I’ve decided to start a series where I document my impressions of perfumes I get to try on my way through airports or blitzing through a capital city department store on a lunchbreak. Low to zero stakes sampling, in other words, with the focus on quick first impressions rather than an in-depth exploration (though on occasion, I might be interested enough to order a sample or decant to acquaint myself more thoroughly). Given that I regret 90% of my samples, I think it is useful to smell as broadly and as ‘shalllow-y’ as possible when I can.
Amouage Guidance
Synaesthesiastically, I experience Guidance as a whirl of the vinyl-shiny, plasticky colours on a 1930s movie like the Wizard of Oz, but aroma-wise, it’s more like what I imagine the sleepover/makeover scenes from Grease would smell like – Bazooka gum, acetone nail-polish remover, Aquanet Super Hold, and handfuls of marshmallow fluff and brightly-coloured hardboiled candies like pear drops and rhubarb-and-custard sweets.
It is so fruity and creamy and loud that I immediately grasp the appeal to young women still on the prowl. It projects enormously and indiscriminately, invading people’s personal space with its confident message of, here I am, the Queen – bitches, part the crowds and play the bugles!
Of course, it is by Quentin Bisch. Guidance follows the same rulebook that made his Delina such a hit, being equal parts piercing and creamy, flirting but never quite touching the pitch of a headache, working up your arm and into you to the point where every sensory node, every synapse is flooded by that loud, creamy, fruity, rosy, nutty smell that is no longer just a smell but also physical touch and a bright white light mushrooming at the back of your corneas.
I absolutely hate it until a minor détente later on when a quieter, icing sugar rose-sandalwood moment arrives, by which point, I convince myself that this is quite pleasant actually. Until the next time I spray this on myself and the cycle begins again, and I curse my weak mind for falling victim to the Stockholm Syndrome lure of this awful but also occasionally quite beguiling perfume.
Dior Privée New Look 2024
Absent the former glories of the now discontinued or badly reformulated versions of Eau Noire and Eau Blanche, I don’t think much of the Dior Privée line these days. It produces really nice smelling stuff like Vanilla Diorama and Gris Dior, but nothing truly innovative or interesting. Solid if slightly boring masstige perfumes for people with more money than sense, in other words.
But oh man, New Look 2024 is a blast. Re-purposing the name of New Look 1947 (Dior is running out of heritage names and year numbers more quickly than Chanel, so they had to recycle), a vaguely abstract white floral that nobody was ever going to miss, New Look 2024 actually honours the original spirit of the controversial Christian Dior New Look collection of 1947 better than the New Look 1947 perfume did.
Let me say plainly why – the New Look collection took post-war clothing for women away from the wartime austerity years, with their angular, streamlined discretion into an almost cartoonishly, fetishistically femme direction, complete with cinched in waists, exaggerated deep necklines, and skirts so full they extravagantly required metres and metres of fabric that only the truly rich could afford.
2024 New Look opens with such a violent overdose of aldehydes that the impression is immediately of a jubilant, utterly triumphant, two-fingers-up-to-austerity-measures jeroboam of the most obscenely expensive Champagne available, mixed with the scent of clothes washed in laundry detergent dosed in staggering amounts that you just know that all the ration rules just went out the window. I love it – it is fizzy, curvaceous, but unsweet, like soda with all the bubbles intact but the sugar surgically removed. It is almost minerally salty in its absence of sweetness.
This accord dovetails seamlessly with an equally effervescent but also sooty, serious frankincense note. I understand that Dior – more likely Kurkdjian himself – is trying to re-purpose and pervert Chanel No. 22 in the more streamlined shape of one of the New Look skirts (steampunkt in spirit rather than romantic or classical). I think I get what he is doing.
And luckily, though New Look 2024 follows the general lines of No. 22 in layering aldehydes on top of church incense and a warm floral-amber base, Kurkdijan’s skill makes it feel more like a new shape in the air than a homage. It feels like a study of the separate facets of champagne and soap flakes and incense than a cohesive and therefore more abstract perfume, as the Chanel is. If anything, it reminds me of Heeley’s quiet, ethereal, linen-fresh take on incense that is Cardinal. But only in parts, only really when the frankincense takes centre stage.
Weirdly, I don’t experience the base as amber, just as a slight warmth enlivened with a salty driftwood nuance. I suspect that parts of New Look 1947 are molecular and therefore ‘new’ also in terms of captives or strange building blocks of molecules devised in a lab. This is not my usual thing at all, but I can’t help be fascinated by a perfume that not only honours a 1947 clothes collection without feeling vintage or dated, but also captures some of that collection’s strange, shocking, super-exaggerated view of femininity that threw the rulebook on how women should dress and be out the window.
Le Labo Eucalyptus 20
First off, I feel the urge to warn you know that the words in this scent’s title that aren’t ‘Le’, ‘Labo’ or the number 20 is one of the words that I have trouble spelling. Anyway, Eucaluputs 20 smells great and also a bit redundant if you own any of these Comme des Garcons perfumes: Hinoki, Avignon, Black, maybe even a little bit of Kyoto. Euclptus opens with its titular note, except it’s more camphor than straight up eucalyptis, a bit wet and smoky and green, reminding me a little of the camphor in Feu Secret (Fzotic) or Bohea Boheme (Mona di Orio). I love this note because it always make me think of hiking through evergreen forests, fresh air, and far-off curlicues of delicious smoke, like when someone throws pine needles on a campfire.
Underneath this camphor or euycalptous, there is a fantastically dry, smoky frankincense lifted into the air by a shower of sparkly Coca Cola-ish aldehydes, which definitely gives off a very Avignon or Black (Comme des Garcons) vibe, to the point where they are eerily similar. About fifteen minutes later, I feel this accord tilting more definitively in the direction of Black than Avignon, as the bubbly soda pop aldehydes fade away and a sooty, smoky accord takes over, that nubbin of pine-like frankincense having burned all the way to ash in the censer.
For the rest of the ride, I am convinced that Le Labo Euocapliptus is a dry, smoky-hoary, whiskey-ish vetiver, with a scratchy wool sweater texture that is almost identical in structure and aroma to the wonderful Vetiver Insolent (Miller Harris), a perfume I wear an awful lot and with which I am therefore intimately familiar. It means that the slightly abrasive woody note (Iso E Super?) that bothers me in parts of Vetiver Insolent also bother me here, in the case of Eucapyptus 20.
But I have come to terms with its use in Vetiver Insolent, because I admit that its scratchy, cedar-adjacent obnoxiousness is essential to recreating the rather irritating ‘steel wool’ volatile esters that are naturally occurring in real cedarwood and vetiver distillates. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not really a deal-breaker for me in Eucalptus 20 either. That said, my need for this sort of sour-smoky-woody incense accord is more than adequately fulfilled elsewhere, so I am happy to sample this and move on.
Sources of Samples: Tested in various locations but primarily in Addis Ababa airport and Brown Thomas in Dublin.
Cover Image: Photo by Arthur Podzolkin on Unsplash
