 Helena Rubinstein WantedSmell Expensive for Less with these 6 PerfumesNatori by Josie NatoriNorth-American Originals: Perfumers on Fall & Winter 3North-American Originals: Perfumers on Fall & Winter 2North-American Originals: Perfumers on Fall & WinterMy 2009 Halloween Shopping ListMarilyn Miglin Fo-Ti-TiengThe Body Shop Love Etc.Fall Fragrances: Cornucopia of Dark FruitsL'Occitane Labdanum de Séville, Mimosa de l'EstérelRobert Piguet FuturKate Moss VintageFrapin L'HumanistePatriotic Bestseller Perfumes: DiscussFaguenat, Faganat...Fug?Sniffing Rich Orientals in ParisL'Artisan Parfumeur Havana Vanille Dolce & Gabbana Rose The OneGuerlain Idylle - Part 1Guerlain Idylle - Part 2Kat Von D Saint & SinnerCalvin Klein CK Free for MenMariah Carey ForeverWienerBlut KlubwasserPrada L'Eau AmbréeSerge Lutens Fille en AiguillesBritney Spears Circus FantasyYves Saint Laurent ParisienneIdole d'ArmaniGuerlain Aqua Allegoria Tiaré-Blossom, Cherry BlossomHermès Eau d'Orange Verte, Eau de Pamplemousse Rose, Eau de Gentiane BlancheParfums de Nicolaï Weekend à DeauvilleSerge Lutens Fourreau NoirEssential FaithPenhaligon's Anthology: Eau de Verveine, Extract of Limes, Gardenia, Night Scented StockMac Naked Honey & AfricanimalChopard CascadeLancôme Hypnôse SensesJuliette Has a Gun Midnight OudNarciso Rodriguez EssenceQueen Latifah QueenBenefit Laugh With Me LeeLee, There's Something About Sofia, My Place Or Yours GinaThe Body Shop White Musk White Hot SummerRochas Eau SensuelleL'Artisan Parfumeur Côte d'AmourChloe Eau de ParfumGuerlain Les Fleurs du Guildo: An Early 19th Century Precursor of Marine ScentsLush VanillaryByredo Bal d'AfriqueZadig & Voltaire Tome 1 La Pureté - Part 1Zadig & Voltaire Tome 1 La Pureté - Part 2Guerlain MuguetGuerlain Muguet (en français)Spring Notes: Lily of the Valley & DiorChanel Cristalle Eau VerteChristian Dior Escale à PondichéryFrédéric Malle Géranium pour MonsieurGobin-Daudé Sous Le BuisRoger et Gallet Bois d'OrangeMontale Patchouli LeavesStetson All AmericanStephen Jones by Comme des GarçonsGivenchy Harvest 2008: Ange ou Démon Jasmin Sambac, Amarige Ylang Ylang, Very Irresistible Rose Damascena, Organza Fleur d'OrangerYves Saint Laurent La Nuit de l'HommeYves Saint Laurent l'HommeThe Sex Factor in Men's FragrancesNina Ricci Love by NinaHermès Kelly Calèche EDPAnnick Goutal Un Matin d'OrageGuerlain La Petite Robe NoireSerge Lutens Nuit de CellophaneParfums MDCI Péché CardinalHermès Vanille Galante - Part 1Hermès Vanille Galante - Part 2
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 Helena Rubinstein Wanted was first launched in August 09 in Paris at the Printemps and on November 5 in the US. I thought, walking into the department store back in the summer, that it was worthy of a bottle purchase for a blog review, then got a richly illustrated press release, then left on a holiday, then smelled a string of milky fruity-florals in between now and then. I feel at this point as if it requires a certain amount of discipline, even stoicism, not to falter at the mere thought of having to review one more milky-floral (I am channeling the Stoics here). It is unfair to Wanted, because my initial impressions of it were fresher (it's a good thing I jotted down my impressions then). Fortunately, I have been used in my past to doing tedious, repetitive and necessary systematic gathering of anthropological data and this is no different in a sense. So I try to remember how exciting it felt to ask the same questions for the umptieth time because I was getting closer to the bigger picture. But that was when I was interested in detecting patterns and regularities. With perfume, it still remains interesting and even necessary for me to look at it from a social perspective -- I have been doing that from the start of my blogging days -- but since there is nevertheless this floating idea that creativity is expected and even encouraged, it feels at times downright grueling. Are You Wearing a Cherubato, a Lactone, a Milky, an Angel Milk, also called in French a Lait d'Ange ? Having said that, one has to temporarily conclude that the milky fruity-floral has become a genre in and of itself, like chypre is. We can be playful and propose names for it: a cherubato (cherub + rubato), a milky, an angel milk. I cannot imagine that with the number of, nay, the onslaught of releases in this category, it could be considered just as an accident of taste. One of the early, isolated then milky perfumes was Yin by Jacques Fath (1997) created by perfumer Anne Flipo....
Continue reading "Helena Rubinstein Wanted (2009): Are You Wearing a Cherubato, a Lactone, a Milky, an Angel Milk, also called in French a Lait d'Ange ? {Perfume Review & Musings} {Celebrity Fragrance}" »
 Natori by Josie NatoriThe perfume starts with a subtle, surface powdery impression soon followed by a beautiful both intense and understated aldehydic white floral bouquet like a cleaner but no less feminine Joy by Patou. It is a Joy Americanized, made easier to wrap your mind around, offering the clarity of lines of a beautiful race automobile. The impression of Joy came to me before I went to check some background information about the scent. Josie Natori said that growing up she was used to reveling in rich perfumes: Joy by Patou that her grand-mother wore, as well as Bal à Versailles by Jean Desprez, both which can be described as old-school French perfumes. This is just the introduction as it turns out. While you were checking the box next to the word "linear" in your mind as one more sign of Americanization in the jus, the fragrance starts to slowly fade into a deeper, darker and fruitier atmosphere reminiscent of the oriental base with myrrh in Gianni Versace (1981) which has aldehydic, fruity, and chypre facets as well...
Continue reading "Natori by Josie Natori (2009): Abstract Lingerie Perfume {Perfume Review}" »
 (Green border added to the original ad)
When Futur by Robert Piguet was originally launched ca.1967 (based on the year of publication of a magazine ad that states it being "nouveau", i.e., new), couturier Robert Piguet (1891-1953) had been dearly departed for 14 years and the couture house had closed its doors for an even longer period of time 16 years earlier due to the frail constitution of the couturier. It is not easy to come by information about Futur which seems to have benefited little from the large and numerous publicity campaigns lavished on the great Piguet classics, Bandit, Fracas, even Visa, Dingo and Baghari, nor to have been worn long enough to leave an imprint in the literary cannon. From the day of its conception, and like a baby begotten out of frozen sperm if I may, it could come across as not quite fashionably or authentically Piguet. Smelling the recreated perfume of 2009 which is reportedly close to the original formula according to the perfumer Aurélien Guichard himself (I cannot confirm nor contradict his claim at this point), one is invited to go back in time due to both its retro signature and anachronistic feel. To me, Futur ca. 2009 smells like a hybrid of influences, just like it seems it was already at the time of its conception in 1967. This is to say that Futur already in the 1960s was meant to be a compromise turned towards the past although its name and the advert on which it was touted (see above) seem to point to the same future as pointed to by Stanley Kubrick's Space Odissey (1968). The closely cropped hairdo for a woman, the enormous water drop earring are here because it was the age of space attraction and Mod flair on its way to New Age. Twiggy was a feminine ideal then and so the model resembles her.  Pierre Cardin in Canberra in 1967
 Courrèges
Even though Piguet could not try beyond his grave to emulate Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges's astronaut-inspired outfits, Futur in order to make sense to a young audience in 1967 needed to borrow from the signs that felt relevant and especially, current, or as Cardin expressed on behalf of humanity, 'The clothes that I prefer are those I invent for a life that doesn't exist yet - the world of tomorrow'.
That was a bit of a complicated riddle to try to capture the DNA of Robert Piguet, as they would say today in marketing speak, while appealing to an audience that was fascinated by prospects of life on a foreign planet. We are thus faced with a perfume that was never actually launched by Robert Piguet himself, but which bears his name and which was introduced when futurism was the by-word, a worldview that was foreign to the fashion of Robert Piguet. The conflation of both betrays the commercialism of the project. Smelling the perfume ca. 2009 is to discover a supplementary level of contradiction as it does not smell so much like the green perfumes of the 1960s which indeed became in vogue as more like a throwback to the 1940s-1950s with its affinities to the heaving bosom of the green leathery chypre Miss Dior or the Joy-like bouquet of White Shoulders (at the lesser grade found in the parfum, not full-blown like in the eau de cologne), but also thanks to discreet allusions to fetishistic Piguet notes like galbanum, leather (Bandit) and tuberose (Fracas). Here is a Timeline of some representative Green Perfumes from the 1960s-early 1970s: YSL Y; Fabergé Brut (1964)
Pucci Vivara (1965)
Guy Laroche Fidji (1966)
Lancôme Climat (1967)
Norell Norell (1968)
Etée Lauder Azurée; Paco Rabanne Calandre; Guerlain Chamade (1969),
Caron L'infini; Chanel No 19 (1970)
Estée Lauder Private Collection (1973)
Futur is heavier than those except for Azurée perhaps and was built with the intent to make a big impact.
 Notes in Futur such as galbanum, hyacinth, narcissus, and daffodil are very 60s but the volume of the scent, its leathery animalic base are more from the 50s. It smells to put it more synthetically like the 60s-as-the-long-1950s or the conservative side of the decade, advertising notwithstanding...
Continue reading "Robert Piguet Futur (1967/2009): Drama Queen Resurrected from Cryogenic Tomb {Perfume Review}" »
 L'Humaniste is the latest perfume by Parfums Frapin, the perfumery branch of Cognac Frapin. For more background information you can go here as we already reviewed several of their perfumes which are all inspired by a love of wine country and the different facets of wines.  L'Humaniste is a reference in name and composition to Renaissance writer François Rabelais (ca. 1493- 1553) who is an ancestor of the Frapins. He is the son of one Antoine de Rabelais and one Anne Catherine Frapin. The perfume, created by perfumer Sidonie Lancesseur of Robertet, was issued to follow up on the celebration of the 500th anniversary of François Rabelais. Associated with this gesture, Frapin have also launched a luxurious limited edition Cognac bottle called Baccarat Rabelais (see picture on the left) which was presented this year to wine collectors also in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the technique and expression termed La part des anges (lit. the angels' share). As we know, it has now been borrowed as an adapted technique by Thierry Mugler to felicitously, in my opinion, apply to perfume-making and Angel in particular. The grape harvest just took place in Paris in Montmartre like each year. Grape harvest news have been broadcast since August in France. Wine is one of the jewels of French culture (and exports) and it is therefore always, somehow, interesting to know how wine is doing, will be doing and what people can expect to see poured in their glasses at an ulterior date. To paraphrase Stendhal, like beauty, wine seems to be a promise of happiness in France. The news from the Bordeaux country are excellent (they tend to be always great hence the difficulty to sort out facts per the cited source). But according to Le Monde.fr, Saint-Emilion maker Hubert de Boüar exclaimed with particular enthusiasm this year that, "J'ai un jeune labrador. C'est la première fois que je le vois croquer à pleine dent dans une grappe de merlot !"
"I have a young Labrador. It is the first time that I see it eagerly bite into a bunch of Merlot!
Wine is in the air and in two new perfume this fall, the other one being Angel Liqueur, which I already mentioned in an earlier post. Notes are: top: lemon, bergamot, cardamom, pink peppercorn, black
pepper; mid: juniper, nutmeg, thyme, peony; base: gin, oakmoss, tonka
bean... 
Continue reading "Frapin L'Humaniste (2009): Clarity is to be Found in a Glass of Wine {Perfume Review} {Men's Cologne}" »
 Havana Vanille is the new, upcoming perfume by L'Artisan Parfumeur, part of their travel series. This time, coming after Fleur de Liane and Panama, the very atmospheric capital city of Cuba is the reported source of inspiration while the composition centers on a Mexican vanilla absolute. "From its vibrant Salsa rhythm, its famous cigars and its famous Cuban rum, its
palaces and colonial houses with their old and sometimes broken down facades
to its extraordinary religious buildings like the Santa Clara Convent: from its
streets with those old American cars from the 50s to its beautiful long beaches
like Bacuranao, Boca Ciega, Guanabo, Mégano or Santa María...
A world of contrast. "
Havana Vanille is at first blush a musky vanilla with aspects of sweet honeyed and wet leather, creamy vanilla cupcake undertone and some powdery musk-amber with hints of coffee, immortelle, caramel all made a bit boozy thanks to a realistic shot of rum. The composition has a creamy-liquorish-y facet that translate a bit as Kahlua and Bayley's liqueurs. An earthy yet understated patchouli in the base gives it an interesting kick, one, I would have wished, were more characteristic. Instead the focus seems to be largely on amber and even more so, on musk.... 
Continue reading "L'Artisan Parfumeur Havana Vanille (2009): Imagined Communities: with Notes on Coty Vanilla Musk {Perfume Review}" »
 This is the follow-up to Guerlain Idylle Part 1: The Evolution of Guerlain's Signature If I had stayed with my first impression of the perfume upon smelling it casually in a department store, I would have had to write next that the new Guerlain Idylle is incomprehensibly devoid in creativity, originality and personality. A superficial take on it will make you believe initially that this composition is yet another variation - barely at that - on the tried-and-tested musk-rose-patchouli standard ensconced in the young and foolish (in a good way) neo-chypres that have been put out since Narciso Rodriguez for Her EDT. It was then closely followed by Sarah Jessica Parker Lovely which managed to fly under the radar of copycatting and pass as an endearing novelty thanks in part to SJP's lovely pink tulle dress. Later, it was succeeded by noteworthy Gucci by Guccy, Yves Saint Laurent Elle and Dior Midnight Poison. Caresse by Fragonard is also a take on this accord. It is these days, the ever-popular accord, that is, if you pay attention, and has become one of the significant olfactory signatures of the times. What will one day bring tears of nostalgia to the eyes of the future generations because it smelled so much like the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, for now can make you grind your teeth at so much unoriginality when encountered one time too many. My initial reaction to Idylle was disbelief: I just felt like throwing my arms up in the air and shaking my head at so much ineptitude. Really, for one of their major mainstream launches couldn't the house of Guerlain do better than this? This, to just reheat the Narciso Rodriguez for Her brew courtesy of Francis Kurkdjian, Christine Nagel and the majority's approval on a gaz burner and serve it as if piping hot in a new vessel? Incidentally, the flacon by Ora Ito is more beautiful in person than on any of the pictures I have seen. It is a much more subtle form in reality. I was apparently only able in some vexing way to perceive only the shell of the perfume rather than its internal nuances. Retrospectively, it feels a little as if the real story of the perfume was taking place inside a snow globe and I was only able to feel the outer surface. Even on the street, the sillage continued to murmur to me all the sweet expected nothings from a rosy young chypre desperate to follow the trends rather than set it. Day and night as they say....
Continue reading "Guerlain Idylle (2009) Part 2: The Creation of Longing & Beauty {Perfume Review}" »
Idylle means love or the dream of it. It refers to a poetic
genre that in the Greek Antiquity sang the amours and erotic encounters of a
shepherd boy and girl in a bucolic setting. It is also a song of innocence lost expressing feelings such
as the fear to see beauty vanish and youth fly by all too quickly. As the poet
Theocrites penned in one of his idylles, "Soon your youth will fade away like a
dream," thereby inviting the young shepherd girl to experience love before it
is too late.
Thierry Wasser the perfumer who created Idylle explained that in keeping
with the Guerlain family tradition of finding inspiration in love to compose
their fragrances, he had wanted to respect this long line of spiritual
forefathers. The word "youthful" also appears as a key one in his presentation on the dedicated Guerlain website, as befits
the idylle genre and the stylistic choice made here of a crisp, young yet
antique rose tinged with green, with a millefleurs aspect. But it is also more
externally motivated by the house's desire to create an affective link with the
younger generations of women, the customers that will ensure Guerlain's
prosperity into the 21 st century....  Pastorale d'automne by François Boucher, 1749.
Continue reading "Guerlain Idylle (2009) Part 1: The Evolution of Guerlain's Signature {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
 Forever by Mariah Carey is the newest fragrance release by the pop singer who is also preparing to launch a new album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel on September 29, 2009. You will also be able to see her in Lee Daniels's movie Precious based on the novel Push by Sapphire this November. In it she appears virtually without makeup and unadorned to play her role as a caring and frumpy social worker. As the artist already stated when her second fragrance Luscious Pink was launched and in what sounds like a leitmotiv that she likes to rehash, Forever, like Luscious Pink "... reflects where I am in my life now." This appears to be her most natural and no-brainer way to relate to perfume as well as a non-too committal existential quote. No need to bring up aesthetics or anything really complicated like that but what it is saying in the end is that personal meaning is too complicated to be adequately explained. The mystery of Carey's personality and her perfume can thus be equally preserved except that the name Forever seems to allude to her marriage to Nick Cannon as well as her relationship with her fans.  From her debut fragrance M to the extrait version M Gold, to Luscious Pink and now Forever, Mariah Carey's perfumes like her ballads seemingly deliver pages torn out from her diary, or yours for that matter. It is a minimally honest proposition for this type of perfumery creation. One of the critiques plaguing the genre or marketing category -- some will prefer to say -- of the celebrity perfume is that they are sheer mercantile Trojan horses without any soul to them nor a drop actually of the personality of the celeb that gave her or his name to a perfume. The initial M however was built around some of her favorite smells, like the meeting of roasted marshmallows and sea air and incense from Morocco. Who would want to blend that if not for her? Carey's perfumes target her fans and she does not seem to be shy about letting out some particles of her intimate memories through the evocation of collaged impressions from the past... 
Continue reading "Mariah Carey Forever (2009): The Lady is a Gardenia {Perfume Review} {Celebrity Fragrance}" »
 The Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900
Klubwasser by WienerBlut is said to be an evocation of turn-of-the-century Vienna (see also Q & A with founder Alexander Lauber)
but it could be just as well an evocation of a long-forgotten yet
familiar scent that once wafted throughout many European cities in that
period. It is a nostalgic, old-school -- I am tempted to say even
extinct type of fougère -- with a very accentuated coumarin/blond hay
facet pushed to an extent that is not seen today. It marks Klubwasser
as offering an outmoded and revivalist flavor. The fragrance was
composed by Viennese perfumer Yogesh Kumar, a specialist of "emotional communication" as expressed through olfaction. One is struck here by a frozen-mammoth aspect as if archeologists instead of digging back to light a well-preserved mammoth from the Siberian permafrost or frozen mud complete with the grass and seeds it was eating at the time of death, had uncovered a first-generation fougère in its original state smelling of plants and "fougère" in particular in a much more literalist manner than one might have suspected in the 20th and 21st centuries used to complex constructions around the basic accord. Suddenly one realizes that perhaps the original fougère scent had something of a soliflore showcasing the brand new and exciting blonde-hay note. When perfumer Paul Parquet used the synthetic coumarin for the first time in Fougère Royale by Houbigant introduced in 1882, one could imagine that it smelled very much like the subsequent Klubwasser for this idea of the scent of a fougère royale or Osmunda Regalis L. But Klubwasser is also a reenactment of a "bouquet for the handkerchief" and apart from its insertion in the fougère tradition seems to reproduce as well the aesthetics of olfactory elegance of a time when violet was all the rage, and scents had an even more ephemeral quality due to the use of mostly natural ingredients. The illusion of a photo from the past haloed with poetry is here. The radical historic character is so marked that Klubwasser ends up feeling like a scent from a sci-fi novel... 
Continue reading "WienerBlut Klubwasser (2009): Extinct or Time-Warp Fougere {Perfume Review}" »
 Opening a flacon of a new perfume by French artist and aesthete Serge Lutens always holds the promise of standing as another worthy episode in the olfactory adventure that he has been able to create since his debut scent Nombre Noir in 1982. No one is expected more than him, in collaboration with Christopher Sheldrake, to deliver a piece of bravura and make perfume paradigms shift. No one is also more spoken out against. Of all the fragrance artists that practice in the contemporary period that is, those persons that choose to express themselves through the art of perfumery by appealing to our thinking and feeling nose, Lutens is probably the one most attuned to the mind-teasing dimension of fragrances. By design or simply because he cannot help it, his perfumes are psychological objects. With Lutens, you are not following the evolution and application of the theoretical tenets of a school of perfumery but rather you are following the expansion and reaffirmation of a personal universe of thoughts and sensations.  In Fille en Aiguilles, I see a new unexpected didactic dimension emerging in the style of the teachings of a wise old monk using a wooden stick to awaken us from our lazy slumbers. He will not say anything very precise, but he is seemingly sticking a branch of pine in the smalls of our backs to prevent us from thinking that we are awake. The perfume seems to say in not-so-subtle a fashion: this is strong medicine and if you find it too potent for you, then leave me alone, go see elsewhere. The single-mindedness of the evergreen accord in this pine-centering scent, its ruffling-of-the-feathers quality is a reminder of a tradition of eye-opening, mind-enlightening -- and with Fille en Aiguilles -- mind-and-nose-clearing practices carried on by sages in ancient tales. Terebenthine has been extracted from pinus maritima L for ages to cure blocked noses and airways. In perfumery a blocked nose could be the sign of a blocked mind. By highlighting this note in this manner (this is no Brut), Lutens is also going back to an archaic tradition of perfumery little different from medicine while adding a philosophical bent more than a religious one... 
Continue reading "Serge Lutens Fille En Aiguilles (2009): Medicine Mandala with a Sense of Humor or Enlightenment Not Guaranteed {Perfume Review}" »
 Mata Hari dancing in the library of the Musée Guimet, 1905 © Guimet archives -- I picked this picture because Idole d'Armani has this girly, playful layer added to the more mysterious, more mature feminine layer of oakmoss: the idol is in a light, playful mood.
Idole d'Armani is a nice diversion from the musky florals and fruity florals that one has come slowly to accept as the smell of the Zeitgeist. Feminine shelves in perfumeries are by default now catering to the abstraction that are young women's tastes as defined by the invisible masters of fragrance fashion who tell them what will make them happy even before they can have a clear idea of what indeed would make them content perfume-wise. It is only normal that such an overwhelming favorable bias would exist for women in their late teens and early twenties as although not the richest consumers they are the ones most engaged in the dating game. They are also the most fickle too as there exists no inhibition anymore for this generation to the regular exploring of perfumery aisles rather than the settling down for a sig scent as the expression does not go for a "signature scent". Although that could have been a nice perky shorthand via SMS in contradiction though with the general ethos of hyper fast communication and up-to-the-minute version of reality. Imagine a daily message on Twitter saying "still wearing my sig scent today & meaning to do so until the day I croak." Somehow it does not sound eventful enough or in tune with a world in which a fragrance infatuation can live under 24 hours and global warming is referred to regularly to point to a future that is all about instability...  The ad features actress Kasia Smutniak
Continue reading "Armani Idole d'Armani (2009) {Perfume Review}" »
 When I start feeling in the mood for good thriller novels, I know it is summer at last in my head, and that I am now able to enjoy the most carefree days of the year. It might have happened to you sooner, but to me it has taken place really in August this year. The other day this realization together with a good level of heat made me review the newish trio of colognes by Hermès. Today, I am continuing this latter-day summer series with a perfume that seems to have flown a little under the radar this season; it has certainly been the case under my own radar. Although I noted the yearly Aqua Allegoria launch this year, I somehow failed to have an opportunity to try them until recently. Tiaré-Mimosa I did not hesitate to buy for its lovely skin-scent quality while Cherry Blossom although I thought it presented a little twist on the usual pink, girly cherry blossom scent, ultimately it could not really make me want to wear it more than or even as much as Tiaré-Mimosa. Let's qualify that. I have to confess that as a perfume blogger I am more often than not in the state of "wanting to wear perfume" rather than actually wearing any for myself as blogging about fragrance has turned me into someone less spontaneous about perfume Epicurianism, more careful to leave skin, and more importantly, mental space for reviews. Never mind this paradoxical development, it makes those perfumed moments even more special. I am not advocating a Tantric method of perfume-wearing to you. But to some degree, living an alternative to chain-perfuming like there exists chain-smoking - an adaptive behavior to innumerable market launches, admittedly - with rhythmic, stolen-time and rendez-vous perfuming to mark a pause, an event, a personal choice, has its virtues. One of them is to allow you to smell street or nature smells, smell what other people wear and the world at large. You can appreciate the smell of food better. You rediscover your own skin note. We are often told that love is being able to live and let live and not being able to let go is like a state of dependency, a form of addiction, which is, we are told by psychologists, the opposite of love. Taking a step back from perfume-wearing without shutting down your sense of smell, by all means, and considering the other interesting things you can do and experiment in life can only enrich your views on fragrance which in and of itself is really about the states of your mind and that of others. There is a line between perfuming yourself to live better and living to perfume yourself. But in truth, I sometimes miss the time when I could wear fragrance just for my secret pleasure...
Continue reading "Guerlain Aqua Allegoria 2009 Tiare-Mimosa with Notes on Cherry Blossom: My Perfume Rendez-Vous {Fragrance Reviews}" »
 This is the French version, part 1, of my review of Fourreau Noir by Serge Lutens first published in English. Le premier aspect qui frappe le regard en contemplant l'objet le parfum Fourreau Noir de Serge Lutens qui va sortir en septembre 2009 est le jeu des teintes transparentes se fondant les unes dans les autres - brun fauve, gris perlé, mauve passé - composant la couleur subtile et rare du jus de Fourreau Noir. C'est très beau, esthétiquement satisfaisant, et différent de la couleur que l'on aperçoit sur la photo de presse, se rapprochant plutôt des teintes du portrait d'Emily Brontë ci-dessus. Cette recherche de la teinte parfaite - Serge Lutens est aussi un artiste coloriste, ne l'oublions pas - on y devient sensible comme à une allusion offerte d'entrée de jeu par le parfum sur l'atmosphère qu'il contient et va révéler. Fourreau Noir est avec Fille en Aiguilles l'une des deux dernières créations de Serge Lutens lesquelles semblent toutes deux se rattacher de par leur argument narratif de surface à une thématique haute couture et falbalas. On sait que Lutens a travaillé chez Dior, un passé qu'il a invoqué pour Serge Noir. On connaît également sa photographie ultra esthétisante de femmes mi-geishas et mi-poèmes de mode. On serait donc tenté, légitimement, de se rabattre sur le thème de surface en notant également au passage la récurrence d'une autre obsession, celle pour la couleur noire apparue de manière explicite dans, encore une fois, Serge Noir, mais aussi dans Five O'Clock au Gingembre (voir index des perfume reviews)... 
Continue reading "Fourreau Noir de Serge Lutens: La Version Française - 1ère partie {Critique de Parfum}" »
The first remarkable aspect of the upcoming perfume Fourreau Noir by Serge Lutens that meets the eye is the interplay of brown, gray and purple shades that fade into each other in the light and make up the color of the jus which is of a rare, subtle hue. It is very beautiful and different from what appears on the picture of the flacon above and more like some of the tints in the portrait of Emily Brontë below. In this color research you feel, more than with other fragrances by the same brand, an atmospheric hint. Fourreau Noir due to be launched on September 1, 2009 is one of the two new creations by Serge Lutens with Fille en Aiguilles which on the surface of their stories seem to be bound by a common thread of couture reference and fascination for black found explicitly in some of the newer offerings by the house such as Serge Noir and Five O'Clock au Gingembre. I would like to argue, after having myself pointed out the couture trope before discovering the perfume, that this level of apprehension does not yield the most meaning out of the composition at hand which would tend then to be reduced to a mere textural effect of supple velvet thanks to the rich, lush tonka displayed throughout the fragrance. What I personally appreciate most in my experience of Fourreau Noir is its psychological depth and in particular its moving poignancy which transcends the usual Lutensian complexity. Secondly, it enables me to better understand how the vision of the non-perfumer yet author of fragrances, Serge Lutens, is distinct from that of the perfumer in the technical sense, in this case Christopher Sheldrake. This dichotomy is arguably blurry at the edges in the end especially because of the many years spent together by the two men collaborating with each other. Who is to tell how each nose now intuits what the other one wants or can say? There is no doubt however in my mind that the consistency of Serge Lutens's vision is palpable not just through the recurring palette of notes and accords that suggests in particular here immediately Encens et Lavande, Gris Clair, Chypre Rouge, Serge Noir, but much more deeply through his use of perfumery as a means of retelling his biography, at once relived and dreamt upon. The metaphors, the obsessions are Lutens's own. There is also a touch of Englishness to the scent that I perceive and translate into a streak of Brontëan romanticism, perhaps Sheldrake's mark, perhaps a common restrained sensitivity derived from the English-influenced and septentrional North of France. In the two men, there is also this double contrasted biographical anchoring in exotic cultures: Sheldrake's childhood in India, Lutens's adulthood in Morocco... Emily Brontë
Continue reading "Serge Lutens Fourreau Noir (2009): Biography, Memories & Longing {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance} Updated" »
 To me perfume oil is as American as apple pie. A certain kind of fragrance oil that is at least. Not the kind sold in the souks or boutiques of the Middle East redolent of roses, jasmine and oud. I mean made-in-America musk oils designed for the dating scene. Dating is very American. The Art of Manliness blog bemoans the death of dating and wants to resurrect it (thanks for the picture below!). It is a form of modern courtship with its own rules. When a dating perfume is called Essential Faith, it is even harder to miss the allusion to the religious American sensitivity, one of the highest in the world, and the next anticipated step, marriage, marital bliss. "The scent of spirituality [...] Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible, and receives the impossible. Embrace the personal, seductive scent of the body, soul, and spirit."
This is just a line to tie in sexuality and religion, how erotic is that? Next comes the aura of confidentiality that surrounds a product that is not sold everywhere yet begs to be better known for its qualities and defects. A brand that rests on a unique perfume indeed shows real faith in its product and signals a certain level of unreported popularity when this scent has been in existence since 2005. Essential Faith was originally launched under the name Faith but due to trademark registration issues had to be changed to its current one in October 2008. A central claim for this unisex fragrance is that, "Essential Faith
works with each individuals own, natural body chemistry, activated by
body heat, providing each person with their own unique fragrance. It
smells slightly different on everyone, and no two individuals will
smell alike." ...
Continue reading "Essential Faith Oils (2005) {Perfume Review}" »
 Penhaligon's Anthology is a new collection of fragrances launched this month by the old British house established in the late 1860s by newly arrived in London then barber William Henry Penhaligon (no one seems to know the exact year of foundation). As its name indicates, there is an archival bent to this project, at least initially. The brand plans to release four more "archive fragrances" in 2010 and four more in 2011. The revival of these scents were entrusted to perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour and fragrances manufacturer CPL. The perfumer is now better-known as the master-perfumer of L'Artisan Parfumeur, . Duchaufour as it is obvious by now has a non-exclusive contract, which works both ways. One of the latest perfumes by L'Artisan, Côte d'Amour, was created by an external perfumer, Céline Ellena. I am very tempted to nickname this Anthology "Duchaufour Unleashed" as I did not anticipate that it would bear so much of his personal touches. It is also an opportunity for me to catch a side of his that seems almost rebellious and certainly anti-conformist. Did Duchaufour turn into Dean (James)? Eau de Verveine (1949)Notes: citrus, woods, soft metallics, crumbled herbs, spices, musk and vanilla. The initial impression is aromatic, a bit iris-y and sweetly ambery. It is less fresh and herbal than one might have expected from the name of the fragrance and more constructed around the idea of the culturally-connoted distinguished trail for the gentleman playing on subtle woodsy and even subtler leathery undertones. I was expecting a verbena infusion, it is more of a verbena-tinged ambery men's cologne. The signature is classic with the twist that it is a warm ambery fougère rather than a cool, bracing one. It evokes the type of toiletries one might find in the mahogany paneled
bathroom of an exclusive British gentlemen's club... 
Continue reading "Penhaligon's Anthology Part 1: Eau de Verveine (1949), Extract of Limes (1963), Gardenia (1976), Night Scented Stock (1976): Archival Papers Dipped in Contemporary Solutions or Duchaufour Unleashed {Perfume Reviews} {New Fragrances}" »
 The European advertising for the fragrance featuring model Michaela Hlavackova
Perfumers: Béatrice Piquet and Juliette Karagueuzoglou of IFF
Perfume notes: top: pink pepper, grapefruit flower, mandarin; heart: Belle de Nuit, Evening Maiden Orchid, Heliotrope; base: Living Precious Woods, musk, amber. Cascade is the new perfume by jewelry brand Chopard. It comes with the recommendation that it features an original accord of Belle de Nuit flower. The composition is like a medium-bodied oriental showcasing a floral metaphor of femininity through the intoxicating and complex scent of the Belle de Nuit. Voir Venise et puis mourir, to see Venice and then to die they say. I think, at times, when catching a whiff of the floral accord in Cascade, to smell the Belle de Nuit and then die. If my needs were those of an insect, I would certainly follow suit....  The advertising for the Middle East. The model now is covering her shoulders and wearing a black outfit that resembles traditional clothing. Her hair is slightly darker.
Continue reading "Chopard Cascade (2009): Drunk Insects & Beautiful Widows {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
 Perfumer: Romano Ricci
Perfume notes: saffron, Bulgarian rose, patchouli, musk, amber, sandalwood, oud Midnight Oud is the latest opus by perfume house Juliette Has A Gun which defines one of the aspects of its general enterprise as " Luxury, in its spicy and singular version." Juliette's gun is nothing else but her seductive perfume of course. Romano Ricci, founder of the label officially signs here his second composition after Citizen Queen, according to the 2009 press release (in 2008, the brand attributed the perfume to Francis Kurkdjian). It is intriguing a priori to see a very Parisian perfume house jump head along into an arabesque exercise, without any prior warning signals or sense of anticipation. It appears even more meaningful it seems since several brands this year are tackling oud compositions (see upcoming article). Romano Ricci, the founder and now perfumer-in-title of Juliette Has A Gun, succeeding to nose Francis Kurkdjian, said "Following Citizen Queen, Lady Vengeance, and Miss Charming, I decided to dedicate a limited edition fragrance to the Arabian soul.
Inspired by middle east's rich and sumptuous culture, «Midnight Oud» is an opulent composition. A mesmerizing blend of local ingredients, Saffron, Musk, Amber, and Sandalwood, crowned by the most evocative all, OUD. "...
Continue reading "Juliette Has A Gun Midnight Oud (2009): Adapted Opulence: Oud for Urban Chypre Tastes {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
 Perfumer: Alberto Morillas of Firmenich
Perfume Notes: powdery musk, iris powder, rose petals, modern musks, benzoin balm
 Essence is the latest perfume by designer Narciso Rodriguez who worked
with perfumer Alberto Morillas to perfect the idea of a variation on
musk. The couturier has, as it turns out, such an instinctual love for
and affinity with musk that he has de facto exclusively dedicated his
collection of signature fragrances to this raw ingredient. The
masterpiece in his library so far is his debut scent, Narciso Rodriguez
for Her in Eau deToilette version which as time passes by confirms its
enduring qualities more and more. Morillas said himself that he loves Narciso
Rodriguez for Her, composed by Christine Nagel and Francis Kurkdjian,
and that it had not been easy for him to follow up on their creation.
In fact the process for Essence was both so tortuous and simple that
after a year of tests and deliberations, both Alberto Morillas and
Narciso Rodriguez who acted as a full-fledged artistic director, went
back to the initial idea for the scent: to make a fresh, crisp and pure
musk perfume. But the interesting thing is that Essence goes beyond
that point as I was able to find out thanks in part to happenstance.
Going back over some of the explanations given by Rodriguez, I note the
term "dual" which he applies to the packaging, "It's an idea that started with For Her. I loved the idea of duality,
that you have to get close to someone to know what they are on the
inside. The packaging for For Her was that: there was this very
mysterious black bottle encased in another classic bottle. Now that
idea has been reinvented for Essence and made very modern and very
sensuous by this futuristic but very accessible and very tactile
bottle....
Continue reading "Narciso Rodriguez Essence (2009): Dual White & Black Musk {Perfume Review} {New Perfume}" »
 Perfumer: Steven DeMercado of Fragrance Resources
Perfume Notes: Top: golden Tequila accord, Italian bergamot, Mediterranean mandarin; mid notes: Baie rose, jasmine noir, cognac, Moroccan coriander; base notes: Indonesian patchouli, sandalwood, vanilla absolute, tonka absolute, Egyptian incense, sexy musk. Queen by Queen Latifah is the hip-hop singer and actress's debut perfume with a launch scheduled for August 2009. The perfume was made to reflect her love for "golden tonalities, smooth textures, and a certain fondness for exotic flavors", all of which can be felt in the final jus. In fact, the code name for the perfume while it was still in its development stages was "Pure Gold", an indication that semantics played a role in this case to help anchor the inspiration for the fragrance. About Queen the perfume, Latifah said, "For me, beauty really does start on the inside. It's like a state of mind, a state of love if you will. I see fragrance as just a natural expression of this state of love. Scent expresses a woman's confidence and sensuality; it's how she embraces her body, her mind and her strength."
Queen Latifah has recently come into the open to magazine Essence about the secret she had been withholding about her past as a sexually molested child by a teenager who had been entrusted with her care. It makes it all the more powerful a statement. Queen which comes with the tag line "Love steps out first" is a distinctive oriental gourmand with a deep skin-scent finish and a surprisingly rather expensive-smelling sillage. Parlux who developed the fragrance prefer to dub it for their part a " warm, sexy, golden oriental."... 
Continue reading "Queen Latifah Queen (2009): {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance} {Celebrity Scent}" »
 Crescent Row is the new upcoming triptyque of perfumes by Benefit Cosmetics to launch next month. In the past, they issued a debut scent called Maybe Baby followed then by B Spot just last year. The new collection is more ambitious and is inspired by the creative and whimsical vision of two sisters Maggie and Annie Ford Danielson, daughters of co-founder Jean Ford and nieces of Jane Ford....
Continue reading "Benefit Cosmetics Crescent Row Laugh With Me LeeLee, There's Something About Sofia & My Place Or Yours Gina (2009) {Perfume Reviews} {New Fragrances}" »
 White Musk White Hot Summer / Eté Tropical (Tropical Summer in French) is the latest entry in The Body Shop library of white musks inaugurated in 1981 with White Musk. In the recent past the franchise has been reactivated with the creation of distinctive flankers (see White Musk for Men; White Musk Intrigue; White Musk Blush) and ancillary products. This summer we have yet another twist on the basic concept and I have to say that I was surprised by how good it is. In contrast to the extrovert sunset-in-Acapulco-Escada-like bottle or the scrunchy-for-teens first impression, the perfume betrays a remarkable sense of subtlety and is a precisely calibrated composition in the genre of the "veil" fragrances that are particularly popular in the United States, but also have become acclimatized to countries like France...
Continue reading "The Body Shop White Musk White Hot Summer/Ete Tropical (2009): Undefinable Sweetness {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
  Eau Sensuelle is the latest flanker to Eau de Rochas and is the first perfume created by perfumer Jean-Michel Duriez for the house while he continues to be the nose for Patou. Both brands are owned by Procter and Gamble. Eau Sensuelle wishes to be a return to the French roots of the house and a tribute paid to Hélène Rochas. I find first impressions of a fragrance helpful because this is often the time when the olfactory illusion is at its strongest or perhaps better said refer to a moment when we translate it most in visual terms. Smelling further, you start analyzing more and perceiving the scent more in broken-down sections of olfactory perception, which can be either technical or abstract. Sometimes when a perfume is good the images recur...
Continue reading "Rochas Eau Sensuelle (2009): Simplified Rochas Signature {Perfume Review}" »
  Côte d'Amour is the latest L'Artisan Parfumeur from their 100% natural and organic series to come with Ecocert and Cosmebio certifications. As June 5, 2009 is international Environment Day to be celebrated on a global scale with the launch in 130 countries of the earth movie Home by Yann Arthus-Bertrand co-produced by Luc Besson and François-Henri Pinault of PPR, this is a fitting fragrance to consider wearing as a tribute, and beyond the gesture consider the interest of a new school of perfumes.  For those who cannot make it to the movies on Friday, the film which looks simply stunning from the preview images (see website), will be available on You Tube as this is a social project rather than a financial one (entry fees are waved or nominal - 2 € in Europe). The movie is meant to call attention to the unique beauty of planet earth, the dangers that beset it and the possible venues to remedy the issues at hand, chief amongst them climate warming. Yann Arthus-Bertrand has become famous for his breathtakingly beautiful aerial landscape photography, and although Côte d'Amour strikes a more intimate, familial chord it also manages to encompass in its own way the atmosphere of a long stretch of summery northern beach coast with the application of just a few drops of perfume. Moreover it does so with the same good intentions and to satisfy ethically-oriented customers...
Continue reading "L'Artisan Parfumeur Cote d'Amour (2009): The Risk of the Central Perfume Motif, with a Comparative Note on Diorissimo {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
 Chloé Eau de Parfum was launched in 2008 as a successor, in name only, to the original Chloé from 1975, a tuberose-laden soliflore perfume with an immense if not for some an overbearing presence to outwit Fracas created under Karl Lagerfeld's tenure at Chloé. The new Chloé attaches itself symbolically to this heritage like a descendant bearing the same first name. But in the hands of perfumers Michel Almairac and Amandine Marie of Robertet it was turned into a completely different person except for the fact that this time too it is a floral perfume with a marked propensity to be a soliflore and that there is a little hint of Narcisse by Chloé (1992), another lesser known floral predecessor from the same brand. Chloé in 2008 turns out to my surprise to be a beautiful even touching rose composition. It reveals an unexpected measure of originality, quiet charm and even a nostalgic and poetic atmosphere. But this is where I feel the need to draw a distinction between the beauty of the rose + litchi + peony + cedar accord that unfolds here, which is aesthetically compelling, and the whole texture of the composition itself which suffers a bit from the parcimonious attribution of riches. In other words, it feels like looking at a beautiful, sincerely drawn and painted aquarelle but realizing at the same time that some parts of it are not completely finished to full effect due to, say, the drought and lack of water....
Continue reading "Chloe Eau de Parfum by Chloe (2008): Closet Rose Soliflore {Perfume Review} {Rose Notebook}" »
 How It Wafts, At FirstWhat they say: A warm and romantic vetiver inspired by Paris in the late 20's and its
infatuation with African culture, art, music and dance. A mix of the
Parisian avantgardism and African culture shaped a unique and vibrant
expression. The intense life, the excess and euphoria is illustrated by
Bal d'Afrique's neroli, African marigold and Moroccan cedarwood.
Top: Bergamot, Lemon, Neroli, African marigold, Bucchu
Mid: Violet, Jasmin petals, Cyclamen
Base: Black Amber, Musk, Vetiver, Moroccan cedarwood
 The press release further states that the "croisière noire" by André Citroën, the so-called "black cruise" that took place across Africa in 1924-1925 was yet another source of inspiration.
Bal d'Afrique by Byredo, launched last February, opens on the scent of both soft grassy skin and violets succeeded by light sweet notes of marigold served on wood shavings soon followed by candied and juicy fruit sours (buchu?) notes of berries and grapes underlining the violet accord which recedes in the background. Buchu is said to have a sour smell and is used as a body ointment in Africa. The jasmine is very subtle and green with gourmandish indolic notes in the direction of angelica, which is actually the vetiver + cyclamen, and other things. The jasmine is used as an underlining facet rather than a focus. Dots of almond contributes to the sweet feeling operating at both the obvious and less obvious levels. The obvious level of candied notes is very in-your-face. This mostly exaggerated gourmand opening immediately strikes one as an interesting choice given the personality of the Byredo brand. In this context, the highly regressive accord cannot be mistaken for a lack of ideas but rather, is a willed effect. It is here with a purpose, but which one is not apparent right away. At first you think that it is as if the perfumer Jérôme Epinette had decided to take the candied facet of violet perfumes and pushed it maximally instead of just giving a tip of the hat to sugar-dipped violet petals as one of our most traditional violet associations. As Bal d'Afrique develops, it continues to defy the conventions of the well-bred, tasteful and urbane genre of a certain type of niche perfumery and next takes on a sticky, childish texture, to the nose, going now in the direction of syrupy but still counterbalanced by light green and woody notes, the vetiver facet, suggesting banana leaves, banana fruit and passion fruit. Cellophane-wrapped candies continue to impose their imagery. But in-between the literal scent of sweet-toothed sticky kids' fingers and banana - did I say banana, ah yes, of course, (a moment of enlightenment to the non-prejudiced), it is the banana girdle worn by Joséphine Baker in her legendary la danse des bananes - there is a more subtle and vague accord of vetiver introducing a bit more of the unstated quality of perfumery.... 
Continue reading "Byredo Bal d'Afrique (2009): Cake-Walking at the Bal d'Afrique {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 Angel with Lit Wing by Joyce Tenneson, 2000.
You can read part 1: Scent of a Fallen Angel If you are interested in shades of olfactory whites, Tome 1 La Pureté is well worth considering If you like the idea of applying milk onto your skin, and smelling like it, you won't be able to resist it. If you are a Nostalgic of Le Feu d'Issey, please find here its heavenly white version. Zadig et Voltaire have called their debut perfume a "patchoulait", milky patchouli, and reportedly borrowed the theme of the fallen angel from the world of rock' n roll rather than that of religious art. The whiteness of the composition is meant to illustrate a vision of heaven. Thierry Gillier who calls himself a "Dadaïst entrepreneur" teamed up with Le Labo founders Fabrice Penot and Edouard Roshi to propose this first tome in a series of upcoming fragrances. The fragrance was composed by perfumer Nathalie Lorson. Tome 1 La Pureté interprets the theme of purity lost with a composition opening on subtle milky and "white-ambery" (my characterization) notes and ending on a hyper-realistic sweaty accord. There is actually a tendency in the top notes for the smell of alcohol to linger on a bit more than is usual, as if it had not been inhabited by perfume notes from the start, but after this lapse, the perfume appears. One should not ascribe too much depth to this theme of the fallen angel but it can be detected as a figurative motif in the composition. The perfume embeds a Nestlé-condensed-milk accord but weaved into a dream material rather than into a realistic and gourmand squirt of sugar-heavy milk syrup as in the comfort scent Matin Câlin by Comptoir Sud Pacifique. The copy uses the term "nurturing"; I am tempted to see milk here as a more literal and edgier replacement/complement for and of the nurturing and difficult-to-get-now Mysore sandalwood often noted for its maternal, lactic notes...
Continue reading "Zadig et Voltaire Tome 1 La Purete (2009) - Part 2: Patchoulait {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
 As previously announced, the lifestyle and apparel label Zadig et Voltaire launched their debut perfume this spring 2009 called Tome 1 La Pureté (Vol. 1 Purity). The world is certainly not lacking in new fragrance launches, so why review this one, why even pay attention to this launch? The answer for Zadig et Voltaire fans is probably obvious: the perfume is a new element in the boutique, tester sprays are strategically positioned, why not try?  For others, especially the ones suffering from blurred vision after seeing too many perfume bottles in their recent lifetime, there are still four elements that can be both eye-and-ear catching. 1) founder Thierry Gillier associated himself with a perfume house that has a reputation for preferring to err on the side of edgy rather than staid, i.e., Le Labo -- it could be interesting and there must also be a reason why Le Labo is willing to work on someone else's project; 2) The theme of the fallen angel is conceptually and visually if not morally intriguing and possibly translates into an interesting creative olfactory composition - you may choose between visuals of Barbarella (above) and Wings of Desire (below) to whet your appetite;...
Continue reading "Zadig et Voltaire Tome 1 La Purete (2009): Scent of a Fallen Angel - Part 1 {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
 Like each year, Guerlain releases its anniversary Muguet (Lily of the Valley) perfume (see the 2006 edition). Tomorrow April 30th, you will be able to discover the 2009 version in the Guerlain boutiques worldwide, but for just one day. Guerlain traditionally releases a muguet scent each year in anticipation of the 1st of May when sprigs of muguet are exchanged as charming tokens of spring renewal and good luck in France. As if mimicking the ephemeral quality of the fragile muguet scent which is both strong and little-lasting over the days, the Guerlain Muguet is like a bouquet of lily of the valleys to be enjoyed for a short span of time. Subtitled " Un Jour, Un Parfum"(One Day, One Perfume), the one-day launch is an event charged with both traditional symbolism and luxury acumen. How It WaftsThe opening of Muguet 2009 is quite literally and pleasantly soapy (it smells like a refined soap), almost bubbly like Badedas fizz, fresh, green (grassy), but at the same time contrasted with raspy and indolic, almost masculine jasmine notes. Soon a more dramatic sense of intoxication and amorous abandon of the senses momentarily concludes the opening stage. This beginning I see as an olfactory shock meant to provoke an emotion in the smeller/wearer. It is a way of telling you, "see what I am capable of", but the perfume soon calms down. Le Muguet by Guerlain immediately appears to be a stylized yet natural-smelling muguet.The stylization effect rests on both exaggerated traits and added-on ones. There is an enhanced indolic accord of honeyed lilac and muguet mingling with softer green and white floral notes and more angular, sharper leather and nail-polish notes surfacing from the base then overtaking the stage. This "violence" or tempest, in a bottle, soon recedes while the underlying, heavier floral notes remain of a raw, raspy, bold nature...
Continue reading "Guerlain Muguet (2009): A One-Day Limited Edition, Available on April 30th {Perfume Review} + A Prize Drawing" »
 Continuing my exploration of green freshness in contrast to the more widespread canvases of aquatic and airy freshness which as I pointed out earlier are more attention-drawing nowadays, I wanted to call attention to a home fragrance by L'Artisan Parfumeur called Parfum de Feuilles (The Scent of Leaves). It is inspired by "the aromas of a Tuscan garden" in the springtime and features notes of tomato leaves, basil and mint. L'Artisan calls it "elegantly rustic". As its name indicates and as the scent delivers in full it is all about that feeling of bruised grass blades and raw sap oozing on your fingers and staining your skin after you have played with leaves to release their aromas...
Continue reading "L'Artisan Parfumeur Parfum de Feuilles {Home Fragrance Review} {Fresh Notebook - Green Freshness}" »
 Chanel Cristalle Eau Verte Eau de Toilette Concentrée is the latest flanker to the original Cristalle Eau de Toilette. Notes are: Sicilian lemon, bergamot, neroli, jasmine, magnolia accord, abstract white flowers. The BackgroundThe original Cristalle Eau de Toilette was launched in 1974 as a fresh abstract floral counterbalanced by a classic touch of chypre (my characterization). It was followed in 1993 by an Eau de Parfum version in answer to customers' requests for a more lasting version of the Eau de Toilette. This utilitarian motivation translated into a variation attributed to the then Chanel in-house perfumer Jacques Polge (at a time when nose François Demachy was also active at Chanel's) that perfectly fit the bill: to this day it is a bit louder, lasts more at a slightly amplified volume perceptible by more people, with some differing facets. But beyond this dutiful attitude, it was not able to eclipse Cristalle created by Henri Robert with its perfect balance of ingredients and its winning subtlety. For Chanel, it was reportedly an opportunity to reach out to their " younger" and " more hip" beauty customers and make Cristalle more mainstream. As Chanel president Arie Kopelman stated at the time, " Our goal is to convert Cristalle from a niche fragrance into a broader business,". The new Cristalle Eau Verte Eau de Toilette Concentrée (Cristalle Green Water Concentrated Eau de Toilette) which just came out to welcome spring 2009 is separated by several more degrees of liberty from the original composition of 1974...
Continue reading "Chanel Cristalle Eau Verte (2009): Unfettered Flanker or The New Freshness of Magnolia {Perfume Review} {Fresh Notebook}" »
 The new Escale à Pondichéry by Christian Dior was recently launched in India and is due out in July 2009 in the US market. It is the second stopover in the Christian Dior Escales collection inaugurated last year with Escale à Portofino...
Continue reading "Christian Dior Escale a Pondichery (2009): Hedonistic Cologne {Perfume Review}" »
 As reported last time, Géranium pour Monsieur is the latest Editions de Parfums launch due out in May 2009. Evolving from a brash and super fresh opening to further green crushed freshness then floralcy and dark woodland obscurity, it is touted as an innovative take on the traditional showcasing of geranium (not the rosy kind, but the green leafy kind), a key note used in masculine colognes called fougeres (fern) in reference to their eponymous ancestor Fougère Royale by Houbigant (1882) a creation by perfumer Paul Parquet made possible thanks to the synthesis of coumarin by Perkin in 1868 with its freshly mown-hay nuance. In a slight departure from the overall professed unisex creed for the house, it is the third perfume by Frédéric Malle to appear with a more marked masculine persona after Vétiver Extraordinaire and especially French Lover (French-market name)/Bois d'Orage (US-market name)... 
Continue reading "Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle Geranium pour Monsieur (2009): Brash Masculine Floral or a Green Fougere Gone Black {Perfume Review}" »
 The Eyrignac garden in Périgord by cytonick As far as I can tell the perfume brand Parfums Gobin-Daudé founded by perfumer Victoire Gobin-Daudé was commercialized ca. 2001 and during its short life-span managed to garner the kind of favorable rumoring that ought to equate its career with enduring success. In this case however a discrepancy became apparent as the buzz lived on while the brand went down ca. 2003, whether for marketing or personal reasons mainly, or both, I am not clear about this. But still today whenever a Gobin-Daudé bottle is dug up from oblivion, a little feverishness ensues.  Sous Le Buis (Under the Boxwood) is on one level a delightfully fresh, scrupulously rendered yet poetic take on the addictive, for me, smell of boxwood. For anyone who thinks that a fraction of paradise can be had by burying one's nose in the scratchy leafage of a round-shaped boxwood sculptured like a stone architectural element salvaged from an old castle, Sous Le Buis allows you to prolong that sensation beyond that short-lived rapturous moment experienced during a walk. The scent of boxwood, like that of violets, also seems a bit elusive when you stay too long with it although it characteristically permeates the air in French public gardens. On another level, Sous Le Buis is like an excerpt from a roman à clés rich with symbolism with a little touch of enchantment borrowed from an atmosphere comparable to that of the film La Belle et La Bête (Beauty and the Beast) by Jean Cocteau. It is intriguing, not easy to decipher at first with its strange co-mingling of green and animalistic overtones which later on make sense in reference to the sexed history of boxwood...
Continue reading "Parfums Gobin-Daude Sous Le Buis (2002): Green Leafy Animality {Perfume Review & Musings} {Fresh Notebook}" »
 All American by Stetson
is the latest Stetson cologne to see the bright light of day. In
advertising images, the effort is spearheaded by the persona of
Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady. Nothing unusual so far. Brady,
like actor Brad Pitt, seems to be the very mainstream, and for the most
part, convincing incarnation of the classic All-American folk hero, the
one who seems to have spent his childhood on a Midwestern farm running
on a background of cornfields before reaching for the stars and getting
national attention as the best possible outcome to the popular
successful-story master narrative, with roots.  All American Barn by Marty Martinez
But
what I find truly fascinating about this new mass-marketed cologne is
the way in which the successful contributions to America's perfume
culture that were made in the last few years by celebrities from
minority groups were purposefully taken into account and weaved into
the scent by perfumer Harry Fremont of Firmenich. Just
by reading the PR-released interview with him, I would have never
guessed. In fact I was wondering how to make use of one interview so
controlled was it in its tone, its total lack of spontaneity, a little
bit as if he were answering sitting in a confinement room in the
pressure atmosphere created by two former KGB operatives giving him the
steely eye each time he might be tempted to depart from the official
party line.  All
American is no old-fashioned Stetson cologne, or at least, the idea was
adapted. The idealized cowboy imagery is still up on the new billboards
(the folksy hat is gone but the rancher's gloves remain) but the
perfume itself has already started to smell like a mix of real-life
influences and cues taken from Jennifer Lopez in her most Hispanic phase, Sean John (see review), and Usher. They have all been very successful at impacting America's fragrance culture through the celebrity-perfume niche. I
am now starting to understand better in what ways celebrity perfume may
not be such a trivial topic as it is helping define America's identity
smell-wise. If you look at celebrity perfume developing as one of the
major entrepreneurial niches for minority celebrities; if you realize
that those celebrities brought different sensitivities to the notion of
a smell-good perfume; if you acknowledge the fact that American
olfactory culture has already been hit by the change...then one better
understands how mass-market gorilla Coty is making a politico-cultural
statement with Stetson All American. I would have never suspected that
so much could arise from the inclusion of a guava natureprint® note
(and other notes) spotted from early on. One could have just imagined a
slightly trendy and forward-thinking fruity men's scent along the lines
of Calvin Klein Man (2007) and The One for Men by Dolce & Gabbana (2008), say...
Continue reading "Stetson All American (2009): The Smell of America's Melting Pot {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 Stephen Jones EDP is a violet composition from 2008 that I had wanted to add to the Violet Notebook for a while. It, I think, makes its mark thanks to interesting decorative touches rather than an overhaul. Like the tilted hats of milliner Stephen Jones, olfactory colors and brush strokes are added to the sides of the scent, on the edge of a form that itself remains traditional. But at the same time those touches create mini changes of atmosphere like a change of hats. It is not however a revolutionary pamphlet on violets reworked from the bottom up by a perfumer, in this case Antoine Maisondieu of Givaudan who worked with Adrian Joffe and Stephen Jones. I think that Editions de Parfums Dans Tes Bras by Maurice Roucel is more structurally re-thought as a violet perfume than this one. I was really glad to find an illuminating quote (and then a few more again later on), or so I think, from Stephen Jones himself about Stephen Jones Eau de Parfum (at the outcome of having reviewed the scent) because I could not quite explain to myself why in the most evocative phase of the perfume I saw the crooked steps of an eccentric medieval church ascending towards god knows what, a church high in the air yet undefined, a church tucked on a promontory on the edge of the sea, maybe at the Mont Saint-Michel. Jones did not hesitate to use the expression "other-wordly" to describe his conception of both millinery and perfumery, "Millinery, I think, is closer to fragrance than fashion. A hat, like a perfume, is an evocation of something nebulous, ephemeral, and other-wordly." and about his signature perfume itself, "There's something innocent and romantic and otherworldly, as well.
A perfume, like a hat and a poem, has the power to evoke a whole poetic universe in a very short form. The brevity of the form conditions the possibility of experiencing perfume, like a hat and a poem, as a shock, an aesthetic experience that unleashes its effect over a very short span of time, like a coil...  Wash and Go by Stephen Jones from the current exhibit at the V & A Hats: an Anthology by Stephen Jones
Continue reading "Stephen Jones EDP with Comme des Garcons (2008) {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 La Nuit de L'Homme by Yves Saint Laurent is the latest men's fragrance to be issued by a brand that has shown in the past that it could create some fascinating masculine compositions even and especially when you were not necessarily going to wear them. But at least scents such as Kouros and M7 made you, arguably, pay attention and L'Homme is, for all of its popularity, somewhat edgy. The new La Nuit de l'Homme (The Night of the Man) on the other hand is safe, oh-so-safe a launch in a time of recession and a big let-down in terms of creativity although it can still pretend to the designation of " sent-bon" (a smell-good scent), undeniably and unsatisfactorily so. Three obstacles were not surmounted it seems: 1) being an interesting flanker 2) being a celebrity scent that made sense when compared to the person embodying it 3) managing to add a big dose of warm oriental amber without losing all of its edge as that scent is so round and skin-friendly. To refresh our memories we can turn again to the original L'Homme which I reviewed last week and which reveals itself to be a much more interesting concept with its central duetto of bilge and
florals, like a gentler, more pastel version of Sécrétions Magnifiques.
Its transparent fruity undertones, including a trace of cool cucumber, make for a
more complex, aerial blend than LNDLH. Although on a blotter the new
La Nuit de L'Homme seemed in the first moments to project a stronger personality than its progenitor, on the longer run
it turns out to be a more mechanical and conventional version of a
masculine perfume. It is the difference between showing off and imparting a smidgeon of inner life to your perfume.  The obvious structural difference to my perception is that the new
flanker went by a pattern, re-utilizing, the skeleton of L'Homme but
emptying it of its inspiration and originality and decided to
incorporate a twist. That new element is noteworthy in and of itself, or
rather noticeable, but creativity was very limited. La Nuit de l'Homme is a true commercial flanker,
unlike, for example the very personal Kelly Calèche EDP 2009 which is
based on a perfumer's leitmotivs and feels authentic using the flanker
category as a vehicle for personal variations rather than appearing to think in
terms of mechanically applied "codes". You know when you read the word "code" all over the
place that the marketing forces had a heavy hand in the design of the
scent and in this case the perfumers complied, a little too obediently. If sometimes, you are delighted to find the perfumer(s) using a secret language in her or his composition to say something a little more interesting than found in the official spiel, here it looks like they went by the marketing book. The trio of noses are the same ones that worked on L'Homme: Pierre Wargnye, Anne Flipo, and Dominique Ropion...
Continue reading "Yves Saint Laurent La Nuit de L'Homme (2009) {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance} {Celebrity Juice}" »
 L'Homme by Yves Saint Laurent was released in 2006 and has become a bestseller. It is ranked as the 6th most sold men's fragrance in France. The jus benefited from ample advertising budgets as well as the contributions of actor Olivier Martinez as the celebrity face of the scent. The talent of architect Jean Nouvel was added to the mix for a limited-edition bottle shaped as a homage to the male member (officially it is a test tube on a base). The tapping into the nuts-bolts-and-screws imagery obviously was a hit in general, with a bottle design inspired by the Bauhaus aesthetics. The cologne also arrived in a context where the simple name "L'Homme" was still capable of sounding distinctive and ear-catching a year after Dior Homme breathed new life into the masculine world of fragrances thanks its overdosed floral iris accord imagined by perfumer Olivier Polge (the sleek design-conscious packaging by Hedi Slimane counted as well to define the identity of the Dior perfume). Since then, numerous men's colognes touting a spare manhood label have been added to the point of drowning that sense of being simply a man's fragrance and standing apart thanks to a lack of fussiness. Sensing this, Yves Saint Laurent just released a more narrative flanker cologne titled La Nuit de L'Homme as a sequel to L'Homme (our review of the new scent is up next)...
Continue reading "Yves Saint Laurent L'Homme (2006): Modern Man in a Museum {Perfume Review}" »
 When people say that the perception of a perfume is entirely subjective, they ought to turn to the phenomenon of copycat scents that seems to contradict their claim and get back to me. Well, one supposes they could pull out a single note and declare the composition to smell entirely different. Or that it reminds them of their aunt Irma who smelled of leeks and therefore the perfume must smell of leeks... 
Continue reading "Nina Ricci Love by Nina (2009): Oooh, I Love That Little Green Dress! - Hasty-Review" »
 Kelly Calèche Eau de Toilette was launched in the summer of 2007 followed in 2008 by a pure parfum version. The Kelly Calèche Eau de Parfum iteration is the latest olfactory form and incarnation of Kelly Calèche to come out of Hermès in-house perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena's perfume organ. While the first-in-the-series composition was not unpleasant, it had come across to me as being on the conservative side and I put off reviewng it for lack of any very definite ideas about it. The new EDP on the other hand has more personality and a winning softness and fruitiness. It also shocks you with the liberty it takes with the original rendition. More than just being an intensified version of the original eau de toilette (In fact, it is softer; I have not smelled the parfum form, but it looks like it has been re-worked to new effect as well), it is a new interpretation of the formula, different enough to be considered a major variation, perhaps even a slight departure from the initial more Hermès-focused theme with its more palpable and central reference to the house's vault of precious skins. The initial concept of a precious floral leather has become even more subtle in its treatment of the leather notes made buttery-creamy and soft. And here comes the surprise, it is also much fruitier, showcasing a green melon note that we saw last year in Un Jardin Après La Mousson... Official notes are: Barenia, Agneau Plongé, vegetable vine rose, irisey violet, a veil of vanilla...
Continue reading "Kelly Calèche Eau de Parfum (2009): More Than A New Concentration, More Than A Flanker {Perfume Review & Musings} {New Fragrance}" »
 Ed Hardy, following their debut perfumes, Ed Hardy by Christian Audigier for Women and Men, have introduced a second her-and-him scents named Love and Luck by Christian Audigier for Women and Men. This time the positioning is not just the youth market but the Japanese one as well. According to WWD, "Love & Luck was inspired by an oversize painting by tattoo artist
Don Ed Hardy. The work features 2,000 dragons on a 4-foot-wide,
500-foot-long scroll, which he painted to commemorate the start of the
millennium eight years ago."
Zalman Lekach The CEO of New Wave Fragrances added,
"I came across this scroll when I was researching his art and it was
the perfect inspiration for fragrances based on Japanese tastes." [...] "This is a very visual brand,"
In
case you are imagining Lekach had to dig deep into the archives to bump
into the scroll and exhumed it covered with dust and near-oblivion,
this is not quite the case as the 2000-dragons scroll is available in
book form published by Smart Art Press and listed on Amazon. The fast-paced research perfectly mirrors the fast-paced
perfume-making that presided over the creation of Love & Luck
issued only 10 months after the release of the Ed Hardy scents in
February 2008. This just comes through in the scents. While the Ed
Hardy for Women and Men had their moments of weakness, they refrained
from overt exploitation of young consumers' naïveté and reliance on visual cues. With Love &
Luck, inhibitions have been set aside and the creative team seems to
have gaily sailed into marketing waters by 1) congratulating each
others for their commercial successes with the debut scents and 2) wondering how
to benefit from and ride on this unexpected wave of luck: Oh, yes, I
have an idea, let's call the new fumes Love & Luck (you can love us
and we can still be lucky), then tap into the Japanese market which is
white-hot and ready for Ed Hardy. No need to think too hard about the fumes
themselves because, anyway, all available reports say the same thing: the
Japanese hate perfume. But they love to offer it - and super boon -
they never even open their packages. What we have to worry about though
is the packaging...
Continue reading "Ed Hardy Love & Luck for Women & Men (2008): Japanese Taste Taken Hostage or The Art of the Generic Scent {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 Un Matin d'Orage, the latest Annick Goutal perfume to be launched, offered a dreamy soft-focused description of their newest creation in the press release lulling us into anticipating a scent of superlative " delicate sensuality" illustrating a morning after the storm. The description of the gardenia accord in the perfume made it to feel like it was arachnean and kissed by dew drops: " Fragile and pure, it does not immediately reveal its voluptuous character." That summary, we are now able to report, skipped on a whole section of the story of that gardenia, maybe the full first part and last part of a small novel broken down into three or four parts, thereby significantly changing the meaning of the story and its scent. For one thing, the storm has not abated fully it seems and still discharges some of its ozonic furor, or at the very least, tension. Initial clues had led me to wonder how different the new scent would or could be from Songes or Gardenia Passion from the same brand. Official notes include: Sicilian lemon, shiso leaves, ginger, magnolia, jasmine sambac, champaca. Un Matin d'Orage is a completely different breed of "gardenia perfume" while still attempting to recreate the scent of the flower. It is as if the gardenia character were a main actor onstage motivating, anchoring the dramatic tensions. This is not a gardenia soliflore, nor a bouquet of white flowers with gardenia in it, but long dramatic natural moments in time and eternity captured through the olfactory lens and the vision of a primeval gardenia battling against the elements... 
Continue reading "Annick Goutal Un Matin d'Orage (2009): Elemental Gardenia {Perfume Review & Musings} {New Fragrance}" »
 Musky cherry on a bed of both candied amber (Flowerbomb) and old-school ambergris ( Zibeline) with a dash of civet, moist chewy almond and praline macaroons, a gogo, a whiff of Mitsouko's signature in the base, with tart berries and fleshy mango...Each time that I try the latest perfume to come out of the Guerlain stables, La Petite Robe Noire, whimsically drawn for the younger generations, I am compelled to experience a different less-than-easy-and-lazy nuance, going from slightly trashy to elegant. The fragrance is incredibly well engineered, has visibly been perfectly thought out to mesh diverse anticipated degrees of maturity in taste and to bridge generational sensibility gaps. The newest Guerlain has some ambition of being a one-stop fragrance. Reading the description of the notes in the initial announcement may have opened up expectations in the direction of a fragrance born to become a simplistic crude gourmand commercial hit, but LPRN is more like a three-generation-women-in-the-same-family perfume, maybe even four actually. It can be seen to pander to the tastes of ideal perfume-crowd types: the 2008 Hello Kitty crowd, the Insolence one, the Chamade one, the Mitsouko one and even the Zibeline one. La Petite Robe Noire comes across as a perfume of highly intelligent design in which significant intellectual and material resources were obviously invested. It stands as a beautiful and efficacious industrial perfume which could conceivably be exhibited at a 21st century Universal Exhibition with the following slightly naïve caption underneath " Come ye marvel at the progresses of modern perfumery."... A Madeleine Vionnet LBD, 1923. She is credited by fashion historians as the inventor of the little black dress. Drawing by Thayaht, allposters.com   A Chanel LBD from 1927 © The Met
Continue reading "Guerlain La Petite Robe Noire (2009): The First Multi-Generational Guerlain {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 Cellophane was invented in 1908 by Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger. The new term was coined as a contraction of "cellulose" and "diaphanous", transparency being one of its chief characteristics. If transparency is not a new effect in perfumery, the reference to the material cellophane is. Cellophane is used to keep food, but also flowers, fresh, and sometimes, women (certain rituals of beauty include the use of cellophane and olive oil, for example). It is both a functional and a beautifying material when wrapped around a bouquet of flowers, or candies, making them seem more fragile and precious, as if kept under crystal panes or ultra-shiny brittle silk. Its plasticky quality gives it a hard edge and a modernist sense of romanticism once you associate it with flower gifts. Even eroticism if you go farther into the night. There is also a sexual connotation attached to cellophane as it is an erotic inspiration for some to wrap a naked body in this thin, see-through film (the clingging kind often, but not only), which can nevertheless become more opaque as layers are added onto layers. Bondage fetishists make it one of their choice toys, together with latex or leather. But cellophane is special. Perhaps it is the most transgressive of those materials, associating in one stroke memories of cellophaned bread on the kitchen table, decent, flirtatious bouquets of flowers, and a metaphor on nudity. Precisely. Smelling the new Nuit de Cellophane by Serge Lutens one reaches a first conclusion that this work seems to be in its most characteristic aspect a work on the sensuality of floral notes, mostly jasmine, osmanthus, with a certain undercurrent of vanilla-and-magnolia softness, and narcisuss drenched in honey (as in Ozbek by Rifat Ozbek). Followers of Serge Lutens will recognize his palette of colors, his strokes, his self-referential quotes as he opens the boundaries existing between his different perfumes. But to what effect this time?...  Cellophane Show Girls, Rara Avis
Continue reading "Serge Lutens Nuit de Cellophane (2009) {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 The Hermessence Collection in 2009 Vanille Galante: The Olfactory Report and Review As pointed out earlier in the first part of our review of Vanille Galante by Hermès, although perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena voiced his personal issues having to tackle vanillin in the past, this did not prevent him from creating a vanilla perfume in 2009. Further back in his career, in 1993, and to reveal how ineluctable the scent of vanilla is for a modern perfumer, Ellena wrote an article on vanilla entitled "Un parfum fatal de vanille" (A Fatal Perfume of Vanilla) in the book Vanilles et Orchidées (Vanillas and Orchids) edited by Marie-Christine Grasse and the Musée International de la Parfumerie which is based on an exhibition organized by the museum. In that article, the perfumer drew a contrasting historical comparison between vanillin and natural vanilla pointing to the marginalization if not downright possible disappearance of vanilla absolute from contemporary perfumery due to its astronomical cost compared to vanillin, an aromachemical synthetized by Wilhelm Haarmann and sold from 1880, as recounted by Ellena. Yet at the end of the 19th century, vanillin used to be much more expensive than natural vanilla extracted using alcohol ("vanille naturelle alcoolée"). The author gives the price of 2000 Francs per kilogram for Vanillin as opposed to 30 Francs for the alcohol extract of natural vanilla. The article of the 1993 edition concludes with the following sentence, finally explaining the title of the article,...
Continue reading "Hermes Hermessence Vanille Galante (2009) {Perfume Review & Musings} - Part 2" »
 Vanille Galante: Reflections, Musings & Notes on Context Vanille Galante is the latest addition to the Hermessence collection by the house of Hermès, a more selectively distributed collection of "niche" perfumes composed with the olfactory connoisseur in mind; it is purchasable only in the venues of the Hermès boutiques. Hermessence, a collection of "olfactive poems" was inaugurated in 2004, the very year perfumer-composer Jean-Claude Ellena became the house's exclusive in-house perfumer. The series started with an initial quatuor of scents: Rose Ikebana, Ambre Narguilé, Vétiver Tonka and Poivre Samarcande. All four were united by a common tactile thematic exploring sensations associated with four different textiles.These compositions were followed later on by Osmanthe Yunnan (2005), Paprika Brasil (2006), Un Brin de Réglisse (2007) and now the soon-to-be-introduced in February of 2009, Vanille Galante. To better understand the spirit that presides over this particular body of works, it might be useful to quote what the house perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena had to say in 2007, À chaque fois, j'essaie de raconter une histoire courte autour d'une matière que je transforme et d'un voyage. » Each time, I try to tell a brief story revolving around a raw material that I transform and a journey...
Continue reading "Hermes Hermessence Vanille Galante (2009) {Perfume Review & Musings} - Part 1" »
 Photographer Alice Austen wearing a hat decorated with white lilacs, June 1888, by Captain
Oswald Müller, courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society
En Passant by Olivia Giacobetti at Editions de Parfums by Frédéric Malle (2000) - Perfume Review & Musings
Official notes: white lilac, orange leaves, cucumber absolute, wheat absolute
What they say: the scent of a lilac whipped by the wind and carried by the spring air near a garden; an impressionistic fragrance; a play on one note (white lilac); captured at an instant in time; a glorification of the scent of nature coupled with watery notes; radiant and serene (Source: Editions de Parfums French website).
I was probably unconsciously attracted to the words "En Passant" (While Passing By) on New Year's Day to want to review this scent. We have crossed into a new year, 2009, a symbolic benchmark which reminds one of the transiency of things and makes one think of what might lie ahead at the other end of the passage, as we come out of one little tunnel of time and enter another. En Passant is like a soliflore but with a sense of dramaturgy Although
the predilection for transparency that Olivia Giacobetti is famous for (an oversimplification in fact when you look at all her work)
is apparent in this composition it seems to play second fiddle here. The nucleus of meaning of the
scent appears more to be a paroxistic remembrance of a moment of folie
amoureuse for an aroma, a scene, a moment in a day. The white lilacs anchor the other scents that may have converged towards them (are they all real, are they imagined, we don't know and it doesn't really matter). Without that defining central aroma, the bread smell, the watery cucumber scent lose meaning. If En
Passant insists on the transiency of the event, integrating a sense of the passing of time in the composition like an olfactory clock that waxes and wanes, it by no means signifies
that the event was subtle, brief, or only partly experienced or imagined. It is the full
experience of an olfactory apotheosis as passed through the filter of the
perfumer's imagination...  White Lilacs from a Practical Handbook of Trees Shrubs Vines and Herbaceous Perennials by John Kirkegaard
Continue reading "En Passant by Olivia Giacobetti at Editions de Parfums by Frederic Malle (2000) {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
Méchant Loup by L'Artisan Parfumeur - Perfume Review & Musings
Official notes: cedar, licorice, hazelnut, honey
What they say: All dressed with the scents of the forest; a hazelnut core; a very tender woody and gourmand fragrance; for the inner unrepenting seducer found in every man (source: the French L'Artisan Parfumeur website in 2008).
My initial intention for today was to review Poivre Piquant but I became quickly so intrigued by Méchant Loup (Big Bad Wolf), also by perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour, that I decided to substitute a review of the latter for one of the former. A first element of surprise for me springs from the perception that this time Méchant Loup smells different from that other point in time where I experienced it in the past. Going back to it - precisely because it smelled sub-par the first time - smelling it from a different sample I am wondering now what happened to the original unpleasant astringency and the mini chemical blast I got then. It is now complex, subtle, soft and original. A second element of surprise comes from a familiar sensation lying in the heart of the fragrance which made me wonder for several hours what it could well remind me of? An Eureka moment finally occurred and made me situate the composition within an interesting genealogical map of fragrances. Magical Perfumes vs. Illusory Scents
A compelling trait of this perfume is how it manages to distill an aura of magical wonderment - which can be explained in part by an unconscious association with the liminal quality of the deep forest (here the smells of the forest) - to contrast this notion with the idea that a perfume and a good perfume at that should succeed in creating an illusion. Perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena for example promotes the latter idea often declaring himself to be essentially an illusionist. Within that worldview there is no belief nor hesitation as to what the real world is. Art and reality are two separate distinct planes in the mind of the creator. And in fact, it could be argued that these types of perfumes rely heavily on real-world scents as points of departure for the illusory construct. On the other hand, in magical perfumes there are references to real scents but those are less clear-cut and and tend to appear elusive, like uncertain apparitions and explanations. Here with Méchant Loup we enter a different dimension, one that is not wholly set within a rationalist framework but which seems to hint at a world where dark sylvan forces still lurk embodying sexual impulses in a symbolic manner, an idea which is convincingly rendered through perfumery accords. We are asked to believe rather than to be the spectators of an illusion. Perhaps the most seductive characteristic of this fragrance is its fundamental ambiguity... 
Continue reading "L'Artisan Parfumeur Mechant Loup (1997): Magical Perfumes vs. Illusory Scents {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 On April 26th, 2008 Koto Parfums, a French company which specializes in developing kids' scents based on popular movie franchises, launched two new perfumes for infants and toddlers on the one hand and little girls on the other hand called respectively Hello Kitty Baby (without alcohol) and Hello Kitty. The fragrances were created by Drom Fragrances who are also responsible for the Escada, Guess, Eden Park, Jacomo, and Olivier Strelli brands. It comes a year after a Hello Kitty scent issued by mother company Sanrio called Momoberry and created by Tristan Brando (cf. cultish Monyette Paris). There was also apparently an "original" Hello Kitty perfume before that. As one may or may not be fully aware, the Japanese kitten with a cute plump bow on the side of its baby-head-sized cranium is wildly, nay, fantastically popular with large segments of the world population. Hello-Kittified human beings are the proud owners of not only cuddly Hello Kitties, but Hello-Kitty TVs, popcorn machines, toasters, emblazoned toasts, plush toilet seat covers, faucets, sex toys, and more, many more. There are even a Hello-Kitty plane, a Hello-Kitty restaurant in Taiwan. There must be a Hello Kitty brothel where it is legal. The demographics of enraptured Hello Kitty fans are surprising to consider at first since Hello Kitty's near-universal appeal resists the normal age limitation envisioned, of say, 9 years old, and is still considered to be a thrill by older kids, pre-teens, teens, and yes, adults nearing mid-life crisis. Celebrities love her as they wish to be or can pretend to be as iconic as she is. In fact, the advances of Hello Kitty since 1974, the year it was created by Sanrio, seem unstoppable, jumping from one generation to the next as young mothers in their twenties and thirties are only too happy to initiate their daughters, and they themselves never seem to be able to shake off the addiction. Nor are they trying to. Indeed, Hello Kitty appears to elicit the love that a drug addict lavishes on his or her cocaine and similar in this regard to the sub-culture surrounding a particular substance abuse, the phenomenon may appear slightly opaque to outsiders. Another point of contact in this analogy of possible terminal depravation is that, as business authors Ken Belson and Brian Bremmer have called attention to in their book Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon, the Hello Kitty franchise makes, admittedly, the profits of a (clean) drug cartel. Deaths by Hello-Kitty overdose however have not been documented to our knowledge, although fits of intolerance have been reported... 
Continue reading "Koto Parfums Hello Kitty (2008): Hello Me, You, Everyone {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 Lyric for Man by Amouage The Skinny:
Perfumer: Daniel Visentin
Artistic Director: Christopher Chong
Gender label: masculine, but easily adopted by women
Notes: top: bergamot, lime; heart: rose, angelica, orange blossom, green galbanum, spicy ginger, nutmeg, saffron; base: pine, sandalwood, vanilla, musk, frankincense
Characteristics: a fresh and warm, dark and transparent green spicy rose oriental fragrance with a sustained aqueous facet and discreet powdery one.
Personality: subtle, elegant, offbeat
Wearability: very easy for a woman, easy for a man
Price point: $$$; worth it. Exceptional lastingness and diffusion
Bottle: an almost black-red glass (darker than on the picture) and a lighter black plastic cap than on the women's flacon but without feeling flimsy. Here the Swarovski crystal appears on the face of the cap and a crown motif appears on a metal appliqué on top of the cap.
Perfumes discussed: Penhaligon's Hammam Bouquet, Czech and Speake No. 88, Un Jardin Après La Mousson, Fabergé Brut, Yves Saint Laurent Paris, Lyric for Woman, Yohji Homme.
Lyric Rose, The Men's Version, and Gender
Amouage, as is their habit, launched at the same time a duo of fragrances for women and men which in this case turns out to be a dual homage paid to the rose. They being a perfume house shaped by the culture of the Middle East (and that of Oman in particular), it was interesting for me to anticipate how the creative team would work on a masculine version of a rose perfume that would be made, in principle, to stand a few degrees of virility apart from the feminine version while, one could surmise, taking into account the cultural heritage of the rose traditionally considered to be a popular scent in Arabic men's perfumes. By opposition, modern Western perfumery broadly defined tends to interpret the lushness and floralcy of the rose scent, whenever it is showcased prominently, to be women's appanage; it was not so in the 19th century (see for example the literally sulfurous Penhaligon's Hammam Bouquet) and even today Czech & Speake No. 88, a men's perfume showcasing a dark even sombre incensey rose belying these proclivities. It may be due perhaps both thanks to the colonial history of Great Britain and the country's traditional inclination for floral fragrances including soliflores that this cultural perception of the intensity of the rose otto was never completely forgotten. For it is a given that the rose in such cases will be masculinized.
The Western history of beauty reinforces the feminine attributes of the rose as this most desired and cultivated of flowers has been made to become in the end a stereotypical symbol of feminine beauty since the antiquity when the rose was sacred to Aphrodite. In the Islamic tradition however, the rose's aroma has been exoterically endowed with religious meaning, and if there is any gender association, it might be considered to be just as masculine as feminine through its connection with the figure of the Prophet Mohammad. It is thus said that the emanations of the rose are derived from the very sweat of the Prophet who invites "whoever" wishes to smell his person to drink it in. According to this tradition he expresses his own transfigurative mystical experience by referring to the intoxicating olfactory power of the rose, pointing at the same time possibly to a favorite perfumery accord: rose and musk,
"When I was taken up into heaven, some of my sweat fell upon the earth, and from it sprang the rose; and whoever would smell my scent, let him smell the rose."
The mystical use of the rose trope to express the exquisiteness and ineffability of the divine, further popularized by images of Sufi poetical transcendance. It carries therefore a priori an universalistic message despite the fact that Arabian feminine beauty, as in the West, is also unavoidably and classically compared to that of the rose. Of the rightly-named Rose-in-Bloom in the 1001 Nights, it is thus said that
"her name was Rose-in-Bloom; and the reason of her being so named was her excessive delicacy of beauty and her elegance."...
 October rose by Catmadogma: this picture is cool and warm like the perfume with a similar effect of watery transparency
Continue reading "Amouage Lyric for Man (2008): Unusual Rose {Perfume Review & Musings} {New Fragrance} {Rose Notebook} {Men's Cologne}" »
 Lyric for Woman by Amouage
The Skinny:
Perfumer: Daniel Maurel
Artistic Director: Christopher Chong
Gender label: feminine
Notes: top: bergamot, spicy cardamom, cinnamon, ginger; heart: rose, angelica, jasmine, ylang ylang, geranium, orris; base: oakmoss, musk, wood, patchouli, vetiver, sandalwood, vanilla, tonka bean, frankincense
Characteristics: a deep dark fruity and resinous rose encased in a classic oriental structure offering a nod to Shalimar and the guerlinade
Personality: opulent, rich, luxurious, classic, politely transgressive
Wearability: easy in the evening; you will get more noticed during the day
Price point: $$$; could have had more originality for that price, not just richness; sorry to haggle
Bottle: very nice; the cap is in a heavy good-quality plastic topped with a Swarovski crystal. The flacon is made of hefty dark, almost black-red (darker than on pictures). The
Perfumes discussed: Joy, Shalimar, Habit Rouge, Parure, Musc Nomade
This review is a composite picture of several impressions of the scent.
Lyric Woman by Omani niche perfume house Amouage is rich enough to support a variety of interpretations and can surprise you overtime with its different accents, although I think it is safe to try to encapsulate it as a dark wine-y rose oriental.
Although the rose is conspicuous at first, it tends to lose its centrality in the perception of the perfume as it develops further, for it is a very dressed-up rose in full regalia, bedecked with gold and carbuncles, including no doubt Burmese Pigeon Blood rubies. The rose here is less of a diva on its own than part of a general operatic atmosphere of ostentation with a decorative, ornate style although it blooms at times, especially peeking through a second layer of application.
As I said earlier (Perfumes that Sing Vs. Perfumes You Want To Eat), I am also more struck by the deep colors and tonalities of Lyric than by lyrical qualities, such as flight. The one criticism I have that stays with me with some persistence is regarding the use of a slightly juvenile, "easy" and regressive vanilla accord in the midst of rather convincing opulence and nocturnal ambiance...
Continue reading "Amouage Lyric for Woman (2008): Ornate Operatic Rose {Perfume Review} {Rose Notebook} {New Fragrance}" »
 John Galliano perfume ad featuring his muse: the fragrance just launched in Europe. Expect to see it in 2009 in the US and the Middle East
John Galliano by John Galliano
The Skinny:
Perfumers: Christine Nagel and Aurélien Guichard
Artistic Director: John Galliano
Fragrance company: Selective Beauty
Gender label: feminine; could be worn by a man in the spirit of a 19th century men's floral scent thanks to its tobacco and hay nuances; perfect for a modern dandy
Notes: aldehydes, violet, iris, rose, musks, woods
Characteristics: classic florals perceived through the filter of memory meet real-life realistic atmospheres = arty superimposition of freshly ironed couture dress on powdery lipstick-y floral bouquet and more
Personality: soft, tender, romantic and edgy
Wearability: easy - the "edge" might be too much for some
Price point: $$
Perfumes discussed: Berdoues Violettes de Toulouse, Borsari Violetta di Parma, Creed Love in Black, Editions de Parfum Dans Tes Bras, Guerlain Insolence EDP, Penhaligon's Violetta, Stephen Jones, Lalique Eau de Parfum, Caron Aimez-Moi
The Larger Context: Violets Then & Here & NowMajor fragrance and flavors producer Symrise said in February 2008 that the scent of violet would be one of our notes of predilection in the future, and indeed we have seen this forecast, or perhaps better put, industrial push come to realization. They announced, amongst other things, that there would be "... a redefinition of classic notes like vetiver or violet..." I was mildly surprised to have to imagine that one of the signature trails of the 19th century bourgeoisie, when floral bouquets and soliflores were overwhelmingly in was supposed to waft anew in the near future as if reflective of our deep hidden meaningful unconscious need for it, only it just had to be brought to the surface. Why a violet "craze" redux now? What could its meaning be? Is it simply the tail end of the 2007 iris comet (see Galore of Iris Perfumes), a note often associated with it? Was this just a fashion diktat we ought to disobey like the violet, purple and plum colors trend of this fall 2008? And are we really begging to tattoo violet perfume, metaphorically speaking this time, into our skins as was fashionable for some at the peak of the violet mania? The mid 19th century and early 20th century perfume-history chapter is full of excess and passionate addiction to this scent which was considered to be the epitomy of what "delicate" is meant to express. Violet was perceived to offer an "unsurpassed delicacy", an ideal and naturally refined aroma although many formulas were in fact attempts at capturing the illusion of the real thing. It is thus important to note that despite the label "violet" (soliflores) a good number of people were in fact aware that in many cases violet perfumes were illusory renditions of it. What I find very interesting in this case is that these original sources show that the so-called naturalism of 19th century taste in perfumes was actually linked to a higher level of perception of the abstractness of floral fragrance compositions than our contemporaries commonly think. The idea of a simple violet scent might sound charmingly naïve in retrospect but in fact 19th century perfumistas were much more astute consumers of it than we think...  The Marchesa Casati by Giovanni Boldini
Continue reading "John Galliano by John Galliano (2008): Edgy Violets {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
Dans Tes Bras by Maurice Roucel for Frédéric Malle Editions de Parfums
The Skinny:
Perfumer: Maurice Roucel
Artistic Director: Frédéric Malle
Gender label: Sexless
Notes: bergamot, clove, violet, jasmine, sandalwood, patchouli, salicylates, incense, Cashmeran, heliotrope, white musk.
Characteristics: nostalgic and futuristic; a violet perfume looking both towards the past and the future, attempting to decipher the unknown, the yet-to-be-smelled.
Personality: a beautiful refined and subtle skin scent
Wearability: very easy
Price point: $$$: entirely worth it
Bottle: Editions de Parfums use a standard flacon in two sizes which resembles a modern, round inkwell; simple and elegant.
Perfumes discussed: Après L'Ondée (inspired by); Jicky
The Review:
Violets for the FutureDans Tes Bras, the latest creation by Editions de Parfums a French perfume house specializing in fragrances with a more demanding than average sense of authorship, is at its most immediate level a perfume showcasing peppery, powdery and leathery violets. In a more sophisticated fashion, the perfume manages to convey the impression that it owes its very existence to the progresses of fragrance chemistry and more particularly the presence of an unnatural-smelling aromachemical component that comes across as beautifully synthetic without losing its power of poetic evocation. The sensation of smelling an odd olfactory intruder remains a bit vague and cold yet harmonious like the atmosphere of a modern art exhibition set in an ancient 19th century factory made of concrete and steel both ancient and very current, playing up contrasts and welding them at the same time...
Continue reading "Editions de Parfums Dans Tes Bras (2008): Futuristic-Nostalgic Violets {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 As previously announced, Baume du Doge is the latest creation by niche perfumery Eau d'Italie, a brand which continues to show consistent interest in capturing the distinctive atmospheres of the Italian regional landscape and history (see our reviews of Rose Paestum, Sienne L'Hiver, Bois d'Ombrie, Magnolia Romana). The composition is by perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour who is able to go on collaborating with Eau d'Italie thanks to his flexible appointment as the new resident-perfumer for L'Artisan Parfumeur. This time the source of olfactory inspiration is the merchant past of Venice, a city seen as a crossroad of civilizations where spices from the East came to mingle with the indigenous agrumes of the Italian peninsula. "Slowly making their way from India, Persia or China on the back of mules and
woolly Bactrian camels, then aboard daring merchant ships, a world of spices
found its way to Venice, their names as exotic as the languages spoken by their
traders.
Roots, barks, seeds, pistils, flowers, rhizomes and resins took hold of the local
taste, flanking and often blending with local produce. Thus myrrh and
frankincense, saffron and clove, cardamom and vanilla met sweet oranges, sharp
bergamots and wild fennel in a rich and warm fusion, the use of which ranged
from medicine to perfumery, often at the same time."
The wish to go back to a time when the line between a medicine and a perfume was thin is further emphasized by the beautiful name of the fragrance, Baume du Doge, which sounds like a wound-healing balm both for the body and soul. We are invited to imagine a recipe favored by one of the 120 doges that crossed history and perhaps passed on as a secret a balm imbued with the curative properties that paradoxically one always wants to ascribe to those very persons that can issue a death or torture warrant and take your lives, or at least conspire towards your demise; historian Marc Bloch studied this mystical power in Les Rois Thaumaturges. The Doge of Venice, whose title derives from the Latin Dux (Duke) remained a merchant as his salary was less than substantial and so, as in the case of the Bourreau de Paris who could also be a little bit of a cosmetician-pharmacist, he might have concocted a recipe on the side based on his experience of Oriental ingredients, sold to secure additional earnings ...  Doge Leonardo Loredan (1436-1521) by Bellini
Continue reading "Eau d'Italie Baume du Doge (2008): Renaissance Italy In A Contemporary Style {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 Prelude To Love, Invitation is the seventh fragrance under the label By Kilian and part of their collection titled L'Oeuvre Noire (The Black Masterpiece). It was composed by perfumer Calice Becker who signs here her fifth contribution to the line (See TSS's reviews of Love, Beyond Love). She is also the author of well-known fragrances marketed to the mainstream such as J'Adore by Dior and Beyond Paradise by Estée Lauder. Perfumery-wise the latest By Kilian appears to be a blend in tune with this year's interest for hesperidic compositions, even flirting with the genre of the Eau de Cologne, but almost more as a passing quote than as a main focus. Like for other By Kilian fragrances, literary references are key and shape in this case the personality of this scent inspired by an excerpt from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, Bonne pensée du matin (good thought of the morning). The perfume is best understood "read" together with the poem as it does not seem to take it as pretext for a further flight of fancy. Instead, a sense of faithfulness and interpretative effort appears to animate the composition, even possibly dictating its duration. How could a perfume be of epic-recitation length as in a cycle of retelling that lasts for 24 hours when it wishes to recreate the essence of the atmosphere conveyed by a poem, not even the whole poem at that, but a few verses that speak to its creators?... 
Continue reading "By Kilian Prelude To Love, Invitation (2008): Citruses & Preciousness {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
 Citizen Queen is the latest perfume to come out from the confidential French label Juliette Has A Gun and out of the hands of perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. It was released in France in May 2008 and will be shortly in the US. For the founder of the brand, Romano Ricci, the gun that a woman aims at a man today cannot but be her perfume. So how does this Juliette's pistol smell like? Citizen Queen - visibly a play of words on Orson Welles's Citizen Kane in tune with the pop culture references of the house - is presented as an aldehydic chypre (a classic chypre accord rests on notes of bergamot, oakmoss, cistus-labdanum, patchouli, and I am tempted to add amber although the Société Française des Parfumeurs does not list it). The scent wishes to be an incarnation of contemporary femininity, which it does with a vintage flair. To this effect and to my nose, it seems to artfully borrow from several classical sources of inspiration that together read like a list of 20th century feminine fragrance best-sellers: YSL Paris, Rochas Madame Rochas, Femme, Chanel No. 5, Guerlain Mitsouko, Coty Chypre are all contained in this jus at some level. As one can see Citizen Queen is a perfume that comes with a solid background in the classics. It is very frequent in the world of perfumes to practice this type of classics-revisited approach both for academic and marketing reasons. The problem here might be that added to this artisan proclivity is the sense that the composition is a bit weak in its middle stage. These two aspects contribute to turning it into a well-calculated, but not necessarily completely well-calibrated, perfume rather than an artistic one. The reader might want to know that whenever I read "niche" somewhere my standards do not automatically go up but they refuse to go down on the other hand, despite the fact that I do not intrinsically believe in the distinction between niche and non-niche. I will not say, oh, after all it cost only $ or $$ and basta! I will think, wait this is $$$ and it smells like another $$ scent I know of. The way I view it is that many niche perfumes use this term as a commercial label now like some brands use "natural" to lure you in at no cost and without any official quality control. The perfume industry has thus managed to offer itself a pseudo label of quality absolutely free of charge. It is therefore up to the consumer to separate the wheat from the chaff and realize that not all "niche" perfumes are created equal. Citizen Queen is yet another example that shows the artificiality, in many ways, of this technical (the scale of production is indeed different) rather than cultural distinction... 
Continue reading "Juliette Has A Gun Citizen Queen (2008): A Phial of Vintage Chypre Was Hidden In Her Bosom {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
 Prince Matchabelli Wind Song by Parfums de Coeur is, no doubt in my mind right this instant - and has been for the past few days - the most perfect fragrance in the world and never has this type of preposterous, fleeting, yet sincere axiom sounded more subjectively convincing and worth a public review than in the, at times, sweltering heat of a glaring Cantabrigian summer (Note: this review was initially written, but not completed, in July 2008). If the latter qualification seems to diminish the very notion of a perfect scent, it does not in reality; it just expresses my genuine sense of bewilderment at finding the added, heavensent desirability of a complementarity discovered between the hotness of July in New England and the perfectly collected coolness of this subtle and fresh green powdery scent that seems to encase an elegant pin-thin-sized hand-rolled lady's clove cigarette, maculated with traces of rose-scented lipstick in its heart. The subtle greenness is charming is what at first pulled me into the scent. I am finally not let down by the creamy, smoky and dry herbal-y vetiver in the drydown. The ylang ylang is discreetly sexy. Ah but that carnation is enigmatic and metallic yet completely alluring as a beauty with a steel prosthetic leg is: you note the silvery flash from the corner of your eye, yet quickly forget about it and are enchanted by the general aura of the person. And there is so much more to say that I will probably need to review it several times before I can let go of it. Wind Song is, however inconspicuously, related in regard with the clove-carnation accord to perfumes like Tabu and Opium, with their central hot-and-dry carnation accords. But it is also at the same time a fresh aldehydic related to Chanel No. 5. There is something also of l'Origan in that orris chewing-gum effect. The dry woods in the base, cedar, vetiver, add a subliminal perfecting masculine touch that contributes to the sense of wholeness of the scent as in the circle of assembled yin and yang symbols. Together with the exotic suggestion offered by ylang, it comes to smell like sandalwood. This perfume, I realize, is a hidden gem of the drugstores and the perfume world more generally speaking....  This advert, from 1995, is reportedly the favorite of Parfums de Coeur.
Continue reading "Prince Matchabelli Wind Song (1953): A Perfect Fragrance {Perfume Review & Musings} On The Perils in Comparing Vintage & New Formulations Side by Side {Scented Thoughts}" »
 Magnifique (Magnificent) is the latest major feminine fragrance launch by Lancôme and as its name indicate, it wishes to come across as one of those pedestal-scents that are meant to act as sublime allies of glamazons. The lovely Anne Hathaway is its idealized incarnation. A deep red highlighted by black was chosen as a color-theme meant, no doubt, to celebrate feminine passion. A dedicated micro-website will launch in 14 days. The Nagarmotha TouchA combination of hyper-classic rose (Lancôme's iconic flower) and an exotic grass known by many names, one of them, "Nagarmota" (as picked by the press release), was devised to create a perfume obviously at once very establishment and in quest of new sensations, like a genteel European lady having decided to escape the confines of her countryside manor, the accompanying stifling boredom of a life constrained by too many conventions and rules and burdened by infinite leisure time. At the same time, she is somewhat paradoxically on a budget. Reportedly having traveled to India in quest of unusual exotic scents, tandem of perfumers Olivier Cresp and Jacques Cavallier finally decided to incorporate a central woody-grassy note also known as Cypriol, Umbrella's Edge, Bois de Papyrus or essence de cypérol or more esoterically still in Sanskrit, Bhadramusta. Virtually each Indian language of the subcontinent has a different appellation for it. Its Latin name is Cyperius Scariosus R. Br. If my cross comparisons of the different terminologies used are accurate, it was featured previously in several designer men's fragrances: Xeryus by Givenchy (1983), Gucci pour Homme (2003), L'Eau d'Issey pour Homme Intense (also by Jacques Cavallier) and more recently Tom Ford for Men which prefers to reference it as "Cypriol". The latter used the note for a vegetal-musk effect rather than for its woody facet as in Magnifique...  Anne Hathaway at the Lancôme Magnifique launch © Julien Hekimian
Continue reading "Lancôme Magnifique (2008) {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
 Love in Black is the latest perfume creation for women from the house of Creed founded in 1760 in England, relocated to Paris in 1854. If the scent is already out in the French capital city, it will be introduced in the US only later in September 2008. The name is like an echo and a reverse image of Love in White launched in 2005, a fragrance with a bridal theme. Like its predecessor and many other Creed perfumes it wishes to be a reference to a patrician world of wealth and privilege. Also like several other Creed fragrances, it is inspired by the memories and image of an iconic woman. This time Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis is the muse to perfumers Olivier and Erwin Creed like Grace Kelly was for Fleurissimo and Audrey Hepburn for Spring Flower. The composition itself is described as a " violet oriental" and evolves as a fresh and woody violet then iris scent developing within the elegant range of the colors black to pastel mauve. Jackie O
There are women who stand as collective references even to those who do not necessarily follow them. Some of them epitomize a near-saintly virtue often referred to in an understated fashion as "grace under pressure". In an alliance of feminine charm, inward and outward elegance and steely strength they seem to be composed of a special essence. To explain her own personal forbearance in the face of adversity, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once said that she could not but act the way she did thinking about her forebear General Lee. The quality that was striking in her from my general perception of her image was her stoicism and something else about her that made her appear to be immutable, unruffled. When Jackie Onassis died in 1994, I had precisely started to feel her disappearance from the public scene asking myself randomly one day what had become of her not having heard of her or seen her pictures in the press for a while. There are such synchronicities of consciousness, I find, and celebrities thus populate more or less unconsciously the social imagination. Then the news came in quickly to answer this question and we all learned that she had died at a relatively young age, in her sixties, from cancer. It was like a public confession of vulnerability. She who had to overcome daunting challenges such as the loss of children, the assassination of her husband, and more, was not meant to live on a tranquil life, but had somehow finally ceded under the pressure from existence, prematurely...  Love in Black © Creed
Continue reading "Creed Love In Black (2008): Mauve Is The Color of Demi-Deuil {Perfume Review}" »
Nomad Tea is part of the Series 7 Sweet, which also features Burnt Sugar, Wood Coffee, Sticky Cake, and Spicy Cocoa. Like practically all of the Comme des Garçons scents since their debut in 1994, it aims to provide aesthetic olfactory pleasure through the sensation of anticipated and realized discovery thanks to an expressly sought-out unusual twist and with oftentimes, but not in this case, a little dose of provocation. The perfume brand owned by designer Rei Kawabuko loves to capture smells of the real world and transcribe them into liquid manifestos that are more or less incisive. Odeur 53 and Odeur 71 are compendia of street, office, home smells, Guerilla 1 only indirectly alludes to a butcher's shop without going to the extent of copying the literal aromas of, say, raw red meat and mutton fat, Red Harissa turns a terracotta red spicy condiment for Couscous into a plausible perfume ingredient, and much more. Nomad Tea is a serene perfume travelogue, like a tea scent can be, making the international roads of tea bifurcate in one imagined place, the scent bottle whimsically shaped like a turban/pumpkin/garlic bulb/fennel, which is meant to represent a sweet. Letting the scent evaporate on your skin is accepting an invitation to drink Moroccan mint tea made with astringent bitter green tea from China sitting at a café terrace in Paris and next, jump to Myanmar on the map to inhale and chew on some fermented Laphet. It is a scent that manages to be both slightly meditative and refreshing, with a calming influence also thanks to the woods, a welcome general psychological state to encourage in ourselves to counteract the summer heat.... Old woman drying tea leaves, Namhsan, Myanmar by Coole Images
Continue reading "•• Comme des Garçons Series 7 Sweet Nomad Tea (2005) •• {Perfume Review} " »
Photo © Etat Libre d'Orange Tom of Finland is the latest fragrance to emerge from the "space of olfactory libertinage" created by Etat Libre d'Orange, a taboo-averse slightly iconoclastic niche perfumery located in Paris. Named after master draughtsman of homosexual eroticism Tom of Finland, whose real name was Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), the perfume aims to instill the sense that to be "Gay or straight, it doesn't matter. The frontiers have expanded and barriers have faded to make way for a beautiful and original vision of masculinity." It is a joint project undertaken with the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles which asked as main guideline that it "does not disturb the odor of men," (see previous post)
The problem from the start for founder and artistic director Etienne de Swardt was, if at all possible, to avoid clichéd representations of homosexuality, "With Tom of Finland, the challenge was to avoid a purely sexual banality, a conventional story of propositions clad in leather and conducted in bathrooms. At the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, I discovered a world that was highly erotic, but it was an eroticism presented as art, as a veritable religion. Tom's drawings have a fine, elegant beauty; they are never vulgar. They convey a happy sensuality, a light-hearted debauchery. The viewer is amused, entertained. To create the perfume 'Tom', I thought it would be interesting to go to the antithesis of the cliche, and assign the scent to a 'straight' perfumer, Antoine Lie, who has played up the contrast of subject and viewpoint, in his successful interpretation."
Antoine Lie, the perfumer, added, "Although heterosexual, I must admit that many of the most beautiful souls I've met in my life have been masculine and gay. I'm fascinated by their culture, their talent. This perfume is my way of paying homage to them, to show the straight world that there is much to learn from gay society, to blend absolute purity with outright sensuality all the way to a sexuality without borders."
In a way, it can be seen as playing it safe to express these ideas through perfume. How far could it go in provoking sexual walls to fall? Tom of Finland the perfume, like the drawings of the artist, betrays a playful touch, that humor perceptible in the Kake comics characters, never going as far as the more seriously olfactorily provocative Sécrétions Magnifiques. It offers a simplified image of homosexuality, one that anyone can relate to and adopt as scent. It is understandable that the brand would not want to run the risk of putting out a composition that would be felt to be repulsive, like Sécrétions is often thought to be, as this might deliver a negative message about homosexuality and potentially trigger homophobic discourse. Etat Libre d'Orange want to bring you into their fold and so they have devised an appealing perfume that speaks to the cause of gay men, in particular, the ones that recognize themselves in the Tom of Finland archetypes......
 Image © Tom of Finland Foundation
Continue reading "•• Etat Libre d'Orange Tom of Finland (2008) •• {Perfume Review} {Celebrity Fragrance}" »
Sensuous is the latest major feminine launch by Estée Lauder following Tuberose Gardenia Private Collection introduced last year in the summer. If there is an American beauty brand that has consistently aimed to make as many women as possible feel more beautiful through access to fragrance allure and luxury, that would be Estée Lauder. Although it is sometimes stated that Lauder wanted to capture the attention of the upper-classes with her luxuriously feeling scents, their price points indicate otherwise targeting rather the woman who believes she has it in her to live a better life. Private Collection (1973) may have been initially a private gift to Princess Grace of Monaco, but taxi cab drivers loved it just as much and it finally made it to the department store counters. Mrs. Estée Lauder was obviously particularly sensitive to beauty. The models that have graced the advertising pictures of the brand have become the stuff of legend thanks to their gorgeous classical looks.There were Karen Graham, Shaun Casey, Willow Bay, Carolyn Murphy (see Estée Lauder advertisements for more familiar faces). Paulina Porizkova was noted for being a discreet turning point - a sign of the times - a beauty that was slightly less Greek. Liz Hurley further made the Estée Lauder woman archetype feel more accessible. These standards became an iconic reference and even made it into the popular culture. Thus best-selling author Dan Brown tickles the desires of his masculine readership by talking about the main feminine character in his thriller Digital Fortress as looking like an Estée Lauder model, in order to stress her exquisiteness knowing his readers will catch on to that mainstream gold standard of beauty: "Her delicate European features and soft brown eyes reminded him of an ad for Estée Lauder" (p. 16)...... The bottle: the back of the Sensuous bottle is ribbed, adding a sensual tactile element to the experience of the perfume. It is unusual and very pleasant to the touch, almost acting like a worry-perfume-bottle. The jus is a pink-champagne color. Photo © The Scented Salamander.
Continue reading "Estée Lauder Sensuous (2008): A Buttery Fusion of Woods & Amber {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
Kenzo Power by Kenzo, which rhymes with Kenzo Flower no doubt for harmonizing branding purposes, is destined to be the masculine counterpart to their best-seller feminine scent created by Alberto Morillas in 2000. Like its predecessor, the upcoming Power to be launched in August 2008, takes as source of inspiration the imagined scent of a flower. In the case of Kenzo Flower what served as support for poetic license was a scentless red poppy dear to the heart of designer Kenzo; in the case of Kenzo Power the fictionalized floral reference dissolves further into the vagueness of a non-entity just described as an "imaginary flower".
Olivier Polge is the perfumer behind Kenzo Power. He is also the creator of Dior Homme, Guerlain Cuir Beluga, Dior Pure Poison, Victor & Rolf Flowerbomb, among others. Masculines Are Hot
The new Kenzo Power, beyond the in-house reference, appears to be part of new trendy generation of floral compositions for men that were recently reintroduced with some fanfare by Jean Paul Gaultier with Fleur du Mâle (Flower of the Male), a masculine scent centering on orange blossom created by Francis Kurkdjian. If floral notes never really took the exit door of men's fragrances following the prim flowery 19th century filled with gentlemen sporting flowers in their buttonholes and scented with rose at their barber shops, they could be showcased more or less, and as recently experienced, readily flaunted for their modern metrosexual connotations rather than hid as sub-virile. Thus contemporary dandies have pointedly been invited to reconsider their options......
Continue reading "Kenzo Kenzo Power (2008): Trendy Masculinity By Way of Muji {Perfume Review} {Men's Cologne}" »
A Precious Rendition of Musk With its name vascillating like a flame in the direction of Serge Lutens Muscs Koublaï Khan, you might have expected Annick Goutal Musc Nomade to smell like what your imagination of a nomad of yore conjures up, one who faithfully and with great discipline would disregard the distinction between the clean and the unclean as Koublaï Khan once ordered it. If Muscs Koublaï Khan may suggest some of the martial hardiness of the mores in the steppe region of the center of Asia, Annick Goutal Musc Nomade only keeps that other facet found in the first fragrance: an idea of preciousness linked with the utilization of musk experienced as a much sought-after aromatic material purloined from the musk-deer for centuries by nomads who would trade "musk-bags". Musk and its adjective "musky" may point to a certain roughness of style, a naturalness that is borderline offensive especially in North American culture today, but at the same time, it is also the musk of luxury brought back from distant lands with its ascribed aphrodisiac, soothing, beautifying and gustatory properties. The other side of musky as in the French word "musqué" is that it came to mean at one point the reverse of what the ring of the word "nomad" seems to contain, that is an excess of affectation and also coquetry betraying foppishness in 19th century France......
Continue reading "Annick Goutal Musc Nomade (2008): The Inner Orientalist Motif {Perfume Review}" »
Lancôme Peut Etre (2008), which means "maybe" in French (normally written with a hyphen, "peut-être") is a feminine rose and iris composition brushed with fresh and green vernal notes on top while offering at the same time a warm ambery-musky counterpoint in the base, consisting in a sumptuous, endless incense-y and resinous dry-down, as if offering two distinct atmospheres. It should delight amateurs of old-manner perfumes with lasting yet elegant sillages. According to the Financial Times, "La Collection brings together original masterpieces whose compositions reveal surprising complexities," says Liz Mearing of Lancôme. "These fragrances also capture a recent trend for beautiful, vintage scents that are created to the highest standards. It's very exciting to be able to offer something so special to a discerning, niche audience."
The images it evokes, as it turns out, are very close to the intent of the vintage form of the perfume.
Lancôme initially launched Peut-Etre in 1937 and it is ascribed to Armand Petitjean, the founder of the brand, in 1935, a former managing-director and arguably apprentice of François Coty, the father of modern commercial perfumery. This spring Lancôme reintroduced an offspring of the original scent in La Collection series of "haute parfumerie classics". The original perfume was reportedly updated and recreated by perfumer Nathalie Lorson. It is classified by the brand as a musky floral, which is an over- simplification for a scent that presents other meaningful facets. In our persona case what took place was an eerie moment of revelation. We experienced an authentic shock of discovery after having described the perfume and written about some of the images it suggested to us as then we happened on a 1940 advert for Peut-Etre by E.M. Pérot where the iconography seemed to mirror our description of the new scent (see after the jump). This seems to indicate that Nathalie Lorson worked closely with the original formula as the imagery found in the 1940 advert is not hinted at in any way by the new press release (no incense is mentioned, for example). It suddenly felt like a slightly disturbing pythian incursion into the realm of archetypes. If you look at the first advert below (also seen after testing the scent in fact), you can see a reiteration of the fundamental theme we describe in the review and which comes through much more powerfully and precisely in the second 1940 advert. These publicity images therefore do speak about the perfume and about its main thrust as well as important secondary facets. Due to this "revelation" the review is layered, one more unaware and the other more informed, post-epiphany.....
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Un Jardin Après La Mousson is the latest and third fragrance installment in the Jardin series proposed by Hermès and created by in-house perfumer Jean Claude Ellena. Following Un Jardin en Méditerrannée and Un Jardin sur le Nil, Un Jardin Après La Mousson (A Garden After The Monsoon) aims to capture the spirit of a place and lift a stone of the vegetable world that was left unturned. Hence the concerted effort, like that of some painters' - Gauguin comes to mind but perhaps even closer to Ellena's world, Cézanne - to travel or go to the mountain (Mont Victoire), and observe the world in a different light.
Like its scent predecessors, Un Jardin Après La Mousson is based both on original empirical impressions garnered in situ by displacing the nose to a more or less distant locale and, if we are to believe Ellena, in the end, discarded in order to make room for the perfumer's own free movement of interpretation. He recently said that he does not care about reality.
Despite this pronouncement, to be clarified, usually what Ellena retains from his peregrinations is a novel, out of the ordinary smell that will anchor his composition. For Bois Farine by L'Artisan Parfumeur it was a a tree in the Reunion, a species whose red flowers diffuse a flour-like aroma. The fragrances in the Garden Series all showcase a fleshy fruit (fig/prune, mango, cantaloupe/watermelon) that gives way to a transparent, watery impression. With the latest Un Jardin Après La Mousson, the least easy and most complex of the garden scents, one encounters a delightful realignment of well-known ideas and sensations that gives in the end an unexpected and very original fragrance. The variegated nature of the scent, yet its harmonious tonality makes you think of a kaleidoscope reshuffling white, transparent, green, and blue crystals -- the colors of Impression, Soleil Levant. The felt plurality of the sources of its inspiration conjures up the vision of a page from the Moleskine notebook Ellena uses and in which different ideas are noted down and worked upon. The result is very idiosyncratic and full of perfumery quotes. The scent is in a Hermès bottle but could easily be poured into a Comme des Garçons one instead and touted as avant-gardiste. Ellena has made apparently contradictory statements about his more or less essential need for nourishment coming from the real world. There is for him a need for an olfactory trigger of inspiration on the one hand - the aromas of teas at Mariage Frères (Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert), the natural licorice-y facet of turmeric (he could have used it for Brin de Réglisse had he encountered it sooner), the smell of a grove of green mangoes in Egypt or fig leaves on a tray at a cocktail party in a Mediterranean garden - and his professed absolute disregard for slavish olfactory copies of the empirical world on the other hand. Impression Soleil Levant, the painting that gave its name to Impressionism
One way to understand the seeming fundamental tension that Jean Claude Ellena seems to point to in his relationship to the natural world - both seeking it out and rejecting it - is to liken his approach to that of Marxists..... just kidding......the Impressionist school of painting. Like these painters who were mobile painters, the perfumer feels an urge to come in direct contact with the objects he will paint, look for them in open places, dig them out perhaps more so since olfactory objects can be unseen and are less well known and cataloged - try knocking on the door of the local tourism agency and asking them what is there to smell in the region? - and in the end filter them through his own impressions. The watercolor-like texture of his Jardin perfumes invites this comparison further, making you think of the lilies on a pond series of Claude Monet and suddenly making you realize also that the vegetal motif on the packaging of Un Jardin sur le Nil is not unlike them. Monet was after all dubbed a poet of gardens and water. Next a composition centered around the garden of Giverny would seem appropriate and natural. However according to Le Nouvel Observateur, Un Jardin Après La Mousson "brings the water trilogy to a close.".......
Continue reading "Hermès Un Jardin Après La Mousson (2008): A Strange, Original Tapestry of Familiar Accords {Perfume Review}" »
The latest Dior Escale à Portofino (Port of Call in Portofino) created by François Demachy presents itself as an unconventional, rethought Eau de Cologne. It clearly borrows its main structural idea from the genre which first came to be known to the public in the 18th century under the name Aqua Mirabilis, but lets through a rethinking of the concept influenced by the existing Cologne Blanche by Dior, a previous niche cologne offering from the house created by Francis Kurkdjian which pairs fresh and soft. Escale à Portofino can further be seen to develop the in-house lineage of freshness in perfumed compositions inaugurated by Edmond Roudnitska at Dior but puling it in the direciton of the spare "niche" feel of the trio of colognes by Kurkdjian. The scent is part of a new line of summer fragrances illustrating a travel theme, a mirror collection of perfumes to the annual Dior Cruise Collection designed by John Galliano. Freshness, but also Transparency and Softness
Roudnitska the Elder, if we may so call him, (his son Michel Roudnitska is also a well-known contemporary perfumer) is famous for having brought to life fragrances playing upon sensations of lightness and clarity such as Eau d'Hermès (1951), Eau Fraîche (1953), Diorissimo (1956), Eau Sauvage (1966), and Diorella (1972) when full-bodied perfumes for women were a dominant norm. Like Poiret encouraging women to drop the corset and traditional focus on waist and hips, Roudnistka seems to have followed a comparable intuition with his non Femme-like fresh perfumes asking women to lighten the structural ornateness of their scents and make it more modern, different, perhaps more fluid...... Panorama of Portofino by Giorgiopix 
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Mariah Carey launched her debut signature perfume, M, last year and since then there has been only positive buzz about it as far as we can tell. Celebrity perfumes are always suspected of being crass vehicles for loud branding and sheer money-making, except by their fans, and magic in a celeb's bottle is not expected by most people. M seems to be a case where the famous personality was able to have her say and impact the making of the perfume significantly while the perfumers seem to have intuited her well. Maybe we will learn one day Carey wanted it to smell like a billy-goat and the marketers set their foot down, but the perfume seems to go well with her perceived image on yet another level of synergy, that of the celebrity's image and her or his fragrance. What can catch one's attention at first is the fact that M sounds authentic because it presents blatant idiosyncratic traits: a marshmallow note with a sea breeze accord and then some Moroccan incense? Quid? It sounded like the notes were there for a reason because they sounded rather whimsical thrown into the same mix. We also later thought that it might be a little in the line of Dune by Dior (marine incense) and so were doubly curious as this one is a rather unusual scent below its surface of mainstream respectability........
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Ambergris Ambergris is an organic animalic material excreted by sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus). This substance in its natural state or near-natural state, i.e., as an infusion, has a wonderful, deep, and almost unbearable intensity before it finally mellows down. The tiniest amount of what is already an infusion, something like 5 % in alcohol, takes on a life of its own once it hits the skin becoming worthy of the most ostentatious of monarchs holding court with a seductive yet iron fist. Before it alights on the skin, the scent of ambergris emanating from a phial evokes intriguingly enough the smell of pungent dusty old leather-bound books, ones that would have been left to gather the aromas of spices in the most stocked-up of the Comptoir de la Compagnie des Indes spice warehouse and the most religiously frequented too as a suggestion of smoky incense passes before the nose. Once transfigured by the warmth of the skin, the ambergris starts to glow and become, enfin, that sensation to which it gives its name, amber-y, releasing a luminous effect that is very close to the visual sensation felt next to a fire burning in a fireplace or sunlight shining through a thick brown glass bottle. A thousand nuances seem to congregate into a few recognizable facets smelling of dry herbs but also of peach, apricot, leather, dusty parchment, baby powder before the fact, white rice flour, a tinge of almond, sweet fruits, earth, skin, sandalwood, wine-y resin, manure, sand, iodine, hay, moss, cinnamon...It is a world opening up in and of itself, a minuscule universe that has formed thanks to the sea, salt, sun, and marine animals...... "Raisins" amber glass bracelet by René Lalique, 1919, from Ragoarts
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Sycomore is the latest composition by perfumers Jacques Polge and Christopher Sheldrake appearing in the collection Les Exclusifs by Chanel, which purports to offer more elaborate works of perfumery utilizing finer ingredients and proposing more delicate art-pieces for the connoisseur.
The fragrance is also a new take on an old idea for the house of Chanel, which remains tradition-bound in order to preserve the spirit of Mademoiselle Chanel since an initial Sycomore perfume was launched in 1930 that aimed to be seemingly this contradictory object: an uncluttered woody perfume for women supporting an overall baroque interpretation. In Michael Edwards, Perfume Legends, Jacques Polge is reported to have characterized both Bois des Iles (1924) and Sycomore (1930) as baroque pieces. The old perfume Sycomore then very interestingly already provided inspiration to him for the creation of Coco as one of two perfect fragrance embodiments of what he saw to be the lost style of Coco Chanel, now seen predominantly through the prism of her clothes. That lost side of Chanel was her less-well known predilection for the complicated chinoiseries and opulence of gold-leaf work as revealed by her Rue Cambon apartment to the in-house perfumer who explained that he wanted to absorb her influence by mediating in-situ about her taste. Admittedly though, Chanel's taste for baroque opulence and excess is more clearly apparent in her accessories, jewelry in particular.
It is therefore also the second attempt at least on the part of Polge to recapture some of the soul of the original Sycomore, but it seems going in a new interpretive direction, more towards the idea of showcasing pure woods, although a baroque hint is present as well.
More recently, Jacques Polge is reported to have wanted to concentrate solely on vetiver (Vetiveria Zizanoïde) and its natural facets this time. Despite the reported express intention not to see the vetiver be overtaken by other facets (see previous post), it seems that the incense-y facet in Sycomore is almost as equally important as the vetiver one, an already smoky varietal here.
Sycomore is a beautiful, even stunning wood and incense composition that manages to awaken the combined evocative powers of vetiver and whirling incense, their decidedly exotic association in this case, while offering itself at the same time as an oh!-so-French study in ideals of understated refinement and elegance. A little baroque flourish is discreetly inserted in the signature of the perfume as an homage paid to the spirit of the Grande Mademoiselle, she who instinctively knew how to embrace the contrasted purity of monastic lines and the golds of aristocratic ostentation and excesses to feel complete. You are tempted also to recognize the influence of perfumer Christopher Sheldrake in this discreet exotic touch.
The perfume conveys its, if you will, French style or Chanel world-view through its intuition for pure lines - like a French window, a French garden - in its sense of refined, controlled, balanced and clear, Cartesian elegance. At the same time there is to be found a sense of Baudelairean voyage to the perfume, but without that hint of opiate-laden, heavy voluptuousness found in the weight of velvet curtains or sensual women's manes as populate that universe. Something airy and pure traverses Sycomore, suggesting the original spiritual, meditative qualities of burning incense and smoke (smoky woods) while alluding to a quiet, reserved and polite sense of mysticism......
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Thierry Mugler AngelMen Pure Coffee is a new interpretation of Angel Men launched in 1996, four years after the original women's Angel which revolutionized our perception of the seductive oriental fragrance by pulling all the stops on extreme edible sensations such as chocolate, honey, and caramel but darkened and turned into a dusky-voiced femme fatale thanks to indomitable notes of patchouli. Shalimar had met its match in gourmand and alluring shock-value nearly seventy years later. One can well imagine that smelling the overdose of vanilla in Shalimar in the 1920s when Vanillin was but an unfamiliar sensation in the world of fragrances must have been the equivalent of inhaling Angel in the 1992 and finding it curiously voluptuous, intense, and almost edible.....
Continue reading "Thierry Mugler AngelMen Pure Coffee (2008) {Perfume Review} {Men's Cologne} {New Fragrance}" »
The new trio of perfumes by Annick Goutal titled Les Orientalistes is inspired by the tradition of the Orientalist imagination, which was at its peak in 19th century Europe. At the same time it pays homage to three main materials: amber, myrrh, and incense also called Olibanum or Frankincense. Isabelle Doyen and Camille Goutal have decided to literally interpret the familiar notion of an oriental fragrance by bringing out the figurative motif hidden in the warm, mysterious folds of compositions that today mix the intense, nonchalant, and sensual notes of amber, coumarin, vanilla, benzoin, patchouli...
In the 19th century, an Oriental perfume would have meant any perfume that included exotic substances evocative of the East, prime among them, patchouli, as can be seen in the reconstitution of writer George Sand’s Perfume by Nicolas de Barry. It is only towards the end of the 19th century with the introduction of Vanillin that orientals would come to canonically include this aroma originating from South America, most famously in Shalimar (1925)......
C'est là que j'ai vécu, dans les voluptés calmes,
Au milieu de l'azur, des vagues, des splendeurs
Et des esclaves nus, tout imprégnés d'odeurs,
Qui me rafraîchissaient le front avec des palmes,
Et dont l'unique soin était d'approfondir
Le secret douloureux qui me faisait languir.
(Extrait de "La vie antérieure " de Baudelaire)
Continue reading "Annick Goutal Les Orientalistes: Ambre Fétiche, Myrrhe Ardente, Encens Flamboyant (2007) {Perfume Reviews}" »
Summersent is the unique creation of a new niche Chicago-based fragrance brand established in 2007 called Marjorie Midgarden Fragrances. It incorporates for the first time the suave and secret scent of a bloom (name undisclosed) captured thanks to Living Flower technology. The founder, Marjorie Kitzrow, a marketing executive veteran with 30 years of experience in the business, was not loath to tell GCI Magazine however that, “I thought it would be so interesting that it was so familiar,” she said. “It gets in your head and you just say ‘Wow!’ I had heard about it and I wanted to seek it out. It is a very old plant.”
It was by chance that Kitzrow heard again with more insistence this time in 2003 about “a mysterious fragrant bloom” thanks to a friend who had it in her garden. She decided to head for the Chicago Botanic Garden to smell a particularly fine specimen of it whose scent is just described as being “robust”. Subjugated, it gave her the idea of creating a perfume based on this aroma......
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Bois de Turquie is the latest composition by Jean-Paul Millet Lage, the perfumer and owner of Maître Parfumeur et Gantier. It is the first fragrance by the house since 1989 explicitly marketed as a unisex perfume and is classified as a woody aromatic composition. Despite its name which means "Wood(s) of Turkey", its incense-y facet is more important than its woodsy one it seems as here sandalwood is made part of an incense-rich mix. "Woodsy" is a term that can be used in a more figurative sense to designate aromas like vetiver and patchouli and here it applies to patchouli. A hitherto hidden woody violet note emerges in the end which tilts the balance more in the direction of a woody perfume. Complexity is the name of the game.
The scent aims to bridge the gap between the West and the Orient seeming to do so by resorting to references to an antique historic substratum located in Anatolia while inscribing itself in the Mediterranean geographical continuity.
Inspired by the Millet Lage's travels within Turkey, the scent is a shockingly beautiful fragrance offering both austere and sensual facets with an undercurrent of discreet gourmand notes marked by a religious quality. The beauty of this perfume is such that it is able to provoke a genuine physical aesthetic emotion of poignancy and even suffering in the wearer. One feels strangled at the throat, tears are ready to pour and one attempts not to give in to the strength of one's emotions. Bois de Turquie perfectly illustrates the difference between what is pretty and pleasing and what is beautiful and more difficult to bear. In the experience of Beauty there is longing and the fear of loss while at the same time there is also the revelation of one's mortality and transiency. I will never be able to stand here for all eternity and drink from the source of this river for my thirst never will quench and the beauty that is contained in this place, person, or scent cannot last because all things and all sensations are meant to disappear. The perfume shuns exoticism and a classically rendered Orient and prefers to turn to a mythical antique pagan Mediterranean landscape filled with protective deities. The explicit "unisex" treatment of the perfume can be felt at one level in the contrast between austere, dry and voluptuous notes as mentioned above, but also more deeply, between the opposition and marriage of paternal and maternal principles..... 
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Pure White Linen Light Breeze inscribes itself in the direct genealogy of White Linen (1978), which had a Breeze version as early as 1996 and was adapted to contemporary tastes with Pure White Linen in 2006. Like each year, Estee Lauder put out their summer collection of fragrances, which are usually made to smell of-the-season with the addition of fresh notes and dressed in pretty shades and patterns to accent the mood of relaxation. So this year there is also a Pure White Linen Summer Fun. This review is for Light Breeze only which was issued in the beginning of 2008 to herald the early days of spring. By now our representations of what crisp linen smell like - and an immaculately white linen at that - has been heavily codified by a whole school of perfumes that aims to capture the quintessence of clean. Given this constraint and given the simple purposes of such fragrances, it is tricky to assess them beyond the fact that they appropriately seem to deliver the promise of an eternal youth for your white t-shirt. With this type of perfume on, your t-shirt will never age, wrinkle, nor smell bad. No, the Ozonic smell takes over and imparts a permanent jus-showered effect that even clean little babies can only dream of......
Continue reading "Estee Lauder Pure White Linen Light Breeze (2008): Reflections on Clean {Perfume Review} {Scented Thoughts} {Notebook: Fresh & Clean}" »
Dirty English has been identified by Nash-Taylor of Juicy Couture as a cross between the influences of her own Anglomania (she is married to John Taylor of Duran Duran), Skaist-Levys’ “CZ Guest Style”, a dash of punk (Sex Pistols) while its style (the bottle's?) borrows from their flagship store located on Rodeo Drive. She also promised that, "Any self-respecting bad boy will want to wear it." (Women’s Wear Daily) The name of the perfume is immediately catchy and if we were to start drawing a list of The Best of 2008, it would have to be nominated under the category "Best Fragrance Name". It actually makes you want to create the category. The first whiff from the bottle promises the scent to be less than pale. It is sweeter and more heavily resinous than average.
The perfume turns out to be a noteworthy twist on a traditional woody-leathery-tobacco scent for men with fresh fougere accents. It demonstrates how you can play with the idea of excess without being excessive in reality. Its most traditional facet suggests the suave after-shave of a gentleman frequenting the requisite club with all the necessary trappings of leather furniture, books and polished woods with beeswax that one would expect. This is deemed an ideal by many and it is a comfortable one. Its more adventurous facet is a humorous and sensual play on the notion of human foulness and extreme bodily exhalations as it plays with the notion of dirtiness but ultimately and paradoxically in a clean and allusive way. This Englishman is indeed a bit dirty and it is not just a play on words but really a play on olfactory sensations......
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Avon and Cynthia Rowley Flower and Petal were both composed by tandem of perfumers Richard Herpin and Frank Völkl who have used the word “ wearable” to describe their creations destined to the mass-market. The notion of “wearability” is subjective and a bit mysterious if you start thinking about it but usually it means a perfume whose type and popularity have been tested in previous launches within a specific culture and whose smell would be best described by the aesthetic category of “pleasing”. If in a given African culture it is the smell of fried buttery onion applied onto the body that is considered pleasing and sexy, it will not be the case in North America and on the global level. A wearable scent does not aim to surprise but builds upon conservative tastes within the group aimed and is non-invasive. The specializations in this case are that Flower and Petal are for women, some older some very young, and that generally speaking Avon is known to be particularly well-established within the lower middle class culture. The nuance here is that Flower and Petal are part of a slightly more upscale designer range developed by Avon. Of the two, Petal is to us the least conventional. It is in fact an adorable perfume. Cosmetic World reports that several notes in Petal were chosen by Cynthia Rowley’s eight-year old daughter and this may explain a certain freshness of concept as well as the playful even tender addition of certain nuances by the perfumers. Flower, which feels retro and more déjà vu might (nothing is positively said about that) have been influenced by the scent worn by Cynthia Rowley’s mother as she explained that “ The scent of my mom’s fragrance…is one of my favorite memories from childhood,” adding “ I wanted to make something that I could share with my daughters”......
Continue reading "Avon & Cynthia Rowley Flower & Petal (2008) - Part 2 {Perfume Reviews} {New Fragrances}" »
Photo © Communication Serge Lutens Serge Lutens possesses this uncanny ability of turning a priori the most superficial, surface objects and sensations into an oniric walk taken down the maze of a garden as if in a daydream. With Five O’ Clock Au Gingembre composed in collaboration with perfumer Christopher Sheldrake, a tea party in an English manor opens the way to the muffled, velvety footsteps of a discovery walk down the dozens of labyrinthine corridors of a mansion built with hundreds of forgotten rooms. At the same time the contained intensity of the perfume, which unfurls as if following the line of a fall suggests a drop in a well filled with dark light. The perfume is thus complex in the sense of creating both a horizontal line of imagery, by minutely shifting the sensations, and a vertical one by creating an impression of dynamic deepening. Five O'Clock is one of the most difficult perfumes I have had to write about due to the level of detail found in it and its structuring which is poorly rendered by a chronological account. I am tempted to say that it is more constructed like a faceted gem, but it is not quite that either. It is more like a combination of both structures, the linear one and the prismatic one. Or another way to put it would be to say that it is the most elusive of the Lutens despite its deceptive homey title...
Photo © Communication Serge Lutens
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Cruel Gardenia is the latest installment in the Art et Matière collection by Guerlain, a line devoted to more creative perfume creations offering culturally speaking a niche, i.e. arty flavor and centering in principle on a reflection on raw materials. The fragrance was created by perfumer Randa Hammami in collaboration with artistic director Sylvaine Delacourte and is a limited edition. The press release is helpful in explicitly stating from the outset the existence of a stylistic variation that can be felt upon discovering the scent and is a bit surprising. Cruel Gardenia offers a relatively spare signature in terms of classic Guerlain standards. If you expected a rich exuberant perfume, you would be let down for a moment before being able to adjust your perception to a perfume that is simpler and as close to a modern simplistic skin perfume as Guerlain could try to come up with while keeping its gilded touch evoking the lush drawing-rooms of the Second Empire, but more as in a watermark effect in this case....
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Andy Warhol exclaimed one day, "My favorite smell is the first smell of spring in New York". With that, Union Square the latest Bond No. 9 in the Andy Warhol collection starts like a fresh spring bouquet redolent with visions of flowers colored like pastel Easter eggs and then puts on a light creamy white Chinchilla wrap around its shoulders to assuage the chill of too much sappiness too early. The textile of this impression weaves discreet floral motifs intertwined with soft green grassy accents.
Union Square, despite the psychedelic colorings of the Flower silkscreen paintings by Andy Warhol, which inspired it and which are reproduced on the bottles in all of their 10 glorious colorful variations is an ode sung to softness and restraint, perhaps timidity even, an unexpected interpretation of the universe of an artist known for its eccentricity and use of arresting colors and volumes. But the truth is that Warhol’s favorite scent is known to have been that of the violet, whose characteristic delicacy reveals another side of Warhol, the shy one. If we look at it from that angle, the bottle becomes Warhol’s outer persona while the perfume itself or “jus” as it is sometimes called in the industry offers a glimpse into his interiority......
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Mona di Orio new Amyitis fragrance is so concentrated on the central and deep idea of freshness - one realizes after a while - quieted down by a more fluid and liquid sensation of shadowed coolness that it will need the full context of summer to reveal all of its character. For now, one can just will mentally that it is Summer, abstract from the distractive surrounding February New England snow that feels like it missed the train and arrived late, imagine that the air is sweltering and then sip in through the nostrils a whiff of Amyitis to measure abstractly its meant contextual impact. Doing this is experiencing in imagination the age-old thirst for freshness of people who have crossed the desert repeating itself once more as in a ritual. These travelers seemingly without transition step out of the stony mineral sand sea behind them to enter a lush green garden, the dust of the journey still covering their leathery sandals as suggested in reverse in the perfume by the passage from green notes to slightly dusty ones.... An imaginary depiction of the gardens of Babylon by Maarten van Heemskerck in the 16th century.
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Agent Provocateur released a set of three sensual massage oils in 2007 which includes the aphrodisiac scents of rose, tuberose, and ylang-ylang. You could have expected something magical containing a pinch of a secret ingredient, but we merely thought that the oils would smell decent albeit probably on the simplistic side. We were wrong. Judging from the rose oil, this set is really worth purchasing. Not surprisingly, it is currently sold out on their website.....
Continue reading "Agent Provocateur Rose Passion Massage Oil: A Very Sexy Green Rose (2007) {Perfume Review} {Smell-The-Roses-Till-Valentine's Day - Day 25}" »
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