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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......
Continue reading "Marjorie Midgarden Fragrances Summersent (2007) {Perfume Review & Musings}" »
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..... 
Continue reading "Maître Parfumeur et Gantier Bois de Turquie (2008) {Perfume Review & Musings} {New Fragrance}" »
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......
Continue reading "Juicy Couture Dirty English (2008) {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance} {Men's Cologne}" »
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
Continue reading "Serge Lutens Five O'Clock Au Gingembre (2008): The Black Luminous Intensity of Ginger {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
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....
Continue reading "Guerlain Cruel Gardenia (2008) {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance}" »
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......
Continue reading "Bond No. 9 Andy Warhol Union Square (2008) {Perfume Review} {New Fragrance} {Celebrity Perfume}" »
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: wow, look at that, I'm already drooling, great color, looks superb. how ...
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Parfums de Nicolaï or 3 News for this Spring 2010: l'Eau MiXte, Un Soir en Sicile, New Boutique - Update
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: Thank you for an excellent back ground on this fragrance.
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The Pure White Trend in Fragrances: A Return to Fundamentals {Trend Alert}
: Yes, I agree this is a trend, and I am very much ...
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: Desperate for Rose Ispahan - got it as part of a mini-set. ...
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EOS for Him & Her (2009): Beer-Based Carbon-Neutral Fragrance Smells of the Future {New Perfumes} {Fragrance News}
: Oh, brilliant! I can't wait to smell like waste and rancid beer! ...
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In Canada, Perfume Intolerance Mounts in Public Spaces, Honolulu Agrees and The Stinky Bus Trope in Pop Culture {The 5th Sense in the News}
: If there is one thing that I find more obnoxious than stench ...
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Kim Kardashian Perfume (2010) {New Fragrance} {Celebrity Perfume}
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Dior Escale à Portofino (2008) {Perfume Review}
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