My particular type of crazy is that not only do I buy fragrances for a fantasy self that lives in a parallel universe but also in honour of a past self that actually existed, in some sort of weird attempt to capture, if not my youth, then a positive memory of who I was – always slightly improved, of course – in that timeline. A case in point is 10 Corso Como by 10 Corso Como, which I bought to remind myself of the thinner and more confident Claire who lived in a city near Milan between 1997-1998 and was always hanging around the 10 Corso Como store and fashion outlets at the weekends.
I didn’t have much back then, but man did I have swagger. Apart from the Armani suit I picked up for 80,000 Lira (€80 in today’s money) and was slim enough to fit into exactly twice, the purchase I was most proud of was a squat glass frog I bought on sale from 10 Corso Como because it had a chip in the base. I suppose that, technically, it was a paperweight, but with no papers in my bare little room in a Bergamo garret (I may be exaggerating a little), it functioned purely as an objet d’art that elevated my existence by winking at me from my pile of books that also functioned as my bedside table.
Jesus, sorry, this review is beginning to sound like those stories on recipe blogs you’re forced to wade through to get to the recipe you Googled just to get the cooking time on a bone-in pork shoulder.
Anyway. 10 Corso Como smells like the 1990s to me, a sleek mishmash of wood, spices, vetiver, rose, and incense that smells like what you’d imagine a Calvin Klein model, a glossy magazine, or a concept hotel smelling like – minimalist, sort of clean-spicy, sweetish, and lots of air and space between the molecules.
I get a lot of that pickled lumbar that passed for sandalwood back then, making me think of a proto-Santal 33, a peppery-fizzy incense that feels less liturgical than it does sherbetty, and enough grassy sourness from the vetiver to hint at the exotic wood they were just beginning to market as ‘oud’. It smells grey and chic, like a finely cut bolt of mulberry silk. There is some relation to Black Cashmere, Wenge, Chaos and its ilk by Donna Karan, as well as to the pale, watery spiced rose of both Marni and Costes. Years later, Black by Puredistance would pick up pretty much the same thread.
In other words, pleasant but not unique, and certainly nothing so groundbreaking that I’d miss were it to go. I’m probably stuck with it, though, because my bottle came with a faulty sprayer, which means that applying it has become like accompanying an elderly male relative to the restroom and never knowing when the dribble will become a spurt.
Cover Image: Photo by Anastasia Eremina on Unsplash
Having chosen a career path that sees me moving country every four years or so, it is no longer feasible for me to own a large collection of fragrances. So, in advance of my next move, I’m on a mission to evaluate the perfumes in my collection to understand if they are essential or if I can let them go. I guess I’m finally getting around to fulfilling the premise of the ‘take one thing off’ in the blog’s name. Next up is Fêtes Persanes.
Having chosen a career path that sees me moving country every four years or so, it is no longer feasible for me to own a large collection of fragrances. So, in advance of my next move, I’m on a mission to evaluate the perfumes in my collection to understand if they are essential or if I can let them go. I guess I’m finally getting around to fulfilling the premise of the ‘take one thing off’ in the blog’s name. Anyway, first up is Gris Dior by Dior.
I enjoy Gris Dior more as a rosier, flintier reincarnation of the Bottega Veneta for Her suede than I do as a perfume in its own right, which is perhaps a little unfair and also doesn’t really explain why I felt the need to own both. The reason I do own Gris Dior is that I have the unfortunate, and ruinously expensive, habit of buying perfumes that feed into the idea of a fantasy me, and the version of fantasy me that Gris Dior panders to lives in an airy apartment in Bordeaux, retired, child-free, sometimes also husband-free, and with enough time and resources to visit art galleries and music recitals.
Indeed, half my collection can be blamed on my delusional belief that buying perfumes to suit the hundred or so other selves of my ID floating around out there is a perfectly sane way to scratch the itch of the road less travelled.
To be fair, Gris Dior does feel very French to me. But in a naturalised French citizen way rather than girls on Instagram with their fresh tan bleating on at you about the seven secrets to French Girl chic in a thick Lancashire accent. It is elegant without trying too hard. Despite a brief pop of a candied rose at the top, Gris Dior is a muted greyscale sketch of a rose-patchouli, all stretched out and sparse, almost see-through in its architraved elegance. French in a ‘I threw everything out except for this one linen shirt that is perfect in every way and yet I also don’t fetishize inanimate objects such as pieces of clothing so it’s not that deep’ way.
Gris Dior is shimmery in its minerality, its rose almost salty on the tongue. The patchouli suede drydown is all Bottega Veneta for Her, meaning dry, dusky and autumn-coded, slightly chypre-ish, but much airier in the Dior version. I reckon I could sell it without losing part of my soul. The Bordeaux version of me would survive.
Cover Image: Photo by Kaishin | OneLushLife on Unsplash
Man, this thing is so savoury and muscular. The arid, burnt-hay aspects of immortelle are really what are brought to the fore here, with none of the material’s usual maple syrup or curried wetness along for the ride. The opening is vegetal and green in a stock-cube kind of way that almost reads as a little oniony until a gorgeous Turkish rose moves in to pretty things up.
Well, I say pretty things up but that probably implies a dominant female energy that just isn’t here. What I really mean to say is that the rose hydrates and softens the throat-catchingly dry texture, adding a winey depth that is much needed beyond all that crisp sunny hay. Though the rose brings some pulp to the texture, and the end result is quite rich, I would call this a sinewy perfume rather than a jammy one. The coffee and sandalwood lend a bitterness I associated with toasted wood or spent coffee grounds – nothing gourmand about those notes at all. Everything here seems to pull in the same direction, and the result is a harmonious study in late-August copper, coffee, and burnt sienna colours.
I admire it and think it’s one of the most interesting fragrances I’ve smelled this year. However, I am not rushing out to buy it. For one, I think that two perfumes I already own, namely Afternoon of a Faun (État Libre d/Orange) and Santal Nabataea (Mona di Orio), come close to creating a similar effect – the first a pretty much note for note take on the rose-immortelle theme, the second a mirror of the rich coffee and sandalwood ‘desert-like’ effect I find in Contre-Jour. Even Beloved Woman by Amouage, another one I own and like, has a similarly musky-spicy rose-immortelle thing going on in the drydown. And, to be honest, if I were adding another arid immortelle to my collection, it would probably be Le Mat by Mendittorosa. All to say that my immortelle bases are well and truly covered, and that if you own any of the perfumes I’ve just mentioned, well, then yours probably are too.
The other thing that gives me pause is that sweaty, vegetal opening. I love immortelle for its range of nuances, from syrupy to spicy to hay and fenugreek tea and so on. But that the savoury ‘stock cube’ aspect is something I personally find difficult. It is as much a presence here in Contre-Jour as it is in Patchouli Luxe by Comme des Garcons, where the salt-and-pepper undertones of immortelle are accentuated by white pepper and a fenugreek-soy sauce accord that, while impressive, manages to turn my stomach a bit. However, if you don’t own any good immortelle perfumes, love savoury accords in perfumery, and are interested in the yin and yang balance of the traditionally masculine notes (hay, wood, spice) with more traditionally femme ones (rose, sandalwood), as interpreted by one of the best perfumers working today – Annick Ménardo – then Contre-Jour is probably a worthwhile investment.
Cover Image: Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash
Future Memories by Byredo treads a path familiar to many of us watching the brand over the past few years, in that it gives you just enough wow factor in the first thirty minutes to frog-march you to the cash register before petering out into a synthy mess on your arm once the damage to your wallet has been done.
The opening truly is lovely, with a spiced fruit topnote (no berries to my nose) that recalls a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice mixed with cinnamon and cloves, but an upbeat summer version of what you might be imagining is a Christmassy affair. When this meets the vanilla, it softens into an orange blossom accord redolent of marshmallow fluff stirred through with a fruit cordial of sorts. It almost gets into Love, Don’t be Shy territory, but for a wheaten-biscuit texture pushing through the creaminess that sets it apart. Not a caramelised biscuit – nothing at all like Biscoff – but toasted and grainy, like the roughened surface of a McVities Digestive.
And honestly, it’s the different textures at play in Future Memories that make this really quite attractive at first. The vanilla is that plasticky doughball vanilla that I remember from Gucci Rush and that Gucci brown bottle perfume whose name I can never remember. If you partied in the nineties, you’ll remember this as the scent soundtrack of shiny-vinyl purses and wonder bras and unwise decisions made late at night in dodgy nightclubs.
But thirty minutes on and the only genuinely unwise decision you’ve made, you realise, is falling for the empty promise of this perfume’s hype train. Let me spare you the suspense – Future Memories unravels rather quickly into that cheap feeling, as-glassy-as-a-boiled-sweet amber base that has been consistently stuffed into so many perfumes since Grand Soir. To my nose, this type of ‘amber’ smells more like a room in which broccoli has been boiled than resins or anything even vaguely associated with nature. Hate to see it coming in an otherwise good perfume. It gives me a glimpse of a ghastly emptiness at the core of the perfume, eating away at any soul or imagination it may have initially possessed, like The Nothing from The Neverending Story.
Cover Image: Photo by Shayna Douglas on Unsplash
I’ve just returned from a month in Abu Dhabi, and while I left a very cold and blustery Ireland, I seem to have arrived back in time to witness the kind of spring weather that this country does best – fresh, sunny, with greenery exploding in the hedgerows and fields. It is still cold as hell at night, though, so I find myself turning to fragrances that are bitter and herbacious, but mingled with enough resins, fruit, or wood to kick in that balmy warmth I still crave. These below are doing the trick.
Having worn and lived with my samples of Oud Liaisons and Patchouli d’Atlas, two of the four additions to the Ormonde Jayne Four Corners of the Earth collection (called ‘Four Corners of the Earth Reimagined‘), for about a week now, I can say two things.
First, these perfumes are a significant departure – stylistically and compositionally – from the original collection. Whereas the original collection employs a rather Western, or French, approach to mostly Eastern tropes (oud, tobacco, osmanthus), complete with a semi-classical structure and plenty of space and air between the molecules, this collection smells more narrowly Arabian in both idea and execution.
Number two, these two perfumes demonstrate that it is possible to build the Giga-Chad of Gulf style perfumery without drowning them in the obnoxiously chemical heat signatures of most examples of this style. In other words, you will smell potently and diffusively like the Crown Prince of the UAE, phone-flipping swagger included, but in an ultra-posh, refined manner. These do not exist in the same universe, let alone shelf, as any of the Lataffas.
Oud Liaisons is a thoroughly weird perfume. It smells pungently of real oud oil right off the bat, with almost none of the other supposed topnotes (rose, lemon, pink pepper) showing up, except for an odd licorice note that smells more like a medicated boiled candy than the anisic gumminess of licorice rolls. Though the opening is compacted and a bit overwhelming, in the air, it manages to create a scent trail of something softly rounded and suede-ish. Up close and on the skin, though, it takes time to cycle through some less attractive phases that smell a little like ureic acid or dried honey soaking through the sawdust floor of an indoor riding ring. It is horsey and acid in equal part.
Close your eyes, though, and it no longer smells of pee and woodchip, but of those expensively peaty Scottish whiskeys, like Laphroaig. The whole perfume, in fact, is subject to the power of suggestion. Once the cacophony of notes loosen a little, it begins to smell of clay, of horse blankets, and of old wood. Later, a hint of candied rose petal emerges, and, unless I am hallucinating, even something one might think of as marshmallow fluff. In the very late drydown, though, this candied accord evaporates entirely, revealing a latexy myrrh. Inexplicably, though composed of individually ugly and brutalising notes, Oud Liaisons manages to smell regal. This is a successful expression of the idea of oud, rather than a faithful (and inevitably poor) copy of the raw material itself.
Patchouli d’Atlas is possibly the strongest (and most masculine-presenting) perfume I have ever smelled that didn’t also raze my nose to the ground with brutish woody ambers. Make no mistake, the woody amber are there in ample quantities, and it is by no means a comfortable wear for me, but this perfume appears – at least on the face of it – to derive its immense power not from its Ambroxinated underpinnings but from the combined forcefulness of the other notes, which in and of themselves all possess strong personalities.
Among these non-shrinking violets, we have a rubbery saffraleine material that smells like Tom Ford’s Ombre Leather magnified to the nth power, tons of that woody-pap space filler that is cashmeran, finely milled cedar, and the nose-moisture-wicking qualities of Akigalawood, a bone-dry particle that extricates itself from the earthen, cocoa-dark mass of patchouli to become an airbone expression of leather. The drydown is a sour, rich tobacco-like accord, with hints of Black Gemstone (SHL 777). Tom Ford would totally release this as Cuir Marrocain if he managed to get his hands on this formula.
The best way I can describe this perfume is to say that it is like Ganymede (by Marc-Antoine Barrois) if it moved out of the Parisian suburbs to Riyadh and started speaking fluent Arabic, or like Oud for Greatness (by Initio) if someone was willing to pay for a much better formula. It is an iron fist inside a velvet glove. Though I would rather push razors under my nails rather than wear something like this potent, I admire the Giga-Chad-ness of it all. Someone just distilled GCC braggadocio into a scent without looking over their shoulder at the fake Middle Easternness of most of this genre.
Source of Sample: Ormonde Jayne PR kindly sent samples.
Cover Image: Photo by Llana on Unsplash
