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Personal Pantheon of Patchouli Perfumes: PART II (The Deviations)

6th March 2023

 

 

Fragrances in this group – the patchouli deviations – tend to be more perfumey, abstract, and therefore more individual in character.  Some of these deviations treat the patchouli as a fixed point on a map, others as a jumping off point into unknown avenues of discovery.  Though some clear sub-categories can still be discerned (patchouli chypre, rose-patch, fruitchouli, etc.), even the patchouli perfumes that may be said to fit a ‘type’ surprise you by sliding instead into tight slots intended, in retrospect, for them alone.  For example, though Noir de Noir (Tom Ford) and Rose Nacrée (Guerlain) both play with the rose-patch template, the first smells like French chocolate truffles and the second smells like the inside of a Mosque.

 

Stepping away from the more straightforwardly patchouli patchouli group (earth, cocoa, amber) discussed in Part I opens the door to a diverse group of potential new entrants.  Because once you start cross-pollinating patchouli with jasmine, oakmoss, immortelle, black pepper, vanilla, and tonka bean, the results vary as infinitely as the combinations to a bank vault safe.

 

On the one hand, this makes it easier to identify and avoid redundancies.  On the other, the temptation to add these fragrances to your collection is strong, precisely because each of them is special in their own unique way.  My approach to curation of this second group, therefore, is less structured than the first.  I will have to feel my way intuitively through it, being completely honest about the specialness or ‘essential-ness’ of each choice to my personal collection.

 

Remember, this is by no means a comprehensive analysis of every single patchouli-esque perfume I have ever smelled or reviewed, but rather a good hard look at my personal collection and collecting habits.

 

 

Phenolic Patchouli

Photo by Tobias Rademacher on Unsplash

 

Patchouli 24 by Le Labo.  Yes, yes, I know that 80% of the patchouli in Patchouli 24 is in its name.  And yes, if you were to argue that Patchouli 24 smells more like smoking tar pits and the aftermath of a chemical fire in a tire factory than it does patchouli, you’d certainly have a point.  But are you writing this blog, or am I?

 

Something about the way the burned, smoky ‘electrical fire’ facet mingles with the thin, poisonously sweet slick of vanillin and the faint whiff of runner’s sweat (vetiver) pooled at the base makes me feel like Lisbeth from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, chasing a bad guy down on her motorcycle.  The salty-sweet ‘glazed ham’ quality to the smoke is also something that feels weirdly sexy to me.   I would wear this more often, but for the fact that when I do, my husband stops the car to check for an electrical shortage or fire of some sort.

 

 

Immortelle Patchouli

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

 

Saying goodbye to:

 

PARFUMS Luxe: Patchouli by Comme des Garçons.  Luxe: Patchouli’s opening salvo of wet teak, hickory smoke, syrupy immortelle, anisic fenugreek, and herbal patchouli is both impressive and challenging.  I swooned when I first smelled this in a niche perfumery store in Belgium but should have remembered that scents that are characterful enough to push past the thick fuzz of hundreds of other perfumes being sprayed into the air are often too big for me when I get them home.

 

There are parts of this fragrance that I love.  It is a genius idea, for example, for the perfumer to flank the patchouli with the syrupy warmth of the immortelle, the burning white pepper, the dried alfalfa sweetgrass, and the bold smokiness of the opoponax, because these notes render all the soil out of the patchouli like fat from a sausage, leaving only its vegetal facets on display.  On the other hand, vegetal in patchouli speak always translates to a stewed celery-like tonality, which is not ideal, because, you know, walking around smelling like a vegetable stock cube is not something I aspire to.

 

And unfortunately, this is the aspect that gets further accentuated by the curryish fenugreek note, which smells like crushed celery seeds mixed with pine and mint.  I can take fenugreek in spicy sandalwood settings (like Santal de Mysore by Serge Lutens) but my tolerance level plummets when it is shoved up against an already vegetal-smelling patchouli.  There is nothing like this in my collection, let alone my patchouli collection, but Luxe: Patchouli gets worn too infrequently to earn a permanent place.

 

Dreaming about:

 

Le Mat by Mendittorosa.  A dry-yet-syrupy exposition on the same immortelle-patchouli idea as Luxe: Patchouli, but far less confrontational and saturnine than the Comme des Garcons.  I find it beautiful.  However, at €250 a bottle, it is one of those small, precious things that I am content to file away in my memory palace and think about every now and then.         

 

 

Rose-and-Patchouli

Photo by Salman Khan on Unsplash

 

Rose-patchouli fragrances work in much the same way as rose-oud fragrances do, in that they pair something lush, floral, sweet and stereotypically feminine (the rose) with something rougher, darker, woodier and more stereotypically masculine (patchouli, oud).  The fragrance works because the contrast works.  For some reason, rose-patchouli fragrances all have a slightly Victorian, gothic feel to them – stormy, dramatic, morose (serious Morrissey vibes) – while rose-oud fragrances read as dry and exotic.  I must be in the mood to wear a rose-patchouli fragrance, as they tend to feel quite rich and over-bearing on my skin, and I am not always ready for their sturm-und-drang.  However, I have found two that both suit me and fill very different mood slots in my collection.

 

Eau de Protection by Etat Libre d’Orange, aka Rossy de Palma.  This is the Gothic darkness I’d been hoping for from Voleur de Roses.  The opening is bright and scratchy feeling, 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 pulp fiction rose, and an earthy patchouli.  Towards the end, the scent 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, which takes place over ten hours on my skin, 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 Nacrée du Desert by Guerlain.  By rights, Rose Nacrée du Desert is a balsamic rose-oud – exotic and Eastern in character – rather than a rose-patchouli.  Yet, for me, the role played by the patchouli is so central to its character that I personally classify it as part of the rose-and-patchouli sub-genre.  It is dry, rich, and as hefty as a hippo.  A bright, jammy Taif 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 the scene at first.  But then, in the drydown, in rolls that tremendously gloomy, soil-like patchouli, trampling all over a powdery, sweet benzoin to give it a dirty, lived-in edge.  Rose Nacrée means pearlized rose, which implies something delicate or femme.  But nope.  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.  

 

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

 

Voleur de Roses by L’Artisan Parfumeur.  Voleur de Roses is a relatively simple scent based on three notes – rose, patchouli, and stone fruit – but it is the interplay between these notes that makes it fascinating.  The opening is that of plums on the turn, the sweet smell of fruit slowly rotting in the sun.  Since this is so quickly joined by wet young rose and an earthy patchouli, you are never quite sure whether the fruity decay belongs to the rose or to the freshly upturned earth, so the rotting plums effectively form a bridge between the rose and patchouli.

 

The feel of the perfume is wet, lush, and botanical.  It is certainly not as dark or as brooding as reviews paint it.  The patchouli dominates the rose, yes, but it is not a sinister, raw, or aggressive sort of patchouli.  In fact, the whole thing comes off as delicate and transparent, like a Japanese silk screen print.  With notes as lusty as patchouli and rose these, you want the scent to be deep, bloody, resonant and almost pounding in their intensity.  Or at least I do.  But Voleur de Roses never delivers the intensity I crave, and to add insult to injury, it seems to dissipate from my skin in under two hours.  And I refuse to pay L’Artisan Parfumeur prices for what amounts to a patchouli-rose splash.  

 

 

Sexy Baby Powder Patchouli (Yes, it’s a category, deal with it)

Photo by Miguel Salgado on Unsplash

 

Patchouli Bohème by LM Parfums.  Immediately, this recalls the smeary aroma of the ladies’ communal changing room where my mother would bring me into as a little child to wait while she tried on clothes.  The closed air swollen with the collective unsnapping of bras and unpeeling of pantyhose, the yeasty aroma of cooped-up underboob and flesh rolls suddenly released from their whalebone prisons, and the clouds of deodorizing talcum powders moistened by the day’s wear and tear.

 

At the center of all this is a balmy-greasy accord like clay or playdough spiked with the rosy-minty spikes of geranium leaf.  There is an ungodly amount of tonka bean in this, its slightly roasted almond butter facet roughed up by an oily patchouli masquerading as a black leather jacket.  Thanks to the strong role played by the tolu balsam, the texture of the perfume oscillates between sticky (turgid, airless, and ‘brown’) but and dusty (baby powder spliced with glints of metal).  Tolu balsam is similar to benzoin (woody, vanillic, spicy) but deeper, waxier, and more medicinal, with a pronounced leathery or tobacco like effect.  In Patchouly Bohème, it is as essential as the patchouli.  This is a scent that catches me off guard every time I wear it, because I never anticipate the way its soft, balmy, nutty-powdery skin is just a front – a wee baby Shalimar – hiding this massively earthy, roasted leather.  It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

 

 

Peppery Patchouli

Photo by Pratiksha Mohanty on Unsplash

 

Lord of Misrule by Lush.  The opening smells like black pepper but only if you imagine a handful of black pepper powder being blown at you through the sweet, glittery miasma of mica and minerals that hovers around the bath bomb wall at Lush.  If you told me this is what Outer Space smells like, I’d believe you.

 

Straight away, there are two layers.  The first, that minty-mineralic ‘bath bomb’ dust that impregnates every available air particle to the point you feel a little ‘choked out’.  The second, a wet, syrupy-sweet accord that smells a little like the Coca Cola syrup you mix with seltzer in a Soda Stream.  In this regard, it feels like Lush is recycling a few ideas from previous perfumes in Lord of Misrule, most notably the bright, Coca Cola-ish marmalade-myrrh accord from 1000 Kisses Deep and the burnt sugar notes from All Good Things.  The patchouli is hiding out in the heart, but it is so heavily bookended by the sharp pepper and the syrupy amber that, for the first hour or two, it is easy to miss.

 

But the greyish fuzz of minerals and space dust eventually burns off, revealing a sumptuous patchouli amber so rich you can almost feel it as a weight on your skin.  Essentially, in marrying a sexy ice-creamy amber-vanilla tandem to a headshoppy patchouli (think more the incensey sweetness of patchouli nag champa than the essential oil), Lush has recreated the more expensive feel of niche vanillambers, like Ani (Nishane) or Ambre Extrême (L’Artisan Parfumeur) but charges you a mere €35 for the pleasure.  As long as Lush makes Lord of Misrule, I will be buying it.

 

 

Green Patchouli

Photo by Rebecca Orlov | Epic Playdate on Unsplash

 

One herbal and dusty, one creamy and playdough-y.  Both greenish.  Both essential (to me).   

 

Cozé 02 by Parfumerie Generale.  Coze smells like someone picked up the nicest smelling things in the world – coffee, pepper, dark chocolate, hash resin, patchouli – and shoved them into a perfume.  For something that references both hash and the chocolate we eat when we get the munchies, this is as far away from the druggy atmosphere of a teenage boy’s bedroom as can be.  The sativa note has been cleverly married to a host of other green, herbal, and woody elements, thus yanking the whole thing outdoors.  Whenever I wear this, I feel like I am in the company of friendly lumberjacks, sitting down in a forest opening to coffee, brownies, and a funny cigarette or two after a morning of cutting down trees.  It is the type of perfume that makes you feel happy in an uncomplicated way.

 

The opening is rather dry and dark – a brief boozy patch followed by ashy tobacco and a fine dusting of something that can only be cocoa powder.  It is delicious and slightly spicy, with hot pepper and cloves.  This ashen layer is fitted closely over a sticky green hemp base, and then finally set to smolder on a base of mahogany wood chips.   There is a near perfect balance between edible and inedible, dry and balmy, and smoke and cold, clean air.  Technically, it would probably be correct to call Coze a quasi-gourmand, but its genius lies in dotting the foody notes so evenly around a dark, woodsy, smoky base that it would never occur to anyone to call it yummy.

 

 

Arbolé Arbolé by Hiram Green.  Full review here.  There is a wonderfully soft, smeary quality to the patchouli used here – it is clearly patchouli, but not at all headshoppy.  Rather, backlit with a greenish, rosy tint that makes me think of exotic liqueurs, it takes on a pleasantly stale, waxy chocolate softness that recalls vintage make-up, heavy silks taken out of storage in cedar trunks, and huge beeswax candles dripping over everything.  There is a sort of cosmetic, floral wax tonality that smudges the corners of the other notes and gives the perfumes a touch of vintage glamour.  Hiram Green perfumes wear as if lit from within and this is no exception.

 

All the individual characteristics of the raw materials – the cedar, patchouli, sandalwood – have been sanded down until only a smooth, integrated woodiness remains.  There is none of the normal bitter muskiness of cedar, none of the raw, earthy, or leafy facets of patchouli, and the sandalwood registers only as a unifying texture of creamy butter.  There is a smutty quality to this perfume that appeals enormously to me.  It shares the same soft ‘musky cocoa powder’ sexiness with Mazzolari Lei and Parfumerie Generale L’Ombre Fauve, both of which also blur the lines between patchouli, musk, and ambery-vanilla aromas so smoothly that the nose doesn’t immediately recognize one or the other.

 

 

Patchouli Nu-Chypres (Sans Moss)

Photo by Irene Kredenets on Unsplash

 

I have two favorites in this category.  Stellar job at curation, Claire!  Both use the earthy-minty ‘emotional remoteness’ of patchouli as a replacement for oakmoss in the chypre equation.  But they are so different to one another, as well as criminally discontinued and therefore unobtanium, that I have no choice (no choice, I tell you!) but to keep both in my collection.  

 

Bottega Veneta eau de parfum (For Her) by Bottega Veneta.  Like the famous intrecciato handbag upon which it is based, Bottega Veneta weaves together tonally-greige strands of plum, jasmine, and patchouli for a dusky, hoarse-throated take on suede.  It has the same milky bitterness you get in other light suede fragrances such as Daim Blond (Serge Lutens), which it resembles slightly.  But it is the addition of the gruff, stone-washed patchouli that makes Bottega Veneta the more robust and sexier scent.  Sadly, Bottega Veneta has discontinued this perfume, along with all its original ‘department store’ perfumes, choosing instead to throw the brand’s entire marketing budget at its soulless, couldn’t-strike-upon-an-idea-if-it-tried luxury segment (Le Gemme).  Well, fuck you very much, Bottega Veneta.

 

 

31 Rue Cambon by Chanel.  This is a fragrance that proves that a fragrance doesn’t need oakmoss for it to smell like a proper chypre.  Though I didn’t love it at first, it has slowly taken hold in my life, occupying roughly the same general space in my head as Mitsouko (Guerlain) and Profumo (Acqua di Parma).  But because Rue Cambon draws on a dry patchouli to provide that bitter mossiness essential to the drydown of a chypre, it is more modern, i.e., more streamlined in structure and far less powdery.

 

31 Rue Cambon is essentially a jostling together of ice and earth – the bitter, stinging purity of that bergamot, the Grappa-like chill of orris root, a touch of milky peach skin and jasmine in the heart to fool you into thinking that there is something akin to human warmth in here (there isn’t) – all grounded by a patchouli material that smells more like dried rose petals crumbled into dried earth than the chocolatey version used in Coromandel.  It makes me smell like someone who has her shit together.  The version I wear – the original eau de toilette – was discontinued in autumn of 2016, a sacrificial lamb slaughtered on the altar to modern consumer demand for beauty to last more than five hours (the fucking heathens).   Unfortunately, the post-2016 eau de parfum version suffers from an overload of thick, swampy ylang or vetiver that suffocates the lacy delicacy of the bergamot-iris-jasmine-patchouli structure.

 

In other words, when both my Bottega Veneta and 31 Rue Cambon are gone, I will be nu-chypre-less.  

    

 

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

 

Mon Parfum Chéri, par Camille by Annick Goutal.  A throwback chypre, all sharp elbows and no curves – and yet Mon Parfum Chéri, par Camille is a modern construction, launched in 2011.  The plum note is tart and sour, the iris starchy, and the patchouli as dry as a bone.  It manages to be rich and dark without being earthy, and light and powdery without being sweet.  For me, it immediately formed a memory bridge between the mossy plum of Guerlain’s discontinued chypre, Parure, the woody violets of Bois de Violette (Serge Lutens) – without the candied sweetness – and the dirty patchouli drydowns of grungy drugstore rose chypre classics such as La Perla Classic.  Its bitter, dusty grandeur suggests a perfume with a long and storied past, like Mitsouko.  I respect the hell out of Mon Parfum Chéri, par Camille (to the extent that I bought and sold it twice in two years) but found it difficult to wear comfortably.  I struggled to bend it to my will, make it sink properly into my skin.  Its noli-me-tangere air made it a forbidding and standoffish experience.

 

 

Oakmossy Pagan Patchouli

Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

 

Aromatics Elixir by Clinique.  We all know what Aromatics Elixir smells like.  Or do we?  It initially smelled murky and old-fashioned to me, until I leaned into it and realized that it is one of the great perfume anachronisms of the last century.  Created by Barnard Chant in 1975, Aromatics Elixir blazed a trail of agrestic patchouli, bitter herbs, rose, resins, and moss through what was a very different perfume world, setting itself in opposition to the clean, sporty fragrances that followed soon after but also breaking ties with the mannered formality of the green floral chypres of the fifties and sixties.  Aromatics Elixir’s groovy, loose-hipped manner is the kind of messy that earns you a lifetime of therapy later.  Sometimes it smells less like a perfume and more like a collection of elements a pagan goddess might summon from the undergrowth.  It lives exclusively in the small, private space between my clavicle and my sweater where it can do the least damage.  I apply the potent urine-yellow juice delicately – sprayed lightly onto my fingertips and then pressed gently onto my flesh – but in the end, the submission is all mine.

 

 

Saying goodbye to:

 

Beloved Woman by Amouage.   Beloved is beautifully done.  But was it necessary for me to invest in a whole bottle of it when it is clearly Amouage’s homage to Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir?  No, Claire, it most certainly was not.  Example number 202 of spectacularly poor judgement.  Beloved opens with a bitter, powdered clove, lavender, and sage combination that smells as aromatic and talc-like as Histoires de Parfums’ 1876.  But really, the rose, the hay-like chamomile, and the sage all combine to sing an Aromatics Elixir-shaped song.  Beloved is a fine lady, and Aromatics a hippy mom.  But the essential bone structure is there.  One might have been the other had different choices been made, and all that.

 

Now, of course, there are differences.  Aromatics Elixir is earthier, its airways gunked up with patchouli.  And the rose note in Beloved is arguably more remarkable.  Hidden behind the aromatic powder of the opening, you might miss it at first, but then it swells in intensity, rising from a crumble of dusty potpourri rose petals to become a big, juicy rose fluffed out by moisture.  The rose lingers for a while in a pool of boozy, hay-like immortelle, for a combination that is simultaneously syrupy and dry, sweet and savory.

 

But again, did these small differences provide adequate justification for slapping down a cool €300-and-something down on the table for a bottle of Beloved when Aromatics Elixir performs the same basic trick of making you feel womanly, powerful, and in control of your own fate, but at a cost that is almost ten times less?  No, Claire, they did not.  

 

 

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

 

Noir Patchouli by Histoires de Parfum.  A very refined take on the Bernard Chant canon of patchouli classics from Aramis 900 to Aromatics Elixir, retrofitted for modern tastes with a soft leather bag accent, every inch of its lining thickly dusted with green floral cosmetic powders.  But the earthy, almost metallic bitterness comes from the tree moss rather than from the patchouli, so while it is dark, it is also fresher and livelier (mintier) than expected.  I liked it, but liking is not a strong enough emotion for me to keep anything.  And once I’d spotted the familial Aromatics Elixir DNA, it was time for it to go.

 

 

Tramp by Lush.  Tramp was my Lush favorite body wash for a full decade, so when I got the chance to order a bottle of Tramp perfume from the Lush Kitchen in 2016 or 2017, I didn’t hesitate.  A simple blend of two especially dank forest-floor materials – patchouli and oakmoss – I can understand why they were forced to discontinue it in this post-IFRA world (my last remaining bottle of the body wash still lists Evernia prunastri on the label).  What I don’t understand is why I loved the shower gel so much and the perfume not at all.  In one of those ‘be careful what you wish for’ scenarios, it turns out that a straight-up, one-two punch of patchouli and oakmoss smells like an unfinished sketch of Polo or Brut.  Bitter, aftershavey, pungent, and unrelenting – gah!

 

 

Patchouli Truffles

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

 

Unlike the cocoa aspect of the more patchouli-forward fragrances in Part I, which appear only as a facet of the patchouli material itself, this category refers to a more explicitly gourmand treatment, i.e., melted chocolate, dark chocolate truffles, Nutella, etc.  Where patchouli becomes transubstantiated into something purely edible.   

 

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 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.  It’s worth noting that the rose note here is slightly rosewater-ish, providing a chippy 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.

 

 

Angel Muse by Thierry Mugler.  Full review here.  Muse is an improvement on the original Angel because (a) it manages to drown out the high-octane Maltol shriek of its predecessor with a velvety blanket of hazelnut cream, and (b) the treatment of the patchouli in Muse tacks towards gianduja rather than the sour, wet dishrag left to molder overnight in a sink of the original Angel.  Muse smells both edible and inedible, like a posh chocolate truffle mashed underfoot into the warm, sweet grass of a polo pitch, which makes it a successful perfume rather than just a successful gourmand perfume.  The addition of vetiver is critical.  Vetiver often smells like ground hazelnuts (see Vetiver Tonka, Sycomore, Onda) but adds a savory, mealy element that restrains the sugar.  That effect is noticeable here, and matched to the soft chocolate of the patchouli, the inevitable result is that of a creamy, nutty chocolate truffle (gianduja).  Naturally, because I like it so much, Angel Muse has been discontinued.

 

 

Fruitchouli

Photo by Jasmine Waheed on Unsplash

The marriage of inedible (patchouli) and edible (fruit).  Note that the patchouli in this style of fragrance is usually very clean and ‘pink’, i.e., a prettied-up version of the material, stripped of all its brown, grungy earth tones, instead bulked out by tons of white musks and sweet, syrupy Maltol.  This style of fragrance is not my kind of thing, but I have managed to find two examples that I can not only bear but truly love.

 

Visa by Robert Piguet.  In a slightly similar vein to Mauboussin, Angel, and Chinatown, it would probably be more accurate to call Visa a complex, fruited ‘oriental’ with a distinct patchouli character, however since we are no longer saying the O word and since this attempt at curation is focused on patchouli, I am going to place Visa in the fruitchouli category and invite anyone with a problem with that to write me an angry letter.  The fruit notes in Visa are remarkable – white peaches, plums, and pears that smell true to life without smelling the slightest bit loud or fake.  Darkened at the edges by the burnt sugar of immortelle and wrapped up tenderly in a powdery benzoin and patchouli blanket, Visa’s peaches and plums come bathed in autumnal dusk compared to the strobe-lit glare of other fruity-floral fragrances.  There’s a certain winey, ‘stained-glass’ glow to the stone fruit here that makes me ridiculously happy.

 

Everything in Visa feels hushed.  Even the leather note is gentle – a buffed grey suede rather than a twangy new shoe.  The suede and the slight drinking chocolate powder feel in the base offers a gentle cushion for the fruit notes.  Half the pleasure I derive from wearing Visa lies in trying to guess what category it falls into.  It straddles several at once – the fruity-floral, leather chypre, fruit leather, gourmand, and yes, definitely the dreaded fruitchouli.  But far being a brainless fruity, sweet thing that you use to stun the opposite sex into submission, Visa smells poised and a little bit mysterious.

 

 

1969 Parfum de Révolte by Histoires de Parfums.  It’s a fruitchouli, but not as we know it, Jim.  The perfume’s name refers to the sexual revolution occurring in San Francisco in the late 1960s, but by 1969 the once idyllic hippy kingdom that was Haight-Ashbury had already started to be corrupted by hard drugs, homelessness, and unsavory criminal elements.  And in a way, 1969 Parfum de Révolte pays homage to this shift, by grafting an exuberantly sexy, brash fruit top onto a darkly spiced patchouli base.  At first glance, 1969 is all about playtime.  It opens with the biggest, trashiest peach note ever – as crude and as effective as a child’s painting of a peach, smeared with Day-Glo pink and orange paint.  The green cardamom note squirts a gob of Fairy washing up liquid into the pot.  Joined by a dizzying swirl of rose, chocolate, and vanilla, the peach vibrates and expands at an alarming rate until you feel like you are literally walking around in your own personal fantasy ice-cream sundae (one that features liberal helpings of vinyl and boiled sweets).

 

Once the shock and awe of the fruit-vanilla assault dies down, spicier elements enter the picture and quietly anchor the whole thing.  The mid-section is a fruity rose and vanilla spiced with the gentle green heat of cardamom pods and the woody warmth of coffee beans.  The fruity, creamy roundness is still there, but now with depth and presence.  I like 1969 Parfum de Révolte because it gives me both the low-rent pleasure of a Tocade-style plastic rose-vanilla and a darker, more adult finish that rescues it from tipping too far into the gourmand category.  When all analysis is folded up and put away, what’s left is a sexy catcall of a fruitchouli with just the right balance of vulgarity and wit.

 

 

Saying goodbye to:

 

 

Coco Mademoiselle Eau de Parfum Intense by Chanel.   I remember something in the original Guide (Perfumes: The Guide, 2009) about Chanel doing their version of Angel and being surprised (and embarrassed, it is implied) that it was such a success.  But really, what is surprising in people craving a softer, posher, Chanel-ized take on a fragrance so famously jarring?  The essential idea of Angel – sugared fruit clashing with a hoary, masculine patchouli – is a clever one but not that easy to pull off.  Coco Mademoiselle took the basic template and cleaned it all up, turning the dial from heavy, sour and syrupy to luminous, pretty, and girly.

 

The Eau de Parfum Intense version plays it very close to the model for original eau de toilette, i.e., the pinkish, perfumey fruit pop of lychee set alight with a shower of metallic aldehydes, all underlaid with a cleaned-up, fractionated version of patchouli and a shit ton of those bouncy, expensive-smelling white musks that Chanel stuffs into its fragrances.  The only innovation in the Eau de Parfum Intense is the additional warmth and depth of tonka bean, but the differences between this and the original Eau de Toilette are not as significant as, say, the differences between Mon Guerlain and Mon Guerlain Intense, or YSL Libre and YSL Libre Intense.

 

I am letting Coco Mademoiselle Eau de Parfum Intense go because I bought it for all the wrong reasons.  On my way to live in Rome in late 2018 and leaving my (very young) family behind, I saw the pinkish juice in that reassuringly square Chanel bottle in the airport duty free, and between my tears (and copious amounts of snot), I thought, why not make myself disappear by wearing something that will make me smell like practically everyone else.  It was an act of self-effacement and of sorrow.  And it worked.  Coco Mademoiselle became my urban camouflage – the skin I slipped into every morning when I felt most like a freshly peeled egg turned out into the city.  Wearing it, I instantly became one with the faceless mass of women sleepwalking their way through the metro and train systems in the mornings.

 

I stopped wearing it for two reasons.  First, Helen, a tall and lovely but rather intimidating English colleague spun me around at the train station one morning, bellowing in my ear, Oi!  Who’s been wearing my perfume then?  (Sigh.  The inevitable downside of wearing a perfume this popular).  Second, more importantly, since I no longer live in Rome and no longer suffer the absence of my children or husband, I no longer feel the need to punish myself by making myself anonymous.  Wearing Coco Mademoiselle now feels as not-me as it always was.      

 

 

Conclusion

 

Out of the 22 patchouli fragrances discussed as part this second group, I am keeping 14, or roughly two thirds.  Sigh.  You see?  This is why you should never curate in public.  Now normal people will find this blog – maybe, if my SEO is working – and wonder why on earth someone would need this many fragrances, let alone a grand total of 18 of them dedicated to patchouli.  The answer is, of course, that I’m not normal.  And if you’ve made it this far down the page, then maybe – just maybe – you aren’t so normal yourself.    

 

 

Source of samples:  All the bottles reviewed or, ahem, curated here were bought or swapped for by me.  (Using the word curated is supposed to fool both you and me into thinking that this is an artistic endeavour rather than the pitiful result of unrestrained consumption that it really is).  

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash 

Amber Aromatic Chocolate Patchouli Round-Ups Single note exploration Thoughts

Personal Pantheon of Patchouli Perfumes: PART I (Patchouli Bellwethers)

28th February 2023

 

I adore patchouli.  But is it necessary for me to own every iteration?  No, of course not (she said sternly to herself).  My problem is that, because I love patchouli so much, I am as vulnerable to each variant as my Nana is to phone scammers.  One sniff of this intoxicating material and my critical faculties desert me, leaving me with a patchouli collection that is at least 60% redundant.  (The fact that I just admitted to having a patchouli collection is another telling sign of bloat).

 

I think of patchouli fragrances in two broad groups.  First, straight-up patchouli scents, the bellwethers, the patchouli flags in the sand, i.e., scents that exemplify what patchouli is all about.  Within this group, the singular – some might say forceful – character of patchouli nudges the scent in one of three directions: soil, cocoa, or amber.  Second, the group of scents where patchouli is a key player but not necessarily the whole point.  These tend to be more abstract than the first group, and cover a range of derivations, from the rose-patch and patchouli chypre to the aromatic, the boudoir-ish, the peppery, and the animalic.

 

The article you are reading now talks about the first category, namely the more straightforwardly patchouli patchouli fragrances.  This is the group I find most difficult to curate.  I tend to like them all and can argue with myself into the wee hours of the morning about how this one has slightly more geranium or that one a drop more amber, and are therefore worth owning.  But, really, to anyone who only has a broad sense of what patchouli smells like (most of which will come from some childhood association with head shops, hippies, or health food stores), they are much of a muchness.  I wear perfume for myself, so this shouldn’t matter.  But when even I have stopped being able to tell the difference between Patchouli Leaves (Montale), Patchouli (Reminiscence) and Patchouli (Mazzolari) – if I ever could – it is time to pare back.     

      

Don’t mistake this for anything approaching a guide or a compendium.  This is a purely personal approach to cultivation, a paring down to my must-have in each patchouli category I’ve decided there is room for in my collection.  Even the categories are personal.  You might not think it necessary to designate a spot for a rose-patch scent or a pepper-vanilla patchouli, but I do.

 

Further, I am perfectly happy to own more than one fragrance in any one category if I find something beautiful or different that makes that perfume worth hanging onto.  I am not Marie Kondo.  (Apparently, neither is Marie Kondo these days).  All the same, any outright redundancies that I identify will be whittled from my collection and either gifted to family or sold on Basenotes or Parfumo.

 

My objective is to finally start fulfilling the original mandate of this site, which was do as Coco Chanel advised, i.e., to look in the mirror before going out and ‘take one thing off’.   Now, I admit that it’s not great to be referencing anything that a famous Nazi-sympathizer says about style, let alone name a whole website after it, but hindsight is 20:20.   The principle holds true, however.  Rationalize your choices, allowing what remains the chance to shine.  My hope is that by decluttering redundancies, my collection will be reduced to only the ones that make me shiver with pleasure.  After all, if that’s not the point of perfume, I don’t know what is.

 

Soil

Photo by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash 

Cold earth.  Fallen leaves.  Dark, damp soil, unsullied by amber or vanilla or anything that might soften that patchouli punch.  Usually Italian.

 

My pick in this category is Patchouli by Santa Maria Novella (full review here).  This is cold, damp earth, with a snap-crackle-pop of camphor up front.  Menacing, dark, and even a bit sexy, Patchouli is nonetheless thin enough to wear during summer.  Flashes of rose, leaves, and leather mark it out as a perfume rather than an essential oil.

 

Saying goodbye to:

 

Patchouli by Etro.  If I didn’t have Patchouli by Santa Maria Novella, I would hang onto this.  It runs close to the Santa Maria Novella in that it is a rather plain, straightforward patchouli, but worn side by side, the Etro emerges as far greener (mint, geranium), woodier (cypress), and more bitter (artemisia, orange).  I will admit that the ETRO Patchouli is the more evolved and elegant fragrance of the two, as it goes on with less of a roar and its pacing is more even over the course of a wear.  However, as much as I hate to pitch my two favorite Italian houses against each other, the Santa Maria Novella Patchouli remains deeply evocative for me, while the Etro never strikes me as anything more than ‘a nice patchouli perfume’.

 

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

 

Patchouli Antique by Les Néréides.  Despite buying one of the pre-reform bottles from an eBay seller in Italy (back in 2014 when everyone was buying their Les Néréides bottles from the same source), I never quite understood the rapturous praise for this one.  It smells, well, like patchouli, with only that incredibly dusty cedar note to distinguish it from the rest of the pack.  The much advertized vanilla and benzoin finish is disappointingly wan even in the vintage version (their Opoponax, on the other hand, delivers the goods), so if you are feeling saudade for a version that has now melted into the ether of time, don’t worry – you’re not missing much.

 

Patchouli Patch by L’Artisan Parfumeur.  I was never able to perceive the fruity-floral effect of the osmanthus in Patchouli Patch.  In fact, because it wore so similarly to Etro’s Patchouli on me – a wash of cold, dry earth, enlivened here and there by tiny flourishes of herbs and woods – I sold it off not two months after purchasing it.

 

Patchouli EDT by Molinard.  Sour patch, kids.  I had a 2000 edition bottle, the clear glass with the smoky central label.  Though undeniably good value and solidly constructed (like all Molinard scents), the dry, almost bitter herbalcy of Patchouli EDT always smelled ‘old mannish’ to me.  This dusty air of decrepitude stopped me from luxuriating in the minty patchouli that lay at its core (there’s a process of one’s own skin becoming one with patchouli as the day wears on, and that didn’t occur for me here).  It is a solid, unadorned patchouli for those of you who don’t want the distraction of rich ambers, chocolate, or vanilla.  Unfortunately, for me, once these things are stripped away, all I smell is neglect.     

 

Cocoa

Photo by Tetiana Bykovets on Unsplash

Patchouli in the guise of cocoa or chocolate.  Bitter, earthy, oscillating between edible and inedible.

 

Borneo 1834 by Serge Lutens (Dark Chocolate); Coromandel Eau de Toilette by Chanel (White Chocolate)

 

Borneo 1834 was one of the first niche fragrances I ever bought, and one that never fails to trigger a swell of emotion in me.  Its dark, musty, camphorous opening reminds me of the day I bought it – a blustery day in Rome, walking in dark streets before they turned the streetlamps, still slightly drunk from the wine indulgently but unwisely ordered at lunch.  The cocoa note here is the dark dust soldered (with heavy machinery) off a black block of 97% chocolate, turned greenish at the edge by either mold or galbanum resin.  Though there are gourmand nuances fluttering around the periphery – a hint of caramelized labdanum resin perhaps – the overall impression is of a cocoa that is as dry and medicinal as anything found in Chinese medicine.  

 

The dustiness of the cacao reminds me of the shut-up rooms and papers in my childhood home, a decrepit old thing built originally as a forge the year the Irish Famine began in 1845.  All the rooms were cold and damp.  My brothers and I would routinely wear up to five layers of jumpers to survive the winters (we looked like genderless Stay Puft marshmallow people from a distance).  My mum, a teacher, kept all her school papers and homework in a study, where it was left to gently decay over the years.  Borneo 1834 smells powerfully of this noble rot – greenish-blackish spots of damp colonizing reefs of forgotten papers.  Where Coromandel is creamy, luxuriant as a cat, and comforting, Borneo is raw, dry, and confrontational.  I used to think of Coromandel as the better perfume, more wearable – but over the years, my parameters have shifted.  I now think of Coromandel as a wonderful perfume, but of Borneo 1834 as an emotionally intense experience that I cannot imagine ever tiring of.

 

Coromandel Eau de Toilette by Chanel shifts the paradigm on Borneo 1834 by re-using the same basic template, but switching out the dark, musty 97% cocoa for the silkiness of white chocolate and adding a gorgeous rich, antiseptic frankincense note.  The opening has the harsh aldehydic sparkle common to all the discontinued Les Esclusifs eaux de toilette, accentuated by a touch of bitter orange, and for a while, I imagine I am wearing a tweed overcoat kindly offered to me by a man, with whiffs of some male muskiness and sharp cologne still lingering on the scratchy wool.  But the green-brown earthiness of the patchouli soon sinks back into a giant pillow of orris, vanilla, and woods, for an effect that teeters between powder and cream.  What I love about Coromandel is its fatty, warming richness.  It feels generous and kind, the perfume equivalent of drinking a bath-tub-sized mug of hot chocolate spiked with Irish whiskey on a winterish day, or taking off your high heels and feeling your sore feet sink into the folds of a thick cream carpet.  Though it is not as evocative for me as Borneo 1834, and is therefore far more of a perfume than an experience, I firmly consider Coromandel EDT to be an essential part of my collection, as the yin to Borneo 1834’s yang.

 

The post-2016 eau de parfum and 2022 parfum versions of Coromandel are fine (with the balance between bright, fizzy incense and creamy chocolate a little off-center in both), but neither are an adequate replacement for the balanced specialness of the 2007 eau de toilette.  Therefore, when my bottle runs out, I won’t be replacing it.  That means that, within a year or two, I will have to content myself with only one choice in the cocoa category (Borneo 1834).

 

 

Saying goodbye to:

 

Psychédélique by Jovoy.  By God, this is good.  Thick, creamy swirls of dark (but not too dark) chocolate underpinned by a rich, boozy amber that just beg you to sip it rather than spray it on your skin.  The patchouli is clearly patchouli – green, dirty, earthy as hell – but a transubstantiation of sorts occurs as you inhale, transmuting the soil to a fine-boned, liquid mass of chocolate, dried fruit, double cream, and whiskey.  Spray-on truffles by way of Pierre Hermès.  Despite the glut of gourmand notes, Psychédélique veers towards masculine, possibly thanks to the hand of Jacques Flori, who did many of the Etro fragrances, and whose signature (if he may be said to possess one) is the addition of mint, geranium, and carnation to keep even the most ambery of drydowns fresh and lively.  In the end, however, Psychédélique cannot sustain the rich chocolate truffle accord for very long, soon devolving into a pleasant but standard ambery-patch, of which I have shamefully multiple variations.  Therefore, as much as it pains me, I am compelled to vote Psychédélique off the island.

 

 

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

 

Patchouli Noir by Il Profvmo.  I confess that I bought a (secondhand) bottle of this only because the great Darvant of Basenotes fame always spoke so highly of it.  What I liked about it: the mint, the dusting of dark cocoa over (unadvertised) spacey white musks, and the gentle spice of carnation or clove.  What I didn’t like about it: the tendency of the mint and vanilla mixture to come tantalizingly close to the wonderful scent of mint chocolate chip gelato but never quite get there because the accord’s impact is immediately diffused into scads of fluffy white musk.  Sigh.  Cock-blocked by white musk once again.

 

Amber

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

The earthy bitterness of patchouli balanced by the caramelic sweetness of amber (labdanum, benzoin, opoponax, vanilla).  

        

Inoubliable Elixir Patchouli by Reminiscence.  This is my absolute favorite in the ambery patch category, and every time my wandering eye alights upon other ambery-patch scents, and I head off to explore, I return to Inoubliable Elixir with my tail between my legs.  I’m going to call it right now – Inoubliable Elixir is the Joanne Woodward to my Paul Newman.  So, what does the steak of patchouli scents offer that the hamburgers of the category do not?

 

My answer is depth.  Now, the basic structure of the ambery patch template never changes that wildly.  With two such heavy, rich accords – patchouli and amber – there can always be minute variations in pacing (i.e., adjusting the point in the scent’s development at which the amber turns up to dunk the patch in its much-needed bath of hot, resinous caramel) and decoration (spices, floral notes, citrus), but the crux remains that balance between the leafy earthiness of patchouli and the voluptuous sweetness of amber.

 

Inoubliable Elixir trounces its competitors by ensuring that its patchouli and its amber go miles deep in flavor.  The patchouli is raw, pungent, and almost feral, its darkness lifted a little by a bitter, grassy vetiver, a material that sings in the same earthy register as patchouli but inhabits the surface of earth’s crust, when sunshine and water still penetrate.  The basic amber accord has been thickened here with a generous dressing of both tolu balsam, a South American resin that smells simultaneously like liquidambar, crushed ‘hot’ spices like cloves and cinnamon, and melted beeswax candles, and tonka bean, which throws in its roughened, tobacco-ish, almond cream heft for good measure.

 

When the dirty, greenish patchouli smashes into this thick, sexy, red-gold amber, it smells like I wish my skin would smell like naturally.  I wish to live in this smell, roll around in it, have my pores exude it.  Mind you, I own only the original version of this and don’t know how the modern version (in the clear bottle) measures up.  But if it smells anything like the stuff that comes out of my wavy gold bottle, then there is no reason to ever stray, as it is perfection.  It is also, like, €45 for a 100ml bottle.  Patchouli by Reminiscence is similar to Inoubliable Elixir Patchouli but much lighter (think 40% of the full whack of Inoubliable Elixir), so I like to wear that in summer.

 

 

Saying goodbye to:

 

Patchouli by Mazzolari.  Similar to the Reminiscence but with a honeyed labdanum material that gives the patchouli a luscious, smoked toffee dimension.   It is so rich and sweet that wearing it feels like sucking on a never-ending square of butter caramel.  All the Mazzolari perfumes have this almost super-sonic richness to them, an old school sort of intensity that translates to nuclear longevity and sillage, and Patchouli is no exception.  It would make the perfect starter patchouli for someone who isn’t quite ready for the purer renditions of the note, as the patchouli here is not the dank sort that reminds you of upturned earth and musty wardrobes, but rather a sort of outdoorsy, green grass note.  The dry-down is all about the amber, which slowly transitions from a rich, caramelic amber à la Ambre Precieux (minus the lavender) to a dry, almost powdery finish with a spackle of resins remaining on your skin à la Ambre 1144.  However, gorgeous as it may be, Patchouli by Mazzolari essentially skirts too close to Inoubliable Elixir’s overall effect for me to keep it hanging around.

 

Patchouli Leaves by Montale:  The marketing copy for this boasts that the patchouli leaves for this fragrance were first soaked in vanilla extract and then left to macerate for two whole years in an oak barrel.  The top notes, consisting of insanely rich but dry patchouli that has a raisin-like booziness to it, like aged cognac, suggest that the blurb might, for once, be true.  The dark, boozy patchouli is joined very quickly by a buttery, warm vanilla and amber that serve to sweeten the mix.  The final impression is of a warm, golden river of almost drinkable, spiced brown patchouli, boozy vanilla, and thick amber.  The amber is slightly resinous, adding at parts a slight roughness to break up the smooth vanillic undertow and a touch of powder towards the end.  It is as comfortable as putting on a great big woolly sweater over your work clothes when you come in from the rain.  If I didn’t love Inoubliable Elixir so much, Patchouli Leaves by Montale would probably be the next best choice (for me personally) because it is earthier and less syrupy-sweet than the Mazzolari.

 

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

 

Patchouli Nobile by Nobile 1942.  To be fair, Patchouli Nobile is a far more nuanced take on the ambery patch genre than anything else mentioned above.  The familiar tandem of earthy patchouli and caramelic labdanum is elevated in two ways.  First, by way of a fougère-ish accord – a textured umami brew of sandalwood, cedar, geranium (or lemon), and oakmoss – which gives it an unexpectedly masculine dimension.  And second, with a touch of smoke by way of a cured ham guaiacol and a sharp, piney frankincense.  Patchouli Nobile is not the first ambery patch to draft in some frankincense or myrrh for moral support – Patchouly by Profumum Roma also treads this path – but to my knowledge, it is one of the rare modern ambery patch scents that dips a toe so unabashedly into fougère territory.  (This of course makes sense, as patchouli has drafted in as an oakmoss replacer by perfumers for both fougères and chypres since IFRA first started clearing its throat).  

 

However, despite its substantial Italian charm, Patchouli Nobile is too on the shy and retiring side to appeal to me.  It is almost too subtle.  Then there is the issue of the typical Nobile 1942 drydown, which seems to rely on a roster of cheap, slightly scratchy white or woody musks.  I bought it, I wore it, I tried to go steady with it, but it never put out in the specific way I wanted it to.  In the end, wearing Patchouli Nobile made me long instead for the gutsier, older versions of Givenchy Gentleman and L’Instant de Guerlain pour Homme Eau Extrême by Guerlain, both of which do a more convincing job of marrying the earthiness of patchouli to something sweet (amber, cocoa, sandalwood) and something fougère-ish (lavender, coumarin, anise).  I sold my bottle, which wasn’t hard, because this is difficult to source outside of the EU (and sometimes, indeed, outside of Italy).

 

Patchouly by Profumum Roma.  Profumum Roma fragrances are a bit hit and miss for me, so I only tend to buy the travel bottles when I am in Rome, and even then, only after repeated testing.  The ones I like are a little off the beaten track of common praise; for example, I find the funky, feline cinnamon musk bomb that is Fiore d’Ambra (review here) to be far more interesting than the much-praised Ambra Aurea, and Dambrosia, while admittedly cursed with a vile pear hairspray opening, to be a better sandalwood fragrance than the brand’s own Santalum.

 

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that while Patchouly is extremely pleasant, I find that it essentially splits the difference between an ambery patch à la Patchouli Leaves (Montale) and a chocolatey patch à la Psychédélique (Jovoy).  The sole innovation here is that dry, smoky, but also sparkly incense that Profumum shoehorns into their more balsamic fragrances, which is always welcome.  Then again, if I want myrrh, I can always buy some Olibanum (review here) or, if I crave that dry, leathery sparkle of a labdanum-patchouli-incense pairing, I can wear Le Lion (Chanel), which effortlessly outdoes Profumum at its own schtick. (To cut a long story short, I sold my travel bottle of Patchouly).

 

Conclusion

 

My final choices in the patchouli bellwether group are four: Patchouli by Santa Maria Novella for earth, Borneo 1834 by Serge Lutens and Coromandel EDT by Chanel for cocoa (paring back to only Borneo 1834 when my Coromandel runs out), and Inoubliable Elixir Patchouli by Reminiscence for amber.  I am very happy with my choices, and perhaps more importantly, happy to have fewer choices.

 

Source of samples: I either bought or swapped for every single perfume referenced in this article.

 

Cover Image:   Photo by Gwendal Cottin on Unsplash 

All Natural Ambergris Animalic Attars & CPOs Chocolate Civet Collection Cult of Raw Materials Independent Perfumery Mukhallats Musk Review Rose Saffron Sandalwood The Attar Guide Thoughts

Areej Le Doré Exclusive Attar Collection: Thoughts and Reviews

10th January 2023

 

 

Thoughts

 

As of 2023, anyone stumbling onto Areej Le Doré for the first time might be a bit confused about what the house does and what it stands for.  After all, there are regular perfumes but also mukhallats (oils), a series of attars commissioned from traditional attar makers, and now, a series of attars that the brand has distilled or mixed itself.  A newcomer would be forgiven for wondering if Russian Adam is a perfumer, a distiller, an educator, or a patron of traditional attar wallahs.

 

In fact, he wears all of those hats, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes separately.  His evolution from the small, two-person ‘Book of Oud’ oil outfit in London (circa 2013) to the artisan oud distillery of FeelOud (circa 2015) to the luxury French-inspired, but Eastern materials-based operation of Areej Le Doré (circa 2016) is a trajectory worthy of study and admiration.

 

For the perfume enthusiast, though, it is worth taking a moment to unpack the context of any new Areej Le Doré ‘drop’.  The original spray-based perfumes released by the brand in collections of four or five perfumes each year (which normally follow the pattern of an oud, a musk, an ambergris, and a floral) were where most of the brand’s fan base came on board, and where most of the support still pools.  These annual collections see Russian Adam in full-on compositional mode, mixing his own distillations and those of others into precise formulas of bases and accords for a result that reads as perfumey as a Guerlain. 

 

But 2022 saw Russian Adam launch a passion project that was both a stylistic and commercial departure, namely, a series of traditionally distilled Indian attars (which he did not make himself but entrusted to an experienced attar distiller), quickly followed by a set of spray-based perfumes that used traditional Indian attar perfumery as a springboard into something more conventionally perfume-like.

 

The traditional Indian attars (thoughts and reviews here) were Russian Adam with his educator hat on and his perfumer hat off.  Deeply passionate about Indian attar perfumery, he wanted to give his followers (yes, I use the term ‘followers’ deliberately) a set of benchmarks for what a rose (gulab) or jasmine (motia) smells like when distilled into sandalwood in the old Indian manner.  Pure, linear, and delicate, these attars were less perfumes than they were a teaching moment.  If you smelled anything complex in them, it was more because the raw materials themselves are naturally complex than any compositional skill (since traditional attars are distilled rather than composed).  These attars were intended to serve as a primer on the building blocks of ancient Eastern perfumery for the attar-based spray perfumes to follow.  But they were also a gentle reminder to attar enthusiasts that a rose gulab produced laboriously and painstakingly in a deg and bhapka is absolutely not the same thing as the ‘rose gulab’ you can get off IndiaMart for $8 a liter.

 

The spray-based perfumes produced as part of the History of Attar collection (reviews here) were not so much an extension of the Indian attars as they were riffs on a theme.  Here, Russian Adam put his perfumer hat back on and took the more complex Indian distilled attars like shamama and majmua – involving multiple co-distillations, add-ins of choyas and macerations – as the starting point for an artistic exploration that, while still remaining true to the essence of traditional Indian perfumery, were far more in line with the perfumeyness of Areej Le Doré’s core annual collections to date.

 

It is difficult to get a read on how successful a collection is based on online critical reception alone, but if the Basenotes thread is anything to go by, the History of Attar collection was not popular with the core group of enthusiasts who onboarded the Areej Le Doré train for its Siberian Musk and Russian Oud-type output.  Which is not that surprising, really.  If your buy-in to a brand is big, rich, Arabian-style compositions, then there is bound to be some whiplash if one year your supplier brings out a product based on Indian simplicity and purity instead.  On the face of things, we all want the artisan perfumers we support to be free to pursue their artistic passions and vision.  But where the money from one collection fuels the purchase, sourcing, and commissioning of rare raw materials and distillations for the next, the stakes are high indeed.  When a product veers this close to being bespoke, you have to listen to what your customers want, or they take themselves and their wallets off to find another altar of rare essences to worship at.

 

Personally, I think the History of Attar spray-based fragrance collection was one of the brand’s best and most accomplished.  This may be partially due to the fact that I already loved and had studied traditional Indian attars, so understood what it was that Russian Adam was trying to do.  But even from the perspective of a bog-standard fragrance reviewer, Ambre de Coco, Al Majmua, and Beauty and the Beast were not only an incredibly artistic re-imagining of age-old Indian attar perfumery themes but improvements on earlier perfumes in terms of clarity and intentionality.  For example, though I liked Antiquity, I found it impressive due more to the quality of the Cambodi oud oil that had been used rather than for its composition.  Ambre de Coco, which shares something of the same nutty-smutty-smeary texture of yaks in a barn, uses shamama co-distillations of over 50-60 plant-based materials, deer musks, and cocoa to arrive at a picture of warm fur.  It is more complete, a fuller fleshing out of a similar vision, yet conveyed in a less ‘muddy’ or cluttered frame.  I believe that, in time, history will judge this collection more clear-sightedly and it will settle favorably into the deep lines of our experience with Areej Le Doré.

 

So, where does the Exclusive Attar collection fall against this backdrop?  In terms of simplicity and intent, this may be viewed as an extension of the History of Attar attar collection but nudged strongly in the direction of a mukhallat-based style of perfumery by focusing on raw materials more commonly found in Middle Eastern or Arabian perfumery, such as Taifi rose, deer musk, and ambergris.  This is Russian Adam in distiller mode[1], inching back to the interests and preferences of his core fan base but still working in a style that is as minimalistic as the Indian attars.  Wait for the next core collection if you were not a fan of the History of Attar collection or if you prefer the brand’s core collections of spray-based perfumes.  The Exclusive Attar collection is for aesthetes for whom hours of contemplation of the simple beauty of vintage musks or aged ambergris muddled together in a thimbleful of vintage sandalwood is the point of the exercise.

 

To wit, the perfumes in this collection are all rather soft and linear, relying on the inherent complexity of the raw materials to do all the heavy lifting rather than the composition itself.  In other words, if any of these ever come across as perfumey or strong, it is due to some innate characteristic of the material used rather than any conscious arrangement.   This collection would also work for people who just love natural, aged Indian sandalwood because the twenty-year-old sandalwood these attars are mixed into is insanely rich (sometimes even taking over the blend entirely).  But even if you are a big fan of Middle Eastern mukhallats and already own a few examples of the genres explored here, the reasonable price point for high quality stuff like chocolatey vintage musks, sparkling white ambergris, and aged sandalwood oil makes the Exclusive Attar collection a pretty good investment.

 

 

 

Reviews

 

Photo by Roksolana Zasiadko on Unsplash

 

Musk de Taif

 

Beautiful and moving in its simplicity – a gentle blur of Taif roses folded into cushiony musks and creamy sandalwood. It reminds me a lot of Rose TRO by Amouage, which follows a similar model (roses + creamy woods), but with the zestier, more peppery Taif rose from Saudi Arabia rather than with the Turkish rose otto used in the Amouage.  To a newcomer or to anyone with zero perfume experience at all, this will simply smell like the exotic, Eastern ideal of a rosy attar we all hold vaguely in our heads without thinking too much about it.  The aroma here is a classically pleasing one.  The bright, lemony green and black pepper nuances of the Taif rose send sparks flying against the creamy background, which in turn softens the sharp, fiery edges of the rose.  The deer musks here are more of a textural agent than a major contributor to the scent profile – they feather the outer lines of the rose and woods into one fluffy, amorphous mass.    

 

 

 

Civet Bomb

 

Photo by Timo Volz on Unsplash

 

Not only are animalic aromas are not a monolith but how you process them will vary according to individual experience with animalic smells in general.  Smells come to all of us filtered through our childhood memories, mental associations, and biases.   For example, because I worked on a farm, most deer musk smells warm and round and alive to me, even though the animal from whence it came is long dead.  Castoreum always smells dry to the point of being parched, which is why I like it less.  For a long time, I found some force-aged Hindi oils to smell like bile and billy goat, an association I had to work hard to get past.

 

But civet?  The most difficult of all for me, but of course, because these perceptions are so individual, perhaps maybe not difficult at all for someone else.  To me, civet smells really sharp, leathery, and foul, perhaps a bit floral in dilution.  The word that usually comes to mind for me when smelling civet paste is ‘unholy’.

 

But while those properties are definitely present in Civet Bomb, two things save it for me.  First, the civet paste has been co-distilled with rose, meaning that the sharpness of its funk has been softened somewhat.  Second, the co-distillation has accentuated the geraniol content of the rose, so there is this minty-camphoraceous greenness floating over the civet paste note that lifts it and freshens its breath.  Sharpness is exchanged for a lively bitterness, and this is a good trade off.

 

Be forewarned that the animalic quality of civet paste is still very much in evidence, but its inherent foulness comes more from the ‘staleness’ of well-rotted leather or wood or old radiators rather than from the anal secretion of a civet cat.  As with all of these attars, Civet Bomb ends up wrapped in a thick blanket of that buttery old sandalwood Russian Adam is using here.  In the far drydown – if attars can be said to have a proper drydown at all – the lingering civet and sandalwood aroma reminds me of the handsome maleness of Jicky or Mouchoir de Monsieur in their far reaches, albeit much simpler and less mossy-herbal.  

 

 

 

Royal Musk

 

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

 

Like Hemmingway’s writing, Royal Musk boasts a structure that is straight-forward and devoid of frills, yet still manages to wring an imagined wealth of feeling and depth from the one or two elements it contains.   Made from stirring a tincture of a deer musk pod so old and dried out that all the urinous, sharper edges have long disappeared into that old, deep, buttery Indian Government sandalwood oil that the house is using, this is the rare musk-based attar that might be described as delicious.

 

The opening notes are raisiny, with dried fruit mingling with dark chocolate (or actually cocoa) for a slight panforte impression.  There are no animalic notes whatsoever, yet you can tell that it is deer musk, mostly because of the hint of plastic around the topnotes and its subtly furry, velvety texture, but also because if you are patient and quiet enough, you can also smell a hint of booziness from the tincture.  This is really very nice – dark and sensuous, with that cocoa-and-dried-fruit aspect that makes me think of the pleasures of deep winter, like drowsing under a blanket with a cat or watching the light flicker in the coals of a dying fire.   

 

 

 

Royal Amber

 

Photo by Kendall Scott on Unsplash

 

Here, the intensely buttery, savory vintage sandalwood oil initially overwhelms the composition, for once much stronger than the element with which it is paired, here, a piece of white ambergris from the West of Ireland ground to a fine powder.  Sandalwood is usually the quiet portion of an attar, carrying the other natural essences and adding only a depth and warmth that would otherwise be missing.  Here, however, as well as in the other attars, the age of the sandalwood oil used means that its santalols have deepened into this rich, buttery, concentrated essence of wood that asserts its own character and quite forcefully too.  It smells sweet and savory at once and feels as thickly resinous as an amber accord.  As a sandalwood fan, I am not complaining.  However, part of me does wonder if using a younger, less venerable quality of sandalwood would have allowed the other materials, such as this delicate ambergris, to shine through more clearly.

 

The tart, rubbery ping of the wood esters at the tippy top of the sandalwood oil interact with something briny in the ambergris to create an opening that smells momentarily iodic, like those dark iron syrups you take to correct anemia.  Then the rich, sweet sandalwood notes settle in and start spreading their warmth.  For the longest time, I can’t smell the ambergris.  Until you take your nose and attention off it, and then return, and yes, there it is.

 

Smelling white ambergris – the oldest, most aged specimen of ambergris that has been cured for decades in the ocean and under the sun – is a notoriously peekaboo experience.  There is a faint smattering of nuances so ephemeral and fleeting that they tend to exist like flashes of light at the outer edges of your field of smell-o-vision, making you doubt your own nose.  Here, it smells subtly of sweet, sun-dried minerals and salt on female skin and old newspapers and also a little of morning breath.  The darker you go with ambergris, the marshier the mammalian funk.  In Royal Amber, the only truly animalic part of the experience is the hint of halitosis that sometimes appears and sometimes does not, so mostly what you smell here is the sweet, bright, dusty minerals, mica, and salt-encrusted skin.

 

Ambergris is not amber resin, of course, but the resinousness of that buttery sandalwood does ultimately create an amber-like impression.  The powdery salinity of the ambergris gently strafes the ‘amberiness’ of the drydown, lifting and aerating what might otherwise have been very heavy.  A note about the powderiness here, as powder is a trigger word for some.  It is subtle but perceptible, like the gilded baby powder of Shalimar’s ambery drydown, but not as dense as Teint de Neige.  The slight brininess of the ambergris also offsets the powder somewhat, leavening as deftly as it does the buttered sandalwood.

 

Overall, though, this is a subtle, soft scent that is far simpler than my description suggests.  But I do find it gentle kaleidoscope of nuances entrancing.  It is a private sort of experience on its own; as a layering agent, I imagine that it would act like a bellows on a dying fire, breathing new life and dimension into whatever scent you wear on top.  The more perfume-like equivalent to Royal Amber might be Yeti Ambergris Attar 2012 by Rising Phoenix Perfumery.

 

 

 

Zam Zam

 

Photo by Vera De on Unsplash

 

Although this attar is said to be the most complex and perfumey of the entire collection, I personally don’t perceive it as such.  Zam Zam features a fiercely medicinal saffron distillation mixed into the vintage sandalwood used throughout the collection, and oddly, I find that the two materials bring out the worst in each other.  The high-toned wood esters fizzing at the top of the sandalwood accentuate the iodine-like properties of the saffron, so what I mostly smell is a slightly pitchy, medicinal accord that is too astringent to allow me to relax into the experience.  Once the vaporousness of the topnotes settle, the sandalwood heart notes bank everything down in a fine, brown layer of woody warmth, which in turn allows the saffron to play more of its traditional ‘exoticizing’ role for the sweet, buttery amber-woods.  I don’t smell anything particularly floral.  The saffron, a ferociously strong material, is able to keep a vein of something metallic coursing through the creaminess from top to toe, like a flash of electricity.  I find it Zam Zam striking, but angular and again, simpler than its billing suggests.

 

 

 

  

[1] To be precise, Russian Adam made two of the collection’s attars (Civet Comb and Zam Zam) by distilling the materials into the sandalwood oil carrier, while the other three attars (Musk de Taif, Royal Amber, and Royal Musk) were composed by macerating materials in oil and mixing these macerations into tinctures and sandalwood oil to complete the compositions.

 

 

Source of Sample:  Sent to me for free by the brand for review. 

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash 

Amber Ambergris Animalic Aromatic Balsamic Chocolate Independent Perfumery Review Smoke Spice Tobacco Tonka

Sundowner by Tauer Perfumes: A Review

14th December 2022

 

Sundowner is interesting because, despite the much advertized chocolate and orange notes, it gets the salivary glands working without being foody.  The first blast is a foghorn of amber, spices, booze, and veiny pipe tobacco, but there is an undertow of medicinal sourness that smells like wood chips left to ferment in a rusty barrel.  The Tauer signature is strong, namely the rubbery smoke reminiscent of freshly creosote-ed fences, the brash salty amber, the piercing cinnamon, all set against a watery floral note that might be rose.  There are, at least initially, some parallels to PHI Une Rose de Kandahar, minus the fruity apricot conserve, and to the muscular expansiveness of L’Air du Desert Marocain.   

 

But the more I wear it, the more I think Sundowner does something special.  In draping the front end with all this almost fermented, grungy funk, Tauer sets the stage for the tobacco note to emerge through a new curtain rather than the usual one of dried fruit, gingerbread, and vanilla.   And, as it turns out, sour is better than sweet when it comes to carving out the true scent of tobacco leaf because Sundowner features one of the best, most true to life renditions of tobacco that I have ever smelled.  It is briny, rich, tart, and sweet all at once.  How this was accomplished, I neither know nor care.  When you find the spirit of tobacco bottled, you just buy it and let it take you on a magic carpet ride every time.

 

 

Source of Sample: I first sampled this in Bertozzini in Rome when I was back for a month in March this year. I bought a full bottle in November from ParfuMarija in Dublin.  

 

Cover Image:   Photo by Ilya Chunin on Unsplash         

Aromatic Chocolate Green Herbal Iris Leather Masculine Review Smoke Spice Spicy Floral Suede Vanilla Woods

Iris Malikhân by Maison Crivelli

22nd August 2022

 

 

Iris Malikhân is immediately two things.  It is a leather bundle charred in the grate, so smoky and bitter it short circuits to the word ‘chemical’ in my mind.   But equally, it is a thick iris-vanilla cream that fills the room with a haunting sweetness.

 

It took me ages to figure out that second is causally linked to the first.  Unwrap the scorched, blackened skin of the leather bundle, blowing on your fingers for relief, and you reveal the slightly singed, chalky orris roots that lie within, the violence of the char the catalyst to releasing those cocoa-thickened vanilla spores.

 

For six months, I have struggled mightily with the burnt part of Iris Malikhân.  I believed that it was just like any number of other sweetened iris-suede scents out there – Dior Homme Intense (Dior), Bois d’Iris (Van Cleef & Arpels), Vanille d’Iris (Ormonde Jayne) and so on – just not as good or at least more ‘on trend’ in its use of those intrusive liquid smoke aromachemicals that brands like Maison Martin Margiela, seem to be so fond of.  

 

Funnily enough, it was all those upvotes on Fragrantica for Iris Malikhân smelling like Dior Homme Intense that made me revisit the perfume and try to reframe it for myself.  Because that comparison definitely doesn’t tell the full story.  I’ve smelled Dior Homme knockoffs before (like D600 by Carner Barcelona) and there is more artistry and kink in this one’s little finger than in all of those.  The weird Pastis-like note of artemisia or mastic upfront makes this clear.

 

The moment I was able to mentally reclassify the harshness of the opening accord as part and parcel of a leather tanning process – which in and of itself involves chemicals – was when the clouds cleared and Iris Malikhân clicked for me.   Whereas before I was gritting my teeth through one part to get to the other, I now experience the fragrance as a whole, where the tanning chemical front end is key to unlocking and releasing the full fatness of that licorice crème anglaise, infusing it with a hint of anise, bitter chocolate, and woodsmoke.   If I squint, I just about get leather.   Heck, I can sometimes make out the shape of the purported orris root.  But like Dior Homme Intense, Iris Malikhân is so much more than a sum of its parts.

 

 

Source of sample:  Provided free of charge by the brand for copywriting purposes.      

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash 

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Civet de Nuit by Areej Le Doré X Sultan Pasha 

28th April 2022

 

 

When reviewing a collaboration between two well-known figures in the indie-artisan scene, especially two friends with ten years of cross-pollination of ideas between them, the question becomes whether to review the fragrance for the small band of fans of people already intimately familiar with the styles of both Russian Adam and Sultan Pasha respectively, or for the broader group of people who just want to know what the perfume smells like.  Because I think the hardcore indie fans of both brands are well catered to by Basenotes threads here and here, I write this review for anyone who wandered in off the Google high street.  

 

Civet de Nuit is a retro-style floral musk featuring antique civet and a powdery oakmoss and amber drydown.  It is something of a Picasso, cycling through different color periods.  The opening is its Blue Period, a plush, anisic eddy of old-school florals inside the wistful heliotrope-and-violet powder room of L’Heure Bleue (Guerlain), albeit one reimagined through the lens of a dense indie musk – all licked skin, honeyed, damp cocoa powder.

 

In its heart, Civet de Nuit slides into a Yellow Period, dominated by an animalic acacia honey, sandalwood, and ylang combination.  Fans of Montaigne (Caron) will especially like this part.  The ylang in Civet de Nuit does not particularly of banana itself or of banana custard, but more like the animalic, fuel-like gassiness of a banana stem degrading in a brown paper bag.  It is simultaneously sharp and doughy.

 

In its very last stretches, Civet de Nuit enters its Brown Period, where the florals desiccate to a musty, leathery oakmoss (withered brown dust) that recalls the far drydown of both Bal à Versailles (Jean Desprez) and Miss Balmain (Balmain), an indeterminate ‘brown’ woodiness, glimpses here and there of amber resin, and a stale, saliva-ish accord that might be tobacco (but is rather similar to the brackish honey note present in Onda by Vero Profumo).   

 

The civet in Civet de Nuit is actually very subtle, reading more like a powdery deer musk than the jutting floral sharpness of civet paste.  It is likely that, being vintage civet, it has mellowed over time and lost all its urinousness.  Civet de Nuit is a complex fragrance that cycles through multiple stages on the skin, with the last occurring a full 24 hours after the first spray.

 

Honestly, though I think Civet de Nuit smells amazing, I find it hard to categorize because it seems never to smell the same on me twice.  I’m sure that after this review is published, I’ll wear it again and kick myself for missing something really important.  On my first test, I felt sure I had this pegged as a doughy floral honey scent, with the same burnt, yeasty cocoa effect as Sultan Pasha’s own Mielfleurs.   It smelled to me like all parts of honey production – propolis, pollen, chestnut honey, the bee’s arse, the wildflowers in the meadow, the wooden frame.  A hint of Slowdive (Hiram Green), perhaps?  Yet – and this is the head scratcher – there is no honey listed anywhere.  

 

On my first wearing, I also noticed something of the ‘corn masa’ nuance of Seville à L’Aube (L’Artisan Parfumeur) and the floral cream-of-wheat effect of Dries Van Noten (Frederic Malle), Feromone Donna (Abdes Salaam Attar), and Pheromone 4 (Agarscents Bazaar), produced by a combination of a white floral like orange blossom or jasmine with ambergris or sandalwood.  I love this malty, wheaten effect.  It smells granular and salty, like a knob of Irish butter set to melt in a bowl of hot porridge.    

 

On my second test, the powder came out to play in a way it hadn’t previously.  In particular, a thick Nag Champa indie-style musk.  I’d made sure to wear Mielfleurs (Sultan Pasha Attars) on one hand and Civet de Nuit on the other, to see if the floral honey comparison was right.  But while they certainly land in a similar place (crusty artisanal honey, left to stale pleasantly on the skin), the Mielfleurs attar was immediately smoky, thick, and chocolatey, while Civet de Nuit was a diffuse haze of floral powders and stick incense lifting off the skin.  I think I am only able to smell the sparkling lift effect of Civet de Nuit’s aldehydes when placed next to something with no aldehydes at all.  On this test, I thought Civet de Nuit felt particularly gauzy and gentle.

 

On my third test, I wore Civet de Nuit on one hand and vintage Bal à Versailles parfum on the other.  Though they are both retro civety florals, they are completely different fragrances for 80% of the ride.  Whereas Civet de Nuit had felt aldehyded and powdery on previous tests, side by side with Bal à Versailles, it becomes clear that its aldehydes are a mere spritz compared to the fierce Coca Cola-like effervescence of the Jean Desprez perfume.  While both perfumes feature civet as a headlining note, Civet de Nuit cloaks it in a velvety glaze of dark cocoa and a caramel amber sheen, weighing it down in that thick artisanal musk, and setting the temperature dial to an Evening in Paris.  By comparison, Bal à Versailles, despite the 30 years it has on Civet de Nuit, smells like that Fragonard painting of the girl on the swing with her slipper flying off – a sherbety fizz of bright florals, civet, and soap.  Interestingly, however, in the far drydown, Civet de Nuit and Bal à Versailles do seem to converge.  There is a slightly astringent, leathery ‘Miss Balmain’-esque oakmoss element to both, although at times it also smells like a dusty, rubbery myrrh.     

 

Only on my third wearing was I able to identify Civet de Nuit as having a clearly ylang character.  Ylang can be difficult to control in a fragrance because of its assertively fruity-sour nature and gassy, benzene-like properties.  One drop too many and you get something too mature, too 1980s.  Ylang can age a scent backwards like no other.  Here, it is slightly banana-ish (again, more gaseous decaying banana stem than banana custard) but quite a lot of its bitter, leathery nuances have also been left in.  Not a tropical take, therefore, but more along the lines of how Thierry Wasser used ylang in his Mitsouko reformulation of 2017-2018, lending a discreet cuir de Russie accent.  Nonetheless, the ylang does give Civet de Nuit that slightly bitter, perfumeyness that constitutes its retro floral character.  

 

Russian Adam and Sultan Pasha both have identifiable signatures that run through their work – powdery, pungent floral musks in Russian Adam’s case and funky honey-tobacco accords in Sultan Pasha’s – and both signatures are present in Civet de Nuit.  But I hadn’t realized until I tested Civet de Nuit just how similar their styles actually are.  Civet de Nuit fits seamlessly into the Sultan Pasha Attar stable beside Sohan d’Iris and Mielfleurs, both of which lean on an animalic floral honey for their pulse.  But it fits just as seamlessly into Areej Le Doré canon, right beside the musky, Nag Champa floral stylings of Koh-I-Noor and the delicious, powdery funk of War and Peace.

 

On balance, though, Civet de Nuit is far lighter and less bombastically-styled than any of these forbears on either side of the aisle. Elegant and almost soft, I highly recommend it to anyone who not only loves retro florals but the furred weight of the real musks, sandalwood, and oakmoss used in the artisanal indie perfumer scene these days.   

 

 

Source of Sample: A 10ml bottle of Civet de Nuit was sent to me free of charge by the brand for review (I paid customs). This did not affect my review.

 

Cover Image: Photo my own.  Please do not use or replicate without my permission.

 

 

Amber Animalic Balsamic Chocolate Honey Incense Independent Perfumery Iris Leather Oriental Patchouli Resins Review Sandalwood Spice Tobacco Tonka

Sticky Fingers by Francesca Bianchi

19th August 2020

The more I wear Sticky Fingers by Francesca Bianchi, the more I’m convinced it is the Bengale Rouge of the Bianchi line, by which I mean a deliciously thicc n’ fuzzy oriental that’s characterful without being challenging – the much-loved woolly sweater your hand reaches for over the stark, uncompromising Ann Demeulemeester gilet you bought in a factory sale but could never figure out where the arm holes were. The thing these perfumes have in common is their sense of familiarity – they remind you (vaguely) of scents you already know and love. They wear like old friends even if you’ve just been introduced.

Just like Bengale Rouge is a more ‘people-pleasing’ option for people who would never wear Salome, Sticky Fingers is the perfect ‘out’ for people who want to own a Bianchi but find Sex and The Sea or The Lover’s Tale too heavy on the harsh orris-leather accord that has become the Bianchi calling card. That’s not to say that there’s none of Francesca in this perfume, because women with strong personalities always spill over into their art. You’d know, for example, that Sticky Fingers is a Bianchi creation as surely as you can tell Bengale Rouge is a Liz Moores one.

But Sticky Fingers is not going to ruffle any feathers. It is a cosy, feel-good diorama of Francesca Bianchi’s back catalogue with most of the hard edges sanded down and its already duvet-thick volume fluffed up by a mille-feuille of chocolatey patchouli, resins, amber, tonka bean, and vanilla.  

My own sticky fingers hover over the ‘buy’ button on Sticky Fingers mostly for the last two thirds of its life, which is when it turns into that combination of smells perfume lovers know as ‘sweater mélange’ – that sweet, lived-in aroma of a fabric like wool or coat collar or seatbelt exhaling, like a sigh, the breath of multiple perfumes last worn God knows when. Or that lovely and as-individual-as-a-fingerprint nuclear cloud that rushes up at you when you open a box of your favorite perfumes or cosmetics.

To wit, Sticky Fingers smells like the heady, third-day fug imprinted on my bathrobe after several days of wearing some of Francesca Bianchi’s other perfumes; especially The Dark Side with its honeyed resins, The Lover’s Tale with its sharp leather, and Lost in Heaven for its simultaneously urinous and sherbety civet-iris accord that is practically the Bianchi DNA. Yet Sticky Fingers is much softer and gauzier than any of these. It’s like all of these perfumes mingling together and blown in at you through an air vent from another room.  

Digging down into the detail, there are muffled echoes of something of the choco-wheat-cereal notes from indie perfumes of the last few years (like Ummagumma by Bruno Fazzolari, Café Cacao by En Voyage, or Amber Chocolate by Abdes Salaam Attar), but also a spicy tobacco gingerbread (Tan d’Epices), and a thick ‘white’ note like sandalwood creamed with benzoin (Santal Blush perhaps). I sprayed some Ta’if (Ormonde Jayne) over the tail end of Sticky Fingers once and could have sworn to the presence of smoky, caramelized marshmallow (Amber Absolute by Tom Ford). To be clear, Sticky Fingers doesn’t smell like any one of these perfumes. It’s just a delicious, jumbled up funk of rich woody or resinous orientals that have been worn at some point in the past two or three weeks, and have left an indelible, if undefined, impression.

In essence, Sticky Fingers is a patchouli perfume. But through a glass darkly. Think of the patchouli as the soloist leading the charge in a huge orchestra, drawing in supporting riffs from the strings and the bass until the music swells up from a hundred different sources, creating an incredibly rich, harmonious sound that fills all the air pockets in the room. The patchouli starts out solo, a musty, stale, and fruity rendition of pure earth. But almost immediately it calls in the high notes of the string section, in the form of those acidulated orris-leather tones of the Bianchi DNA, and to counter that, the bass tones of grainy tobacco leaf, shredded into tiny pieces and soaked in a glass of cold, floral-anisic Chinese tea. This combination of notes and ‘sounds’ has the effect of roughing up the patchouli, turning it into a hessian cloth accord of earth, stewed tea, and tobacco, back-lit by the yellow streak of ureic civet-iris that runs through Bianchi’s work like battery acid.  

This opening act is attention-catching but, focused on two or three accords that ride bullishly over everything else, it feels like we are all waiting this part out until the quieter, richer sound of the rest of the orchestra can spot an opening and rise to fill it. Eventually this happens, a whole chorus of dusty spices and sandblasted resins and micas ‘blooming’ in unison, softening the sharp edges of the Bianchi iris and blurring the outline of the patchouli. If I like the scent thus far, then I start to love it now, just as the central accord thickens up like a custard with the addition of tonka, sandalwood, vanilla, and tons of sparkly resin. This is when the perfume becomes a comforting ‘sweater mélange’.

The older the get, the more I enjoy scents that envelop me in a billowing cloud of warm, toasty goodness powered by the natural expansiveness of their resins, flowers, or sandalwood, as opposed to the fake radiance of Ambroxan or the forced volume achieved by over-spraying.  The most naturally ‘wafty’ fragrances in my arsenal are the big balsamic orientals like L’Heure Bleue parfum (Guerlain), Opus 1144 (UNUM), Bengale Rouge (Papillon), Coromandel (Chanel), Farnesiana (Caron), and Taklamakan (777 SHL), which wear like a delicious ‘gold-brown’ scent cloud that moves with me, like Pig-Pen from Peanuts. Sticky Fingers – welcome to the fold.

Source of Sample: Free with my purchase of Under My Skin from the Francesca Bianchi website.

Photo by Dmitriy Frantsev on Unsplash

Ambergris Animalic Aromatic Balsamic Chocolate Independent Perfumery Review Sandalwood Smoke Spice Woods

Eris Parfums Mxxx.

7th February 2020

Mxxx. by Eris Parfums is an almost embarrassingly sexual scent – the result, I imagine, of an experiment to cross breed the silvery, driftwood aroma of a far-off beach bonfire with the boudoir-ish scent of smoked butter, incense ash, and the baritone subwoofer of 88% cocoa powder.

I really liked the original Mx., which, with its creamy-spicy-woody character (à la Cadjméré by Parfumerie Generale), was a bright and casual affair. The innovation here, with Mxxx., is that Barbara Hermann and her perfumer for Eris Parfums, Antoine Lie, decided to up the stakes by adding a large dose of 7% natural ambergris tincture, cacao from Trinidad, and hyraceum tincture to the formula. The difference this has made to the bones of the perfume is striking. It’s not just that the natural ambergris has made the perfume warmer, siltier, more animalic – which it has – but that the furniture has been rearranged in a way that makes me think it’s another room entirely.

Each time I wear Mxxx., it overwrites my memory of the original a little bit more. I remember the original smelling like sandalwood, if sandalwood was made of pine, milk, hazelnuts, and chocolate oranges – sexy in a tousled, white cotton t-shirt kind of way. Mx. was firmly unisex, or just ever so slightly feminine-leaning, and clearly a perfume for daylight hours.

Mxxx., by contrast, is a smeary creature of the night and more emphatically masculine. The bright chocolate-orange sandalwood of the original has been replaced with a smoky butter note, which is held in place by an quasi-fecal cedarwood with bitter, chocolatey undertones.

In its total effect, Mxxx. still smells like sandalwood to me, but a much earthier, more aromatic version than the milky ‘saffron orange’ sweetness of the original. The butter-cacao undertone here is unctuous but roughened with a kitten’s lick of grey sea salt that catches at your throat and stops the scent from smelling overtly gourmand. The incense, subtle spices, and the musky cedarwood give the scent a dry, gauzy texture, like ash from a wood fire blown into the air.   

Animalic? Technically, yes, I suppose it is. But Mxxx. isn’t one of those fragrances that sacrifices smoothness or wearability at the altar of animalic authenticity. I think we’ve all smelled scents where castoreum smells like the pissiest, driest, most urine-soaked piece of leather imaginable, or where their natural ambergris smells alarmingly like halitosis, horse dander, and low-tide harbor. While I admire those kind of scents for pushing boundaries, and for testing our tolerance for the unabridged ‘realness’ of animal secretions at their rawest, they sure as hell can be a trial to wear.

Give me something like Mxxx. any day. It smells great, and sexy in a skin-like kind of way, but never like something that’s playing a game of chicken with me. It really isn’t any more challenging or animalic than, say, the full-bodied, all-original-woods-and-civet-intact lasciviousness of 1980s-1990s perfume, like Samsara (Guerlain) or Ubar (Amouage) or Creed’s fantastic Jasmin Impératrice Eugenie (not that Mxxx. smells like these, particularly; I’m just referring to a similar ‘generosity’ in their proportions of thick, pongy-sandalwoody-French-perfumeyness).   

The smoked butter note is, for me, the primary animalic element. It smells a bit fatty and skin-like, at first, before the smoke and ashy woods arrive to dry it all out. The smoke here is subtle, rising in curlicues up from the bottom of the scent, and sifting its way lazily through the salty, melty cocoa-butter of the topnotes. This is not the strong smoke of cade or birch tar, but rather the rubbery, sweet smoke of the tire leather in (vintage) Bvlgari Black.

It’s a genuinely sexy perfume, this minxy Mxxx., but not in an immediately obvious way – far more Hot Priest from Fleabag, let’s say, than the knowingly calculated (and boringly obvious) head-tilt of George Clooney.

Source of sample: Barbara Hermann very kindly sent me a sample to test (with no obligation to write about it), for which I am very grateful.  I believe that wearing it has increased my sexual attractiveness by about 156%, but I work with scientists, so I should say that there’s no real evidence to support that figure outside of my own imagining.

Photo by Pablo Merchán Montes on Unsplash

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