white flowers. I would fall asleep in its softness while it floated around my sleep like a mysterious guardian. Sometimes, it happens that I encounter by chance women on a street or in an elevator who are wearing it, at that very moment all the images come back, rising up from these fragile sillages."
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