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Claire

Gourmand Lists Round-Ups

A Week’s Worth of Italian Dessert Fragrances

5th February 2024

 

I was back in Rome recently for a strategic retreat and thought it might be interesting to wear an Italian dessert fragrance every day to mark the occasion.  Caveat: I have incredibly narrow parameters for the gourmand category in general (I have no desire to smell like food) but I get even more exacting when it comes to Italian dessert fragrances.  I have a serious weakness for Italian desserts and cookies – the pasticche di mandorle, the lemony torta della nonna, the apricot crostate, pistachio gelato, the unctuous crema gialla spilling out of fat cornetti, the teeny tiny cups of espresso made for fairies, even those powdery little pan di stelle – but am rarely if ever convinced by the perfume form. 

 

But I like to think of this pernickety-ness as quintessentially Italian itself, as anyone who has ever tried to order a cappuccino after 12 noon or ask for their carbonara to be made with cream in Italy will tell you.  The fact that standards exist for food in Italy and are enforced by everyone up and down the food chain from the farmer to the waiter and the old guys at the next table is one of the biggest joys of my life.  We should all care more about what the quality and ‘rightness’ of goes in our gullet, and correspondingly, on our skin.  

 

 

La Danza delle Libellule by Nobile 1942

 

Crisp red apple whisked into the fluffiest of white musks.  I can see why people love this.  It renders apple pie in an admirably light, fresh form.  My only problems with this are two.  First, the apple note never smells less than a synthetic recreation of apple, in the same way that apple-scented shampoo or body lotion does. The accord is undeniably pleasant but you are never less than aware that this is not a smell derived from nature.  And this awareness is what breaks the fourth wall.

 

Second, I am of the opinion that if you are going to render apple pie in perfume form, then at least some of that vanilla and cinnamon had better show their face.  Here, though I do understand the brief was for the perfume to be as airy as a dance of butterflies, it is the foamy ocean of white musk molecules that dominates, making it feel a little like that first chug from a glass of water into which you’ve just dropped an Alka-Seltzer tablet, i.e., somehow both powdery and wet.  Again, it is pleasant and eminently wearable, but there are no real points of interest.  Possibly the worst thing one can say about a perfume is that it is not memorable, and La Danza delle Libellule just hits that line for me.

 

 

Lira by Xerjoff 

 

Lira is quite similar to Indult’s Tihota in the double eiderdown thickness of its vanilla-musk, but with the lovely bright zestiness of blood orange up top and an intense caramel accord threaded through the basenotes.  Normally, I find this sort of thing overwhelming, but the hint of licorice and flash of orange give the vanilla and caramel a much needed twang.  It’s like crema gialla and Campari!  Delightfully lush and enveloping, sweet but not syrupy, no jarring synthetic bits to annoy me – this is Italian gourmandise done right.  I would buy the biggest bottle if I knew I’d wear it regularly, but because I suspect Lira would be an occasional treat only and not a true workhorse in my collection, I am content to keep on buying samples of it.  (Think I am on sample number five at this point.)  

 

 

Noir Tropical by Maria Candida Gentile

 

Every time I wear Noir Tropical, my husband remarks – rather unkindly, I must say – that I am wearing ‘that keks i mleko’ perfume again, referring to the mush of baby rusks (disturbingly called Plasma) dissolved into hot milk that is the cure to all ills in the Balkans.  I made the mistake of buying a mini bottle of this blind with my birthday voucher from the Maria Candida Gentile site simply because a perfume friend of mine with impeccable taste adores Noir Tropical, so I decided to take the risk. 

 

Unfortunately, there is nothing noir or tropical or even particularly special about Noir Tropical.  It smells like high quality vanilla paste, with its woody, cocoa-ish and even slightly boozy aspects.  But the perfume is never more than a background note in its own composition.  Wearing it is like sitting in the theatre, waiting for the curtains to open and reveal the main act, but all you hear or see is the dim rustle of activity somewhere behind the curtain.  Incredibly disappointing, especially for an indie perfume, where you pay (usually a lot) extra for something that deviates from the same old, same old. 

 

I keep spraying this on myself, soaking my skin, mostly to get rid of it, but also because I want to understand if I can suddenly unlock the secret door in the perfume that will lead me through to the promised land of my original expectations.  But I am down to the last drops in my mini bottle and am none the wiser.  A plain, dull-ish vanilla milk n’ cookies scent is all Noir Tropical ever gives me and has ever given me.  

 

 

Vanagloria by Laboratorio Olfattive 

 

Front-loaded with enough iodine (saffron) and pineapple to cripple an elephant, Vanagloria makes a weird first impression – metallic, fruity, acid, and terpenic, like a burning tire onto which someone’s lobbed some opened cans of Del Monte pineapple pieces.  And just under that, a ripe banana custard-like vanilla, like something you’d make out of a packet, but also really thick and expensive-smelling.  Ribbons of smoke from just-lit frankincense add a slightly ashy-woody darkness, deepening the chiaroscuro effect. 

 

It takes some time for all of this to settle, but when it does, what you get is a luxuriously creamy vanilla-incense accord that accurately reflects the aromas gathered in a dried vanilla bean pod – the slightly burnt-smelling woodiness, the booziness, the leathery dryness, the faint thick sweetness of it that floats in the distance.  I smelled it first in Romastore, in Trastevere, in January 2022, and was appalled at its ‘crude oil’ start.  But later, when it dried down, it became an obsession for me, far more compelling to me than any of the other more popular perfumes I’d gone there to try, like Gris Charnel by BDK Parfums.  I bought a bottle the next day and it’s become one of my favourite vanilla perfumes, a group that by itself is very, very small.  

 

 

Devotion by Dolce & Gabbana

 

Devotion is a happy, greasy little monger clearly riffing off the Lira model but lacking the budget (or perhaps ambition) to smell anywhere near as luxe.  Featuring a bright, harsh citrus top strewn over a humongous, popcorny vanilla, it smells admirably cheerful and Italian – big, BIG flavors and maxi pad thickness galore.  It smells a little like a girl’s first holiday to the sun with her girlfriends, all suntan oiled-legs and vanilla deo.  Pretty irresistible actually.

 

That is, however, until a stale ‘fry oil’ note creeps into the rich, buttery mass of vanilla.  I can live with popcorny vanillas if they don’t develop a smell too much like that burnt butter aromachemical everyone seems to use for lactonic notes.  But this almost savory, fried foods element is not in the least bit appealing.  It smells like the end of the girls’ holiday, where they’ve gone to a chipper straight from the airport, the scent of their vanilla body sprays and monoi mixing with the greasy smells pouring out of the vents and rising up from their hot sausage rolls.  And boy, does this perfume linger.        

 

 

Dambrosia by Profumum 

 

The opening of Dambrosia is wince-making: strident pear-scented Windex.  I never would have bought a travel size of this perfume had I not smelled it on a colleague every Thursday at our pre-pandemic coffee and cornetto mornings, when the perfume, applied early that morning, was just now hitting its warm, figgy sandalwood stage.  You could always identify her position in the room from the ribbons of expansive, voluptuous sandalwood that trailed after her like streaks of buttercup yellow.  

 

I bought a travel bottle but was dismayed at the harsh detergent opening when I got it onto my own skin.  And to this day, that opening is something I simply endure until the perfume finally hits its stride.  But when Dambrosia finally turns into that winter-weight fig and oily, peanutty sandalwood that radiates ten meters in each direction, I invariably forgive it its ugly start.  It is never less than edible at this point, never less than slightly artificial either, but I love its vulgar loudness.  It suits the pushy but gritty glamour you see on Via del Corso, with its furred-up baby strollers, small dogs dressed in designer clothes, and flashy cars weaving around the gaggles of excited tourists and tired-looking Romans just trying to make it home.   

 

 

 

Bianco Latte by Giardini di Toscana

 

Bianco Latte has whipped up one of those Internet-based hype storms that never last but still manage to pull an extraordinary number of people into its wake while it’s happening.  So, of course, I was curious to smell it.  Having smelled it, I can only ask why are some y’all so basic?  Why train your taste up – and possibly stop there – on sugary vanilla bombs like this that are only 1.5 steps removed from Pink Sugar or a vanilla candle you can pick up at Aldi? 

 

Adding to the meh-ness of it all is a sour lactonic note that smells like curdled milk to me but may possibly smell like caramel to others.  It is also offensively sweet and devoid of nuance.  I can never really distinguish between stuff like this, Pink Sugar, and Billy Eilish No. 1 – milky-sweet, monotone, full of simple sugar molecules, a bit burnt or artificial-smelling at times – but Bianco Latte comes with a price tag to match its hype, so I am even less willing to go easy on it. 

 

None of us should be spending $150 for perfume that smells like it cost 50 cents to produce.  Bianco Latte is built on synthetic vanilla and lactonic notes that you buy off the shelf in bulk from the fragrance and flavour factories, and not some super expensive vanilla extract squeezed from freshly picked vanilla pods on a Madagascan plantation.  It’s built cheap and it smells cheap.  If Bianco Latte were turned into an actual dessert, 10 out of 10 Italians would send it right back to the kitchen.  Think about that for a second.  Let’s have higher standards for what we spray on our skin.      

 

 

Milano Caffe by Abdes Salaam Attar

 

I once lived half an hour outside Milan and spent many a happy afternoon wiling away the time in a café with a doppio or five.  Drink enough espresso and there comes a point at which it acts upon your organism like a drug, speeding up your heart rate, and giving you an intense ‘high’.  Nowadays, I edge towards that point via the pathetic wateriness of cafetière coffee.  But Milano Caffe whips me right back to the intoxicating smell of the Milan coffee shop when I was still woman enough to take my coffee in concentrate.

 

Forget the rosy-cream-amber version of coffee presented in Café Rose (Tom Ford) or Intense Café (Montale).  Milano Caffe is all about the dark, dusty bitterness of coffee beans, with the ferrous, animalic twang common to both coffee and chocolate.  The smell is woody-barky rather than creamy, and rather austere.

 

In keeping with the authenticity of its coffee accord, Milano Caffe is shorn of extraneous detail.  Those raised on the generosity of mugs of coffee might be a little dismayed at Milano Caffe’s lack of lushness or its refusal to tilt towards even a drop of cream or sugar.  Rather, it packs an ocean of flavor into a tea-spoonful of liquid. The espresso expression itself is quite brief, but the mirage of coffee-ness is carried over and extended through the scent by linking the woodiness of espresso to the woodiness of the iris, opoponax, and cedar basenotes.  Caffe Milano is an interesting scent, and not nearly as gourmand as it sounds.  I find it elegant, dark, and a tiny bit fierce.

 

 

Ruby by Bruno Acampora 

 

As if chocolate wasn’t sexy enough, Barry Callebaut decided to develop and patent a naturally pink-colored chocolate in 2014, and I was in Rome when it finally hit the market in 2018-2019.  Suddenly pink chocolate (named ‘Ruby’) was everywhere, from flowy fountains of gloopy pink chocolate in Eataly to special edition Japanese KitKats.  And in 2019, Bruno Acampora was the first fragrance brand was the first to translate pink chocolate’s unique flavor profile – tart-sweet berries, a yoghurty aftertaste – into perfume form.  

 

God, how I wish they hadn’t.  Ruby by Bruno Acampora smells fruity-sour, which would be somewhat bearable had they not tagged on a milk powder element that smells as foul as baby powder or, indeed, how Hershey’s Kisses taste to Europeans.  That slightly vomitous aspect, a flavor profile that is nostalgic to American tastes, due to milk powder being subbed in for milk during World War II and never being subbed back out again, is deeply disturbing to me in a perfume.  Ruby chocolate itself doesn’t taste that great, but the perfume is infinitely worse.   

 

 

Madeleine by Masque Milano Fragranze

 

Madeline is an interesting take on the classic Mont Blanc dessert – a domed mound of pureed, sweetened chestnut paste topped with whipped cream.  It pairs the intense sugariness of marrons glacés with the solar milkiness of tuberose, and then rounds it off with a very bready cumin to suggest the savory mealiness of the unsweetened chestnut flesh fresh out of its cooked shell.  The cumin also creates a peanutty, floury, almost wheaten aspect that is really quite appealing – similar to the ‘crunchy granola’ raw foods store vibe of Bois Farine by L’Artisan Parfumeur. 

 

The result is much airier and fresher than a Mont Blanc, and even though the white flowers and cumin lend the perfume a pinch of ripe, human-smelling sultriness, it is all somewhat hazy and milky, like a celestial bread pudding.  I would place Madeline somewhere in an axis connecting Bois Farine with Amaranthine by Penhaligon’s, another fresh but sultry, slightly BO-ish floral gourmand, and even Castaña by Cloon Keen Atelier, which is not even a gourmand (it’s a dusty, earthy vetiver) but still manages to conjure up the smell of chestnuts roasting on those perforated metal drums in Rome.  Given that I own those perfumes, I think that Madeline might be a redundancy in my collection.  But it is lovely.    

 

 

Sources of Samples:  I either bought samples, bottles, or travel sizes of the perfumes featured in this article, or sampled them at niche and department stores in Rome.  I do not do paid reviews and all opinions are my own.  

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Sarah Elizabeth on Unsplash 

 

  

 

 

Honey Review Spice Tea Woods

Five O’ Clock Au Gingembre by Serge Lutens

17th January 2024

 

Five O’ Clock Au Gingembre, I love ya, even if you are a B side in the Lutensian catalogue.  Christopher Sheldrake and Serge Lutens were probably going for zest rather than realism when they placed that piercing bergamot note over the candied ginger, but for a moment, it smells like freshly peeled ginger root.  Intentional or not, this gives the scent a fresh, sporty masculine start quite at odds with the biscuit-like powderiness of the drydown.  Get past the initial whomp of aftershave, though, and this is as soft and inviting as one of those squishy modular couches. 

 

Five O’ Clock Au Gingembre is remarkably free of the dried fruit ambers and incense Serge Lutens perfumes are known for.  You half go into it expecting fruitcake, but it is nothing more than a fug of powdered spice lingering in the air after pulling a fresh batch of Speculoos biscuits from the oven.  It is slightly edible but not really what I’d call a gourmand, being more wood and dust and spice than dessert.   I don’t miss the lack of Lutensian sturm-und-drang here, either.  Sometimes, life calls for a scent that avoids pushing any of your buttons, and this is as reassuringly, blandly nice as baby rusks or Jennifer Garner. 

 

The tea note is, as always, a figment of our collective imagination, placed there by the interaction between the acerbic citrus, the mild heat of the ginger, and the milk powder heart.  Five O’ Clock Au Gingembre is often compared to Tea for Two, but interestingly, it is the L’Artisan Parfumeur that is bigger, bolder, and more pungently spiced.  Sometimes I wonder if Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake simply turned up at the lab that day, said ‘Christ, I don’t feel like anything too weird or heavy right now, do you?’ and then churned out a gingerbread tea scent that is delightfully non-descript and yet just happens to cure all manner of evil.   

 

Source of Sample:   I bought my bottle five years ago from Les Galleries Lafayette in Orleans. 

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Dominik Martin on Unsplash 

Aromatic Barbershop Independent Perfumery Masculine Sandalwood Woods

Il Dieci X by Bogue: A Review

12th January 2024

 

Il Dieci X by Bogue had a very short run of 50 bottles produced in 2019, so perhaps it doesn’t even make sense for me to write about it.  But I have to say, if you’re like me and curious about what a sandalwood from Antonio Gardoni might smell like, then this review might surprise you.  First, because the scent’s linearity and simplicity are not properties normally associated with Bogue’s Italian apothecary style.   Second, because if you assumed, like me, that the extreme limits placed on production pointed to the use of a very vintage Mysore santalum album oil, then you’d be, like me, dead wrong. 

 

Instead, Gardoni seems to have made the decision to produce a turbo-charged version of the citrusy, sour-yoghurty, and pine-like facets of Australian sandalwood (santalum spiccatum), when he then drapes over a traditional barbershop fougere structure.  I respect this decision, even if this means that I would have to morph into a 60-year-old wet shaver for Il Dieci to be to my personal taste.

 

Objectively speaking, though, this is one heck of a handsome masculine.  The topnotes smell like a silvery shard of wood stripped from a young tree, rubbed with citrus peel and mint for extra sting, while the basenotes smell gently powdery and clean, like the scent of your hands after washing vigorously with sandalwood soap.  And in between, there is that astringent, but not unpleasant aroma of a freshly shaved male cheek, complete with hot towels, shaving cream, and the hiss of steam. 

 

I think my father would have loved this.  Oh, don’t worry – he’s still with us.  But given that this doesn’t feature – to my nose anyway – anything particularly rare or exclusive, I don’t understand why Il Dieci is not.   

 

Source of sample:   Very kindly sent to me by Antonio Gardoni for review. 

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Adam Sherez on Unsplash 

Herbal Honey Independent Perfumery Review Spice Vetiver

Onda Voile d’Extrait by Vero Profumo: A Review

11th January 2024

 

I always thought of Onda by Vero Profumo as a difficult perfume, but now, at a distance of a decade, I understand that I was just not grown enough for it.  Though I first smelled – and liked – the parfum in Campo Marzio 70 in Rome, my mistake was ordering a sample of the eau de parfum, not knowing that the formulations were very different.  The putrid-smelling passion fruit note, the pissiness, and the fungal brown wetness of it all repulsed me.  I couldn’t imagine anyone wearing let alone loving it. 

 

When I referenced its urinous aspects, laterally, in a review of Maai (Bogue Profumo) for a now-defunct blog, Vero herself took offense and, as the kids say, put me on blast publicly for having a scat fetish.  (Yes, I had to look that up too.  No, I don’t recommend doing a Google image search.)

 

Wearing the Voile de Parfum, an extenuation of the original parfum, now, I still think that the dark, mealy honey-vetiver dankness of Onda gives a little freshly cleaned bathroom stall, but in an unctuous way that also makes me think of brown velvet and the dull, chocolate-y glow of Tiffany lamps.  There is no repulsion.  It turns out that it was me all along that was the problem, not Onda.  And when I was ready to grow the F up, Onda was there, waiting for me. 

 

Still, Onda is by no means for the uninitiated.  Salty, wet, and a bit furry, it is a perfume that smells of feral cats in a den hidden in the undergrowth, albeit a world removed from the agrestic ‘smells’ turned out by indie perfumers to simulate an environment or an animal that lives there.  Onda is a wild-reared, 100% grass-fed, organic experience that just happens to be chypre-shaped.  There is no sense of it having been born, just of it arriving in the world fully formed – a creature with native intelligence.    

 

There are no perfumes that smell like Onda, but the medicinal (and medieval) dustiness of the mace note remind me of other ‘brown-grey’, shadowy, and sepulchral things like Djedi (Guerlain) and Marescialla (Santa Maria Novella).  The ‘artisanal’ apothecary vibe reminds me a lot of both Maai and MEM (Bogue Profumo), as well as the turgid funk of several O’Driu perfumes, including Ladamo.  Still, even in this company, Onda stands out as being impenetrable and a little disturbing.  

 

But then, the greatest perfumes in the world all have something impenetrable or disturbing about them, don’t they?  Mitsouko is a prickly creature, sometimes smelling of peaches and wood, sometimes of formaldehyde.  The clove and honey notes in Comme des Garcons Parfum are sharp and unlovely at first, reminiscent of a sweaty crotch.  L’Air de Rien carries with it the distinct whiff of unwashed scalp.  Yet these are perfumes worth spending time with and trying to unlock, because behind that door lies greatness.  Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to only smell amazing.  For most people, perfume is an extension of their grooming ritual.  You can enjoy beauty without worrying about whether or not it has a dark side.  But if you believe that perfume is art, then it stands to reason that your perfume should transmit a message that goes above and beyond a good ‘smell’.   And love it or hate it, Onda is a great example of perfume as art. 

 

Source of sample:  I have owned the parfum and the Voile de Parfum of Onda since 2015.   

 

Cover image:  Photo by Bram Azink on Unsplash 

Ambrette Iris Leather Musk Spice Spicy Floral Suede Vetiver

Heaven Can Wait by Frederic Malle: A Review

10th January 2024

 

I can’t decide if Heaven Can Wait by Jean-Claude Ellena for Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle is really that good or if I am just happy to get some relief from the heady amber, booze, and tobacco molecules that thicken the air on the high street at Christmas.  

 

The juxtaposition between cold, rooty iris and warm clove is charming.  Its texture?  Also a delight.  Despite a notes list that promises a battering ram, Heaven Can Wait has all the heft of a lace handkerchief.  Initially, it reminds me of the delicate, gripe-water musks of L’Eau d’Hiver and the thin, hawthorn-ish suede of Cuir d’Ange, with a faint brush of Superstitious‘ green-copper acid over top.  The plum is more plum skin (umami, bitter) than fruit and the magnolia doesn’t add any of its usual honeyed lemon cream.   More Parisian greige than Dior’s Gris Dior itself, this is weightless elegance at its best. 

  

But elegance alone is not enough to sell me.  I have plenty of elegant perfumes, including Cuir d’Ange, Chanel No. 18, Iris Silver Mist, and a dab of Poivre extrait, all of which are references I would call upon to describe this scent.   What makes Heaven Can Wait special is its weirdness, which you only catch glimpses of as it rounds the corner on the drydown. 

 

It is down there that something extremely dry and gippy ‘catches’ at the corners of the scent, threatening to unspool the thin silk.  The freshly-poured cement aspect of cashmeran, perhaps, or the raw, parnsippy character of the orris lingering long after the topnotes have burned off.  The earthiness of the carrot seed is a contributing factor, for sure.  But I suspect that there is also a fair amount of (unlisted) benzoin here, as this is a material that smells – to me at least – like the doughy-but-dusty aroma of potato flour just as you begin to add water to it.   

 

To be less arcane, Heaven Can Wait kind of ends up smelling like the art room at your old secondary school, the air thick with the smell of pigments ready to be mixed into white paint, paste glue, plaster of Paris, and so on.  An alluringly odd mix of the organic and inorganic, chemical and vegetable.   I’ve seen the stupid ‘sexy’ advertizing images that were released with the perfume but I think the brand missed a trick by not leaning into its whole ‘Parisian high society lady slumming it in art school’ vibe.  

  

Even the clove note is a quirky.  Unsniffed, you might expect it to smell ‘red hot’ and sweaty-metallic like Eau Lente or the original Comme des Garcons EDP, or alternatively, like the frothy, frilly carnation accord from Caron’s Bellodgia.   However, the clove in Heaven Can Wait is unmistakably that of an old-fashioned clove rock.  Now, I think this is funny – borderline adorable –  though others might not, given the almost $300+ price tag.  But if you think about it, it is this clove rock note, mixed with the scent of art room pigments, that serves to keep the perfume feeling clean and modern, rather than ‘retro’.  And this is a a good thing.  After all, if we want perfumes like this to find a younger audience who might otherwise be looking at something like Angel’s Share, a clove that is candied rather than sweaty or Miss Havisham-ish is probably the right move.   

 

Source of sample:  A SA at House of Fraser, Belfast, was kind enough to give me a carded sample after she saw me empty half a bottle onto myself. 

 

Cover image:  Photo by Khara Woods on Unsplash 

 

 

Lists Review Rose Round-Ups Single note exploration

A Rosy Roster: My Favourite Rose Fragrances

7th October 2023

 

Roses are an intensely personal thing, aren’t they?  A fresh, wet ‘ripped from nature’ rose is one person’s idea of heaven and another person’s hell.   Now, this is kind of fun because it means you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince and self-guided discovery is never not a thing of joy. 

 

But about nine years ago,  I went on a rose expedition for a now-defunct perfume blog and by the end of four separate articles about rose perfumes of every type and flavor, I ran into a big ole rose-scented wall.  I was done.  This was when I learned that if you are too comprehensive about any line of inquiry, you begin to hate the thing you were originally so excited about. 

 

These days, I am wearing and enjoying rose perfumes again, which is no mean feat for someone with rose-induced PTSD.  And this simply because I have stopped feeling the obsessive need to own a perfume in every single rose category, e.g., naturalistic, chypre, rose-patchouli, green rose, etc.  I am now guided purely by my own taste.  I like what I like, and if that doesn’t happen to be Nahema or Gucci No. III – and it most certainly does not – then that is ok.  While I do write about fragrance, I’m not sure why or when I began to equate what is essentially a hobby with any responsibility for covering all the bases.  I have neither the money nor the time to be anyone’s library. 

 

So, this is my very personal list of favorite rose fragrances.  You will notice that I like my rose to be a bit player rather than the main attraction, tucked behind a curtain of woods, spices, and resins.  I have a weakness for roses masquerading as one of those floral Indian puddings infused with saffron and pistachios, or as spiced chai, or even as a creamy sort of wood.  I enjoy roses covered in smoke, crushed cocoa nibs, inky mosses, papery grasses, or tons of soft, wet soil – I like to sense the struggle of roses trying to break through something and somewhat failing.  Rose needs to know its place.    

 

There are no rose soliflores on my list.  In fact, though I admire their verisimilitude, I find soliflores of every single flower to be incredibly boring.  Ok, you imitated a living flower, have a cookie.  Would I ever take you over the actual scent of a live flower?  Not a chance.  I would rather have the glorious scent of a real rose in my nostrils for the all-too-brief two point five seconds it lasts than The Perfumer’s Workshop Tea Rose on my person for more than five hours.  There are some smells better left to nature.  

 

Nahema, No. 19, Diva, Magie Noire, Heure Exquise, Coco –  I respect the hell out of you for occupying such an important place in perfume history.  But I don’t love love you.  Rose is an essential part of your very complicated fabric, but none of you are rosy enough for me to look past the slightly old-fashioned, ladies-who-lunch feel I get from you all.  (It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.)  

 

And God, have I grown tired of rose gourmands.  Oud Satin Mood, I raved about you, and honestly, let’s admit it now, you are nothing but a bloated pile of vanilla, violets, rose, and marshmallow fluff.  You have become synonymous with the modern (read: social media age) taste for loud, sweet perfumes simply designed to fill the air and get you attention in a sea of all the other people holding up selfie sticks.  I would be a little embarrassed at my lapse in judgement except that I didn’t exactly stop there.  I also went gaga for the hot syrupy mess that is Rose Jam by Tauer Perfumes, Rose Jam by Lush, and countless other variations on the theme.  I even bought a bottle of Nina Ricci’s L’Extase Rose Absolue, which is Francis Kurkdjian shamelessly knocking off his own Oud Satin Mood formula for a designer brand.  Have I mentioned that I own a bottle of Oud Satin Mood and that I had already started to detest it when I bought L’Extase Rose Absolue?  Yep.  This whole blog is me calling myself to account for my own bullshit.

 

 

Anyway, if it’s not clear by now, the perfumes below are the renditions of rose that I love, or at least prefer above all others that I have worn or owned (or, God knows, still own despite myself).  

 

     

 

Rose Oud by By Kilian {Full review here

Photo by Heather on Unsplash 

 

Rose Oud is unimaginatively named, obnoxiously over-priced (especially for what is synthetic oud), and not terribly original.  Yet it is beautiful from every angle and, unusually for a rose-oud, speaks with the softest, most indoor voice imaginable.  Its magic lies in the effortless smoothing over of all the cracks between normally pugnacious materials such as guaiacol, oud, and rose. 

 

Think of the most beautiful supermodel you’ve ever laid eyes on – but one who nonetheless fails to either move you or turn you on – and that’s Rose Oud by Kilian.  Because it is almost rosewater-levels of gentle, I use it when I want to feel seen but not heard, like a sleek black cat winding around the ankles of people at a party. 

 

 

Mohur by Neela Vermeire

 

Mohur is a handful of red rose petals strewn on the surface of a glass of cold almond milk into which have been stirred grated carrots, black pepper, and cardamom.  There is a cold restraint to the fragrance that elevates it.  The notes strain against a muslin cloth, drip feeding into the fragrance on a time-release mechanism and allowing the wearer to smell everything both in and out of order.  



First wave – an austere oud note and a sourish leather, underpinned by a green cardamom note.  Behind the sharpness of the opening accord, some fruit and rose petals begin to take shape.  In this moment, the rose smells like the dried rose petals stirred into black tea that you can buy from Marriage Freres.  Then, for about half an hour, I can’t smell a thing –  it’s as if all the opening notes have sharply withdrawn, leaving only a haunting impression of something enticingly boozy and sour on the skin.

 

Then, without warning, the fragrance seems to rev back up again like rusty engine.  Now underpinning the tart fruitiness of the emerging rose is the fuzzy, almost raw feel of a green almond freshly peeled from its shell and pressed to release its fragrant milk.  The red rose petals lose their tea-like dryness and bloom into wet, jammy rose petals plucked straight from the flower.  The sticky rose combines with the milky almond notes to produce something almost edible in its deliciousness.  But the jam and milk notes are spread out on a foundation of earth and roots (carrots), powdery chalk (benzoin), and wood (sandalwood and cedar), so it never quite fully crosses over into gourmand territory.

The intense (but filtered, shaded) whirligig of spice and rose notes never really settles.  Even in the base, it just keeps on shifting through a kaleidoscope of impressions.  At times, the base reads to me like a dusty, rose-tinted talcum powder – the combination of now-dried rose petals and benzoin – and at others, a full-throated, creamy sandalwood that tilted its sweetness towards a weighty vanilla, again, nuanced by rose but never dominated by it.  Sometimes, Mohur strikes me as a very pretty Indian rose; other times, a small miracle.  

 

 

Parfum Sacre by Caron

 

Parfum Sacre hooked me early, at a tender time of my life when I needed a Big Perfume Love, and is therefore resistant to any attempt I make at objective analysis.  If pushed, I would say it smells like an ancient carved sandalwood chest filled to the brim with myrrh resin reduced to a fine golden powder and tender pink curlicues of rose soap lovingly carved off a block of Camay with a pocketknife.  It smells full and soft, like cashmere, but studded with little kitten licks of black pepper and lemon that trickle the back of the throat.  Even the thin, reedy version of Parfum Sacre available to buy today possesses that gently peppery, rosy, soapy quality that says ‘Mother’ to me.  Therefore, it continues to be one of my Big, Albeit Incoherently Described Perfume Loves.

 

 

Smyrna by Le Couvent {Full review here}

Photo by Zoe Schaeffer on Unsplash

 

Smyrna, for the most part, reminds me of the steamy, botanical smell of a warm greenhouse where you are dividing geranium plantlets – the vaporous aroma of sun-warmed wood frames, the peppery snap of the roots and stalks, the rosy-minty smell of the geraniums.  Though ostensibly modelled after Rose 31 by Le Labo or (even closer, I’d argue)  Rose Poivrée by The Different Company, the black pepper gives the scent a kick but no funk.  It smells planty, not underpanty.  It is so smooth, slippery, and oddly lotiony that I can’t help but love it, if only as a spa-like extension of my grooming ritual after a long, hot bath. 

 

 

Portrait of a Lady by Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle

 

Regal and brutal in equal measure, Portrait of a Lady is the kind of fragrance best suited to boardroom intimidation than it is to personal enjoyment.  I only ever call upon it when suiting up for battle – it is my own pocket Iron Lady, complete with the bouffant hair and 1980s power suits.  Crushing, smothering belly rolls of the ashiest incense this side of Tobacco Oud crowd in on the pulpy raspberry rose, the neon green flicker of camphor or eucalyptus acting as a warning light.  A sober, dry patchouli hulks in the background, somewhat discreetly at first until you take a second look and realize just how massive it is. 

 

Portrait of a Lady is less of a fragrance than it is a behemoth – an institution.  These days, the rose is a little less brilliant than before, so some of that ‘red jewel glittering against a grey fog of ash’ effect is lost.  But it is still an impressive perfume and still eminently suited to business of turning you into a walking weapon of mass destruction.  I respect its power more than I like it, but I will never be without a little vial of it, like a flick knife tucked inside my knickers. 

 

 

Eau de Protection by Etat Libre d’Orange, aka Rossy de Palma

 

Eau de Protection gives me all the sulky, stroppy darkness I’d ever dreamed of as a baby Goth circa 1993.  The opening is bright and scratchy feeling, a neon rose teeming with enough ginger, pepper, and geranium to make you wince.  This is soon somewhat softened by a cocoa-ish musk that feels slightly funky in a cat’s paws kind of way, which in turn sets the stage for a dramatic smackdown between the drawing-blood-on-metal sharpness of geranium, wine, a more pulp fiction sort of rose, and an earthy patchouli.  In winding down, it seems to lurch between dried earth, roses, musk, amber, and cocoa, shunting you from the high-toned and pitchy to the dusky and velvety, and then back again.  The whole ride never once feels comfortable or predictable.  Bravo you weird, wonderful people at Etat Libre d’Orange!  This is as jolie-laide as Signora Rossy de Palma herself.

 

 

Rose de Nuit by Serge Lutens

 

There is a true rose in there somewhere, a mere memory of a living, breathing thing of beauty, but it is smothered and muffled with layers of wax, adipose, and decaying rose petals. The opening verges on the unpleasant, with a rose as sharply tannic as the dregs of red wine in the glass you forgot to rinse the night before.  The beeswax takes some of the sting out of it but adds a note of greasy scalp or hair that has not been washed for five days.  The rose dries up and becomes blackened, parched, and leathery, but the fat honeyed wax undertone only grows more animalic. 

 

The first time I wore it, I was repulsed.  But also intrigued.  I put it on before bed and each time I awoke during the night, I became aware of an enticing aroma surrounding me and emanating off my body.  It possesses the slightly sour, intriguingly musty, altogether human smell of a piece of skin you (or a lover) have licked.  Reader, I bought a bell bottle of it.  Though I rarely wear it because its forced intimacy makes me feel unsettled, I am glad that I have something this evocative (and slightly creepy) in my possession. 

 

 

Lyric Woman by Amouage

Photo by Jaspreet Kalsi on Unsplash

 

I didn’t think very much of Lyric Woman until I spilled a sample vial of it on some paper in my office one day and was met by this most incredible aroma of real Indian sandalwood – creamy but dry, rosy but as sturdy as a table.  I was felled; it moved me.  But if the sandalwood was the hook, I ended up sticking around for the lush rose and smoky-buttery-banana ylang, floral shapes in the air carved out and defined by the spices that jostled in the air pockets in and around them – mostly a prickly, piquant green cardamom, which gives the rose a grainy, beery-like dimension, and a fiery black pepper that sharpens and adds angularity to the custardy ylang. 

 

The overall effect is surprisingly smooth and mild for something so densely packed with spice, and I’ve come to realize that Lyric Woman shares a similar structure with Parfum Sacre, in that the botanical ‘true-ness’ of the rose is modulated and made lotiony-smooth by the buffing action of the spices, and intertwined so deeply with the sandal that it is tough to see where the seams between rose and wood actually lie. 

 

In the 2009 Guide, Luca Turin talks about a fruity-woody damascone note in Lyric Woman that turns it from a nice perfume into one that might be called a masterpiece.  And he is right, of course – there is a raisiny, dried plum quality to the rose that makes you think of rot at the heart of an otherwise perfect-looking apple – but I also think that the piquant cardamom and incredible sandalwood are also key players in the magic.  Without them, this might be a nice fruity-woody-incense rose – with them, Lyric Woman becomes the most accomplished translation of the traditional rosy-sandal attar motif of Arabian perfumery to a format more familiar to Western Europeans.         

 

 

Encens Mythique d’Orient by Guerlain

 

This is what I like to call my ‘expensive French whore’ perfume.  It calls to mind an extremely well-dressed Parisian lady at lunch who has peed in her pants a little but is supremely confident that nobody is going to call her on it because she’s just ordered a bottle of the 1975 Clos du Mesnil Blanc de Blancs.  Opening on a steam-pressed barrage of starch and aldehydes, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in a Chinese laundry.  There is a brief glimpse of a rich rose and sour oud wood, but this is whipped away fairly quickly, leaving you enough time to wallow in all those fizzing, airborne ‘white shirt’ particles floating in the air, stuffed to such density that it almost takes on a physical form in front of your nose.  As metallic as a hot wire brush, you can almost feel the aldehydes clogging your lungs like cotton fluff.

 

When the starch cloud calms down, it reveals a rich, salty, ‘fatty’ ambergris note – semi-urinous too – that turns the lights up on the rose.  The effect of the ambergris is like the glare of hard, speckled sunlight on water – so bright you have to half-close your eyes to perceive it.  This approach effectively merges the classical ‘French’ style of aldehydic, operatic florals with certain hallmarks of ‘Eastern’ perfumery, such as the  hay-like bitterness of saffron and the gilded pungency of ambergris, to startling effect.  Acid rather than alkaline.  It smells oddly cheap (scratchy) and luxurious at the same time, a dichotomy I particularly enjoy (see Noir de Noir, below).  

 

 

Rose Nacrée du Desert by Guerlain

 

Rose Nacrée du Desert is technically a balsamic rose-oud, yet, for me, the role played by the patchouli is so central to its character that I mentally classify it as part of the rose-and-patchouli sub-genre.  A bright, jammy Taifi rose is set down to smolder in a pit of smoking resins, medicinal saffron, and the sour, incensey greenness of oud wood, and this accord is what dominates at first.  But then, in the drydown, in rolls that gloomy, soil-like patchouli, trampling all over the powdery, sweet benzoin to give it a dirty, lived-in edge. 

 

Rose Nacrée means pearlized rose, which implies something delicate or femme.  Don’t believe one bit of it.  This is the darkly beautiful oil anointing the beard and robes of Emirati men, wafting evocatively in their trail as they head into the Mosque for evening prayer.  It is as heavy as a length of gold-embroidered damask, so I think carefully before spraying it on, but once it is securely soaked into my every skin cell and nose hair, becoming part of my organic compounds, I luxuriate in it like a cat rolling around in catnip.   

 

 

Rozu by Aesop {Full review here}

 

Rozu wraps a fresh, dewy rose in paper-thin layers of pink pepper, shiso leaf, and aromatic grasses that crackle with intent.  Surprisingly, it is not the spice or the aromatics that shine through the hardest.  For me, it is the evocative aroma of freshly-turned soil that makes Rozu special.  Moist, sharp, alive – this is the healthful, plush air inside a Japanese onsen. 

 

 

Epic Woman by Amouage

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

 

Epic Woman balances the hot and the sour and the sweet as masterfully as a delicate Chinese dish – the heat from the black pepper and cinnamon, the green pickling spices (caraway), and the soft-but-oh-so-vinegary oud are the major players here.  But there is also a diffuse sweetness, coming off the pink rose that blooms behind the sour opening notes and what feels like a mixture of powdered cinnamon and vanilla.  The parched tannins of the black tea are difficult to pick out when placed up against the smoky guaiac wood, incense, and other spicy-woody notes, but they are nonetheless present and correct.



The vanilla in the base is subtle – a thimbleful of crème anglaise rather than an ice-cream sundae – and spiked with just enough sugar added to round out the sourness of the oud wood.  The sourness and the delicate spices surrounding the rose persist all through the perfume, though, and keep me smacking my lips.  This is a perfume to be savored like the snap of a cold dill pickle straight from the jar when you’re starving.  In its perfectly judged balance of sweet, piquant, spicy and anisic, Epic Woman is my favorite rose-as-sherbet perfume.  

 

 

Noir de Noir by Tom Ford

 

The recipe in Nigella Lawson’s ‘Feast’ for Chocolate Guinness Cake makes an enormous wodge of damp, dense (yet springy) chocolate cake of the deepest black imaginable, topped with a thick single layer of white cream cheese frosting meant to resemble the head on a pint.  The beauty of this cake is the way what Nigella calls ‘the ferrous twang’ of Guinness holds its own against the chocolatey sweetness of the crumb and the tartness of the cream cheese.  If you think about it, the pairing makes sense – there is something almost animalic, or at least iron-rich, like blood, that connects the loamy darkness of stout (and soil) with the aroma of a 90% cocoa bar of chocolate being melted in a bain marie.

 

Noir de Noir uses the iodine-like sting of saffron and the plushness of Turkish rose to perform the same trick.  The slightly garbagey, vegetal iron-filling aspect of the spice acts upon the patchouli and roses to create an extraordinarily dark truffle accord that feels like a cross-section of that Chocolate Guinness Cake.  The rose note here is slightly rosewater-ish, providing a cheap and cheerful Turkish Delight brightness that countermands the black velvet lushness of the chocolate-oud.  Probably the most romantic perfume in my collection, though, like dark chocolate and Turkish Delight, a strictly once-in-a-blue-moon kind of craving.

 

 

Paestum Rose by Eau d’Italie

 

This translucent wash of rose, myrrh, and black pepper – set over a base of incensey cedar or cedar-ish incense (depending on the angle you look at it) – never strikes me as being as dark or as gothic as some reviews describe it.  However, there is a water-washing-over-river-stones quality to the myrrh that lends it a certain seriousness, like delicate roses bleached of their lifeblood, their pinkness fading slowly to greige.  The tartness of the pepper tickles my taste buds in much the same way as Epic Woman does, but this is far more sheer and weightless a composition.  I also sense the urinous greenness of blackcurrant bud, sucking any moisture out of the air. 

 

For years, I vacillated between Costes I and Paestum Rose, as I see these fragrances as two sides of the same coin – transparent, spiced woods and rose – and for a while was sold on the more cinnamony Costes I.  But my fascination with the Costes waned as I could never get it to rouse itself past the first, shy, minor C wave of aroma it summoned.  Paestum Rose, while almost equally as sheer as the Costes, seems somehow more robust and characterful in construction, so I sold my two bottles of Costes I and purchased a bottle of Paestum Rose in 2017.  Doesn’t matter now, of course – both the Costes and Paestum Rose have been discontinued.  Rozu by Aesop might be an adequate substitute for the airy, piquant freshness of the peppery rose smell that I love so much, but I’m doubtful.  Paestum Rose is one of my most worn rose fragrances of all time, because it’s just so damn easy to wear, yet never less than soulful. 

 

 

Santal Majuscule by Serge Lutens

Photo by Jessica Loaiza on Unsplash

 

For a perfume that lists so many comforting notes – cocoa, rose petals, sandalwood, and so on – Santal Majuscule by Serge Lutens is full of things that pull and push against each other, creating tension.  The first few minutes feel dense to the point of sensory overload, a strong, boozy cocoa note interacting so violently with a jammy red rose that it conjures up a phantom note of aromatic coffee bean.   The sour, lactic tang of the sandalwood clashes with the syrupy sweetness of the rose; the bitter dustiness of the dark cocoa stands off against the oiliness of the wood; these contrasting notes and textures rub up against each and then pull apart again in the most interesting ways possible.  

Much like Chanel’s Bois des Iles, Santal Majuscule is a reconstruction of the characteristically creamy but arid scent of true Indian sandalwood.  It draws on the different textures and angles of the rose, cocoa, and woody notes to suggest – roughly – the range of tones you get in sandalwood, which run from rosy, woody, and syrupy to dusty, milky, sour, sweet, and oily.  Towards the end, the aridity lets up with a tandem of woods and rose arranged in that floral Indian pudding style, complete with rosewater and saffron.  A perfectly autumnal, woody rose experience and one that is deeply meaningful to me. 


 

Muschio by Lorenzo Villoresi 

 

Past the rosy-minty slap of the geranium leaf, Muschio is a surprisingly creamy rose-musk-sandal affair not a million miles away from Safran Troublant by L’Artisan Parfumeur.  Tremendously diffusive and enveloping, it is one of those rare scents that manages to be sharp and mellow at the same time, thus straddling the Great Gender divide with ease.  Yes, it feels like rose custard, but at the same time, it also smells like crushed herbs, that arid-umami Villoresi sandalwood, and a clean, woody musk.  It is one of my favorite scents of all time, let alone a rose one, and among one of my most worn in 2019, when I was living in Rome. 

 

 

Sballo by Bruno Acampora

 

Sballo means ‘trip’ in Italian.  Not as in a ‘trip to the seaside’, but in the ‘I ate some funny-looking mushrooms and now your face is a rainbow’ sense of the word.  Which is appropriate when you consider how mind-bendingly seventies the Acampora oils smell.  Trippy, psychedelic, groovy – all words that fit the Acampora aesthetic like a glove.

 

Sballo is the banner-carrier for this seventies feel, so it goes heavy on the aromatics, hay, patchouli, and oakmoss.  It ain’t pretty, but it sure does smell authentic.  The main thrust is a patchouli-rose chypre in the Bernard Chant style.  Think Aromatics Elixir and Aramis 900, but richer and rougher in texture.  An artisanal, homemade take on a commercial model.  The rose is brilliant and red, but smothered by armfuls of dry, rustic grasses and hay note acting in tandem with oakmoss and patchouli.  

 

Most modern chypre scents fake the bitterness of oakmoss in the traditional chypre accord via other materials that share a similarly ashen dryness, like denatured patchouli aromachemicals (Akigalawood), hay, galbanum, or even saffron.  But though there is no oakmoss listed for Sballo, I can’t imagine that it doesn’t actually contain at least some.  To my nose, the shadowy dankness of the material is unmistakably present.  

 

Sballo shores up this oakmoss effect by flanking it with equally dank or earthy-dry materials such as hay, clove, patchouli, and a material that smells like tobacco or black tea leaves.  The overall effect is gloomy and desiccated in the grand rose chypre tradition.  Saving it from a classic ‘ladies who lunch’ formality of the chypre is the rough, almost burnt-ashy texture of the moss and patchouli.  It is like the rough, stubbled jaw of a brutish male thrust into your personal airspace, causing both discomfort and the thrill of secret excitement. 

 

 

Traversée du Bosphore by L’Artisan Parfumeur

 

Despite buying almost every iteration of the theme in the past, and me originally thinking that it smelled like a cherry-flavored Jolly Rancher, Traversée du Bosphore is the only rose loukhoum scent I have kept in my collection. 

 

The notes say apple and pomegranate, two ingredients heavily used in Turkish and Balkan cuisine.  But I am used to my mother-in-law’s wild pomegranate syrup, which is tart and sweet and tannic all at once, so for the longest while I couldn’t see the connection to the more single-cell syrup I was smelling in the topnotes.  The dry down, on the other hand, was always more interesting to me – a fat, pink suede cushion thickly dusted with icing sugar and trembling under the weight of rose petals.  The Tl;dr of all this is that while the drydown felt luxe to me, the opening always smell cheap. 



But then it struck me – what the hell am I talking about?  Loukhoum is cheap.  Its cheapness is practically its whole point.  It is cheap to make, cheap to consume, and it tastes a bit cheap too.  I lived in the Balkans for 17 years, and at meetings in Bosnia, Serbia, or Montenegro, someone would invariably pull out a tin of loukhoum and you’d find yourself mindlessly chomping through two or three cubes of vaguely rose-flavored gelatin with the coffee (always more of a texture than a taste), careless of the post-loukhoum sugar headache that loomed over your medulla oblungata like a nuclear cloud. 



Knowing that loukhoum costs pennies is part of its hokey charm, I guess.  It’s like coffee, good bread, and chocolate – small things that cost relatively little and yet provide a spot of brilliance or colour in the drabness of our daily lives.  And this (essential) cheapness is key to appreciating Traversée du Bosphore.  Enough with the mythologizing of Eastern sweetmeats, this perfume seems to be saying – loukhoum is made from boiled up horses’ hooves, so let’s not all pretend that it’s something fancier than it is.  I no longer live in the Balkans, so when I feel a bit nostalgic for the cheap rosewater taste of the local loukhoum, Traversée du Bosphore is my solution. 

 

 

Tocade by Rochas

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

 

A great big, cheap, creamy delight – basically the fattiness of L’Oréal Riche Shine lipstick mixed with the scent of sugar cookies pulled fresh from the oven, and a few non-descript florals (the Roucelian magnolia is there, of course, but also lily of the valley) thrown in purely in a futile attempt to freshen the stodge of its muffin top.  The overall effect is super sweet and plasticky and acetone-ish, like a 1980s My Little Pony scissored in half, or one of those rhubarb-and-custard boiled sweets you’d buy at the corner shop in Ireland circa 1993, which of course is what makes Tocade such a fun, nostalgic wear. 

 

By Killian’s take on Tocade, Woman in Gold, missed the whole point when it made the basic template smell more luxurious.  Tocade is a rose-flavored crème brulée, yes, but more the kind you’d buy in Lidl during their Turkish week than in an upmarket restaurant – and like any loukhoum-and-lipstick scent, this creamy, sugary trashiness is an essential part of its charm.  I wear Tocade only occasionally, but it’s always a good time when I do. 

 

 

Oha by Teo Cabanel 

 

Dark, lush, and curvaceous as heck, Oha smells like a 1940s vintage perfume resurrected from the dregs of a dried-up vial found in somebody’s handbag.  It smells like an authentic, honest-to-goodness musky rose chypre, by which I mean it smells almost embarrassingly sexual, in a similar vein to L’Arte di Gucci and Rose de Nuit by Lutens, but stripped back a bit so that the effect whispers rather than cat calls.  The roses are lusty and sharp – a blend of Bulgarian and Turkish – and the bed they lie on is a sort of mossy patchouli-oak-musk thing that feels suitably dank but still incredibly perfumey. 

 

Oha is as close as I have ever found to that whole ideal of your mother, dressed to the nines in a body-hugging black velvet dress and soaked in Coco by Chanel, coming in to give you a kiss goodnight.  Well, to be honest, I never had a mother like that, but when I wear Oha, I simultaneously feel like I am both the child and the mother in that fictive scenario.  This was the most unneutered and most serious perfume that Teo Cabanel has ever done, only to be promptly thrown out in 2021 with all the other perfumes by the house that didn’t smell like a bleached sun dress and citrus body spray and the whole pre-teen French girl fantasy vibe they’re going for these days.  Assholes.   

 

 

Le Mat by Mendittorosa {Full review here}

 

Le Mat is a study in decrepitude.  Picture a time-release reel of a rose blooming violently and then slowly desaturating in hue from a pulpy, blackened red to brown, dirty gold, and finally grey – a smudge of ash crushed between the pages of a book.  Everything bracketing the rose is desiccated, from the dried fallen leaves of the patchouli to the hay and dried honey spackle of the curry-ish immortelle.  It smells like summer grasses so bleached by the sun you can almost hear the cicadas.  The dense spicing of nutmeg, clove, and black pepper force-ages the rose and buries it under a fine layer of white powder, like the mastic coating on a nubbin of Orthodox incense.  I still dream about this one long after my sample is gone.  

 

 

Safran Troublant by L’Artisan Troublant  

 

Conor McTeague, my friend and much loved writer who wrote under the pen name of Jtd, died in spring of 2020, and I think about him at least once a week.  He was a far better writer (and thinker) than I could ever be, and I looked up to him immensely.  And I know that he loved me.  My heart hurts that he chose to leave, but I know that a part of him lives on in his perfume reviews.  This is why, rather than writing my own words about Safran Troublant, I want to quote Jtd, as his review of this perfume always struck me as the only thing anyone ever needed to say about it. 

 

He said that Olivia Giacobetti almost always  ‘gives us something that doesn’t really exist, but easily could since it makes perfect sense.  In Safran Troublant, she doesn’t give us a talking bear or a winged horse.  She gives us a rose/saffron marshmallow.  Not only is this imaginable, it starts to convinces me that I might actually have eaten one of these marshmallow at some time or other.  The perfume is so persuasive that I question myself.  Is the perfume a memory or an imagination?  Giacobetti speculates so effectively that I question the experience, but she does it so deftly that ultimately I don’t care.  It’s as if I’m day-dreaming.  My mind eases a bit and I become more mindful and less perplexed’. 

 

Conor, how I wish that Safran Troublant had worked a little better as a panacea.  I never wear this rose/saffron marshmallow without thinking of you.

 

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Levko Lyudochka on Unsplash 

 

Source of Samples:  I bought (or swapped for) all the perfumes I talked about in this post either in full bottle or sample form.  

     

  

 

 

 

Aromatic Herbal Review Tonka

Fève Délicieuse by Dior: A Review

2nd October 2023

 

I don’t require Fève Délicieuse by Dior to do anything more than it does, which is to step between me and this cold, cold world like a bodyguard.  In the late nineties, I worked for an American Ambassador in a hotly disputed piece of land straddling two parts of post-war Bosnia, and I quickly got used to his Close Protection Unit – made up of four surly and burly ex-British army officers (who grunted rather than spoke) – entering the room before he did, scanning for danger, barking at each other in code, and generally out Jason Stratham-ing Jason Stratham.  You get the picture.  When I visited the same Ambassador in DC a few years later, he told me that when he returned to America, it took him at least half a year to stop pausing before a door to let his CPU team case the joint.  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Bill, it’s only the laundry room,” his wife would have to remind him.  

 

Fève Délicieuse is built like a proverbial brick shithouse.  Its opening is a clenched fist of wet, bitter herbs (lavender, mint) twisting things into a black licorice shape, not a million miles away from the burnt coffee-herb opening of old Eau Noire (also Dior).  But this is just a teaser, presaging the scent’s main act of sour cherry jam stirred into an almond custard so thicc and muscular that your spoon is guaranteed to stand up in it.  The tonka bean here smells like vanilla if vanilla was less like ice cream and more like a dusky, tobacco-stained corduroy carpet.  It’s the ‘bit of rough’ to your parent’s definition of ‘a nice boy’.

 

Like the CPU guys, I admire its sheer endurance and unrelenting, brute strength.  This is a scent that wraps itself securely around your skin and beds down for the long haul, emanating wafts of burnt almond at frequent intervals to ward off harm.  But – and here’s the kicker – Fève Délicieuse is a scent with zero art and even less conversation.  Its whole point is its power.  It’s Charles Atlas dragging a 145,000-pound train up a track. 

 

But I figure it’s time for me to stop feeling guilty about owning perfumes whose sole function in my collection is to give me strength when I’m feeling vulnerable.  Because while Fève Délicieuse sure isn’t art, or perhaps even that good, its thick-fingered, tattooed hand at the small of my back is what pushes me gently forward when I hesitate.  And boy, does it give me comfort to know it’s there. 

 

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Alec Favale on Unsplash 

 

Source of Sample:  I purchased and swapped away a decant before buying one of those small 40ml bottles directly from Dior Italy in late 2019.

 

 

Aromatic Chypre Herbal Oakmoss Patchouli Review Sandalwood Spice

Marescialla by Santa Maria Novella: Mad, bad, and dangerous to know

28th July 2023

 

Santa Maria Novella’s Marescialla is one of only three fragrances in the ‘interesting and ugly-beautiful but almost too brutal to love’ category that I keep around and wear on a regular basis – the others being the original Parfum by Comme des Garcons and M/Mink by Byredo.  In my non-reviewing, day-to-day life, I don’t always wear perfume and when I do, it is invariably something easy and attractive in the ambery category.  (If you’re thinking of calling me basic, don’t worry – that’s a badge I wear with pride).  

 

Still, there is something about the filthy pungency of raw spices that pulls me in every time.   I can wear the heck out of a sweaty clove-on-steroids (Eau Lente), armpitty cumin (Rubj), and the arid ‘sweddy ballz’ element of whatever poisonous stew of spices thickens a favorite woody scent (Caravelle Epicée).  This is just to explain that, when I say I love the ever-loving shit out of Marescialla, I mean that I really love the ever-loving shit out of it and am not just saying that as your typical fragrance reviewer who exalts the artistic merits of a challenging fragrance only to never again touch it outside of that one review.  Which, to be fair, I have also done. 

 

That said, Marescialla is a scent that probably 95% of people who smell it will think is repulsive.  The opening is a grotesque cacophony of paint thinner, medicinal notes, herbal salve, floor wax, and creeping mold, all underscored by a screechy citric note as harsh as it is unlovely.

 

It’s a bit like walking into an ancient church that’s just been scrubbed down with peppery, neon-yellow antiseptic fluids that cost 0.57 cents from a hardware store.  This harsh, clean scent – the aroma of mace, really – mingles with the damp old wood and stone, creating an atmosphere that’s both a little terrifying and enthralling.  If you told me someone had used a bucket of Marescialla to cover up a ritualistic killing or exorcism gone wrong in an old church, I’d believe you.  The mace adds a clove-like twist, emphasizing the swing between the purifying and the unholy. 

 

I find the scent oddly comforting, though.  I bought Marescialla the day after a particularly gruesome medical procedure I’d undergone in a podiatrist’s office one dark, rainy night in Rome, an office that I realize now must have been repurposed from an ancient crypt or cellar, soaring architraves and all.  Marescialla smells like my experience that night – there was a needle of anesthetic (teasing me with the sweet promise of deliverance), there was blood, there was medical gauze soaked in a brackish, clovey antiseptic, a herb-scented tissue to bring me round after I fainted, and most of all, there was the smell of ancient wood, creeping rot, and damp stone.  It should be no surprise then that fear and loathing and relief (at it all being over) are mixed up in the aroma of Marescialla.  It is already an intensely evocative fragrance – for me, it is memory incarnate.   

 

As it settles, Marescialla reveals a bracing and surprisingly clean blend of clove, rose, wood, and patchouli, reminiscent of skin that’s been thoroughly washed with Pears soap or coal tar.  Though not a conventionally attractive fragrance by any stretch of the imagination, when I wear it, it is one hell of an aide-memoire, and at my age, any aide to the old memoire is deeply appreciated.  

 

Cover Image:  Photo by so flow on Unsplash 

 

Source of Sample:  I bought my bottle of Marescialla from the smaller Santa Maria Novella shop (near Piazza Navona) in Rome in late November 2019. 

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Heure Exquise by Annick Goutal: A Review

25th July 2023

 

I fought tooth and nail to get my hands on a vintage-ish bottle of Annick Goutal’s Heure Exquise, and each time I wear it, I am less and less convinced that the juice was worth the squeeze.  Yes, the sandalwood in the drydown is gloriously real, yes, the rose is a powdery delight, and yes, the iris is the starchiest, whitest Irish linen tablecloth you ever did touch.  But given the ocean of sharp, musky green soap you have to wade through to get to them, I wonder if I’d have been better off investing in another bottle of 1980s Samsara.  Until I remember that I’m not terribly fond of that one either.

 

I have no real criticism to levy at Heure Exquise in particular.  Viewed under any even halfway objective lens, it is a beautiful fragrance.  It is just that my soul remains unstirred by green, aldehydic fragrances that draw on galbanum for their emotive power. 

 

My problem, however, is that I am also drawn to the evocative descriptions of the scent’s retro, womanly charm whenever it is reviewed.  I project myself onto these descriptions, imagining myself to be the type of woman – elegant, fastened-up, but undeniably sensual – for whom Heure Exquise seems to have been created. 

 

But not only am I not that woman, once on the skin, Heure Exquise and its ilk (yes, the whole genre) smells dated to me.  Chanel No. 19, Annick Goutal Heure Exquise, Chanel Cristalle, Ormonde Jayne Tiare, Guerlain Chamade, Lancôme Climat, Amouage Gold Woman – all behemoths of classic female ‘power top’ perfumery – are scents that I respect but cannot bring myself to love.  On the rare occasion that I do wear them, any attempt to mold them to my own personality falls flat and I am left feeling slightly judged (by my own perfume!) for doing unladylike stuff in its presence, like answering emails in my underwear or balancing a bowl of peanuts on my belly as I flick through Netflix.  

 

Still, with Heure Exquise, the am-I-a-dirty-girl-or-am-I-not vibe gives me pause for thought.  Past that atmosphere-rip-tear of a virulently green, dry (gaspingly so) galbanum resin, which gives it more than a passing resemblance to Chanel No. 19, Heure Exquise settles into the almost civety-floral aroma of a bar of Chanel No. 5 soap that’s cracking and grey at the edges, making it seem not entirely impossible that this particular lady who lunches may not have changed her underwear in recent memory.   I’m not saying that it’s animalic but there is something a little poopy or yeasty about that musk-sandalwood tandem.

 

And it is precisely this quality of Heure Exquise that makes me cling to my half used bottle.  I appreciate a bit of ladylike smut holding its corner against the hospital corners of floral aldehydes (the horsey, slightly grimy undercurrent in both Vega and Cuir de Russie, for example, is exactly why I love those fragrances).  But while Heure Exquise is probably the epitome of the classic, feminine power scent and deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Mitsouko and No. 19, I am never 100% myself in it and for that reason, it has got to go. 

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Ravi Patel on Unsplash 

 

Source of sample:  I bought two bottles of vintage-ish Heure Exquise from the Parfumo Souk in 2021 – the second one only because the first was confiscated en route to me by Dutch customs.  I should have taken this as a sign from the universe that this perfume and I are ill-matched. But of course I didn’t.