This is 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.
Dior Privée Bois Talisman
A disappointing effort from a perfumer who created the stunning Eau Noire for the same house – a thin burnt sugar-over-firewood effort that is briefly attractive before quickly unravelling into a mess of scratchy woody-ambery aromachemicals. The scent of Bois Talisman is what hangs over the Dior Privée concession nowadays, by the way, tainting the air with its bro juice grossness. Though I’m sure it’s not aiming for it, Bois Talisman lands in the same general area as By The Fireplace and if that’s your thing, fine, but not sure you want to be paying Dior Privée prices for it.
Amouage Lilac Love
Lilac Love sends me in a state halfway between pleasant confusion and mild panic. Something about the opening – green, syrupy, a bit sharp – made me think of the pungently honeyed booze notes that presage all of the scents in the Tom Ford ‘Orchid’ series, before giving you the come hither into a sultry but uneasy bath of flowers, fruit and chocolate. I think that if you like Velvet Orchid, say, you will find its plusher, posher sister in this Amouage.
The sweet, almost crunchy wateriness of the lilacs (and their honeydew melon-honey centre), though gorgeous on their own merit, just don’t mesh well with the backdrop of powdered Nesquik vanilla. I feel the same way about the cucumber-melon-cocoa clash in Black Orchid – striking, even sexy, yes, but also kind of gross and stomach-churning.
True to form with the newer, post-Chung Amouage perfumes, which pander too cynically to the modern craze for tasty-smelling gourmands, the drydown is eventually less food-like and more acceptably perfumey. Guidance has much the same trajectory. The boozy almond notes unwrap themselves into a more almond lotion type of texture, both doughy and milky, and the final resting place for all of this is a cozy floral powder accord that feels like an expensive dusting powder. This part I like – powder fiend that I am – but given that two-thirds of the ride is overwhelmingly dense and blobby, this is a pass.
Rhapsody by LV Parfums
I have smelled almost all of the LV Parfums fragrances, and while uniformly pleasant, serious perfume wearers should remember that certain brands, like LV, design and market their perfume as ancillary products to their leatherwear, and are really no more than a revenue diversification channel in section C of the business plan. And so while Rhapsody is the only perfume in the LV Parfums range I’ve smelled that feels like it makes an effort to rise above a merely pleasant smell, remember that the €510 you’re slapping down on the counter for this is fuelling LV’s profit margins rather than a rare chunk of white ambergris or wild 1970s Cambodi oud, or the fees of a master perfumer who emerges from his cave once a year on the spring equinox to create one single, special perfume.
I forgot to mention that Rhapsody is part of LV Parfums’ ‘exclusive’ sub-range and costs almost twice as much as the perfumes such as Ombre Nomade, Afternoon Swim, Pacific Chill, etc. Its shiny silver sculpture-as-bottle-cap broadcasts even more loudly, baboon’s-arse-like, a message of wealth and status to the other, smaller monkeys in the room.
It does smell great, though. It is a big, chaotic rush of bitter, perfumey flowers – soapy muguet, a whole kitchen sink’s worth of small white flowers, a sunntanned banana ylang, a touch of hyacinth maybe with its oily greenness, with a dry patchouli and vetiver base for that essential grounding element. It comes off a little Diaghilev-lite, a modern mall wall of sound up front and an almost creamy-faecal-scalpy earthiness in the base – costus or civet perhaps – to mimic the slightly raw, grass-fed lactic quality of oakmoss.
Intense, serious, and quite piercing, Rhapsody presents a cacophony of notes that makes you frown rather than smile – there is no whimsy here. But for all you’re forced to study it, turn it over in your head, trying to find where each thread ends and begins, you also get a sense that it is more crowded and ornate than it is deep. This could have been a wild ride but in the end, it is chaste, a little too self-serious, and both matronly and sleazy, like Karla Homolka in a high-necked blouse in court. And if that’s the effect I’m chasing, then I could get there with a spritz of other green floral chypres I am equally unenamoured of and yet inexplicably own, like Eau de Soir or Odalisque.
Mixed Emotions by Byredo
A blackcurrant-flavoured Vicks throat lozenge, complete with that wintergreen edge that probably doesn’t even have a therapeutic effect but never fails to remind you that you’re under the weather and ingesting this out of necessity, not choice. Underneath the clear, hard candy gloss of this topnote lurks a cat piss note so sharp and winey you are right back in those abandoned lots at the corners of your estate where the weeds and stray cats have colonized every inch of the floor space.
Later, much later, and some might say, too late, a pleasant Ombre Leather-like suede accord comes in – no tea, mind, just the plainest of all glove box suede and new mid-range car upholstery. The catpissy blackcurrant note lingers like a feeling of malaise, developing an unpleasantly BO-ish nuance that only adds to my distress. Though unhappy to have ceded so much skin space to this horrid perfume during a lunch break, I am happy to have smelled it, as it had been occupying quite a large part of my imagination for some time.
Source of Sample: Various airports and department stores
Cover Image: Photo by Phil Aicken on Unsplash
