Confession: I am not fond of cedar as a note in perfumery. Perhaps because these days it is so often paired with vetiver and Iso E Super to produce that piercing sucker punch of ‘woody-fresh’ masculines that it has become tainted in my mind, or perhaps because the essential oil itself can be pungent. I can count on two fingers the cedar-heavy fragrances I love – Feminité du Bois by Serge Lutens and Cèdre Sambac by Hermès – but now, perhaps, I can tentatively add Kashmir as a third.
Living on the equator has its advantages – year-round warmth, sun, lush greenery, the endless availability of mangoes – but heading into my second autumn in Africa, I do find myself longing for the change of seasons. With only minute differences between summer and winter in the Tropics, the only leaves you see turning brown are the ones offed by drought.
Though I certainly don’t want to fetishize autumn in Northern Europe, being all too well acquainted with its cold, dreary reality, there are certain scenes that occupy the no man’s land between fantasy and half-remembered moments of perfection. My father’s military line of silver birches, for example, starkly framed against the burnt red of his maples. Walks along an empty Curracloe Beach, numb red hands thrust into the ends of scarves. The wan, silvery quality of skies backlit by a source of light rumored by Irish weathercasters to be the sun.
Because I am more Morrissey than Taylor Swift, I tend to lean into the bleakness rather than try to bank it down with the perfumed equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte. Something about my perfumes also needs to smell like an ending – a bit bitter, dry, emotionally remote.
Chêne by Serge Lutens is a fragrance I think about far more than I wear. Such a disarmingly simple smell, yet so affecting. Lacquered school pencils split open at the root and inhaled deeply – a dense, ‘packed’ aromascape of varnish, cedar, and powder, coated in a soft, waxy mien that hovers between intense sweetness and intense bitterness in the same way a raisin does. It smells boozy but in a dry, aromatic way, more the honk of volatile wood esters effervescing from a freshly split log than a glass of whiskey. I know this makes it sound like a dramatic scent, but really, there is a stillness to this scent that makes you bend your head to listen. Smelling Chêne feels a bit like watching one of those elaborate sand drawings being made, layers of dun-, ochre- and taupe-colored sand gently swept in and over each other until a vague shape begins to emerge.
Though I originally said that English Oak and Hazelnut by Jo Malone smelled like deep winter, I take that back. Similarly minimalistic and stark as Chêne – albeit less poetic – there is something quite bleak about this perfume that matches the crisp crunch of leaves underfoot and bleachy skies of a late autumn walk.
Tabac Tabou by Parfum d’Empire mines the connective tissue between immortelle and narcissus, a richly stinky inter-webbing of burnished, sunlit molecules redolent of sunburnt hay, damp pouch tobacco, honey, and crushed wildflower stalks and manages to smell gloriously faded just two minutes in on the skin. I don’t know how the perfumer (Marc-Antoine Corticchiato) pulled this off, but Tabac Tabou smells both wildly naturalistic – like you’ve just been rolling around in a clean stable full of hay, plant semen, dried wildflowers, daisy chains, and leather or horse hair blankets – and polished (staid almost), fully at home on an older lady playing canasta in a tearoom on a Tuesday afternoon. I think this is because the vivid, animalic undercarriage of the scent, full of pungent, velvety musks and old honey, has some of its horny aliveness choked out of it by its chypric dog collar. I love this scent, but sometimes it is perfect and sometimes it makes my skin crawl.
United in immortelle, Tabac Tabou shares some of its wilted, sunburnt brownness with The Afternoon of a Faun by État Libre d’Orange, but little of its warmth. This one muscles its way into the green rose chypre category with a vibe halfway between a drenched forest and a bowl full of crushed orris roots. It recalls the burnt coffee grounds and hairspray topnotes of a badly turned vintage No. 19 pure parfum I once owned. Though the immortelle note smells like sugared hay boiled down in whiskey, it also smells savory and dry, like celery salt. Wearing it feels like a pair of fabulous, wide-cut corduroy slacks that are both comfortable and capable of making you look like Marlene Dietrich.
Le Smoking by DSH Parfums makes me feel sad in a way that I like – a self-indulgent type of sadness, the one you wallow in for a few hours because you know you can set it aside just as easily as you brought it on. The galbanum in Le Smoking is not the fresh, resinous green bell pepper sort but one that smells murky, poisonous, and cold, like smoke drifting across a window pane. Lots of dusty tobacco, vetiver, and oakmoss together create a pleasantly stale, acrid accord, a column of ash waiting to drop off a cigarette. A jaded, lived in ‘brown’ scent that feels right for right now.
These days I want spice, too, but only if it’s as dry as a bone and sits somewhere on the tonal slide between griege and porridge on a Pantone chart. Heaven Can Wait by Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, with its juxtaposition between cold, rooty iris and warm spice, fits the bill. Despite the clove and plum, this is a fragrance that feels cool and standoffish. Initially, it recalls the gripe-water musks of L’Eau d’Hiver and the thin, hawthorn-ish suede of Cuir d’Ange, with a faint brush of Superstitious‘ green-copper acid over top. In the drydown, something dry and gippy ‘catches’ at the corners of the scent, threatening to unspool the silk. The freshly-poured cement aspect of cashmeran, perhaps, or the raw, parnsippy character of the orris lingering long after the topnotes have burned off. More greige than Dior’s Gris Dior.
Eyes Closed by Byredo dresses up a dove-grey iris suede (very much like Dior Homme) in a fine coating of baking spices, mostly cinnamon and cardamom. This accord is distinguished in the opening by a remarkable carrot seed material that gives it an earthy, musky ‘cloudiness’ – like someone coming in and smudging all the lines on a charcoal drawing. It smells rather like the dry ingredients of a carrot cake or a Christmas cake before all the booze, melted butter, and sozzled dried fruit get poured in. I like this fragrance because it is arid and unsweet, the richness of its spice mélange untethered to any gooey basenotes, cutting it free to float on the air. I find it to be pleasingly masculine. But it is too intense – almost unpleasant – to smell straight from the skin, and so powerful that the scent gets a bit monotonous after a few hours. That’s why the way you wear this one counts. Like Chergui and Patchouli 24, a discreet dab on the end of your scarf or on one knuckle is enough to scent your entire ecosystem.
Only if the hidden flower in Fleur Cachée by Anatole Lebreton is immortelle does this scent’s title make sense – though it is more likely to be the intensely syrupy-dry-curried-celery aspect of fenugreek seed that is giving immortelle than immortelle itself. Think of a flavor that marries the medicinal warmth of nutmeg to the cool, watery herbal feel of dill or celery, and that is fenugreek. Anyway, this smells like the inside of a sauna constructed entirely of sandalwood – dry, ‘baked’, almost sandy in texture. There is a bold flourish of coffee grounds, which, combined with the hot sauna aura, makes me think of the original Eau Noire (Dior) or even the magnificent Santal Nabataea by Mona di Orio. In the end, I don’t find anything remotely floral or vanilla in Fleur Cachée – this is simply a stunningly dry, but also sweaty-spicy-vegetal sandal in the vein of one of my all-time favorite perfumes, Santal de Mysore by Serge Lutens, just a lot airier (and cheaper).
Though I do not want the cosseting sweetness or fullness of tonka, vanillas, or tobaccos just yet, I will take the more restrained takes. Lothair by Penhaligon’s calls to mind my daughter’s recent exclamation at seeing one of the men on Love is Blind UK, ‘Oh my God, he’s so ugly. He looks Scottish,’ which, coming from a charming little airhead who thinks France is in Asia, is funny. I can kind of see what she means, though, because Lothair is a perfume that smells Scottish for no apparent reason other than I think the initial wallop of metallic lavender, starchy rhubarb, black pepper, and milky cedar is what I imagine a thick, purplish carpeting of thistle or heather on highlands to smell like. The punchy, herbal opening smells hoary and old-mannish to me in the best way possible, like an entrance hall thick with the smell of waxed jackets and tweeds and galoshes (and perhaps the odd bit of Lynx too, for good measure). High country pursuits, then, which, while not typically part of the cultural ‘scent’ lexicon for a woman in her forties from a working-class Irish background, still occupy a shape in the scent library of my mind. Lothair brings in some tonka bean towards the end, but it never smells creamy, just aromatic and kind of manly.
People say they smell fig and black tea in this, and that may be true, but I smell more of those hot metal bars on the old electric Calor gas heaters and the thick, fuzzy scent of wet wool fibers fluffing up when exposed to the intense heat confined to the 2cm radius of the bars. Kind of Gris Clair-ish but better, in that the metallic lavender-tonka combo keeps the screechiness to a minimum and clothes it all in a rich, dry, yet almost lactonic cedar that smells like a special type of incense only the rich can afford. It’s all very Sean Connery – gravel in the streets, butter in the sheets.
L’Air de Rien by Miller Harris is a perfume that I struggled with for years before finally giving in and learning to – if not love – then crave in small doses the very special thing this perfume does in marrying the ‘greasy scalp’ horror of costus to the inky, saline dust of tree moss, a hot metal spoon, a puffy plethora of unholy musks, the only neroli note in the world that doesn’t smell like citrus peel and soap, and an unsettlingly unsweet amber-vanilla. Old books and cranked up radiators at the start of winter have the same funk to them, as do the heads of children and small animals. Add clove and you edge closer to Fiore d’Ambra by Profumum Roma, another perfume that mixes the innocent with the foul until your brains scramble inside your skull. It smells like a freshly bathed human stuffed inside a three-day-old pinstripe suit, or being forced to participate in someone else’s kink for unwashed teeth. Unbearably intimate and yet utterly human in all its weirdness. Autumn is the perfect time to wear this, or whenever it becomes cold enough to start bathing every second day.
Like Chêne, Bohea Bohème by Mona di Orio is one of those fragrances occupies far more space in my head than it does on my skin. It doesn’t lend itself to easy classification, which is, I guess, part of the reason I find myself thinking about it even when I am a whole continent away from my bottle of it. Essentially, it is a minimally smoky, peppery tea scent that stretches itself over a sparse structure of wood, herbs, and greenery. But the scent distinguishes itself with an opening bristling with camphor and mint, providing the wear with a surprising jolt of bitterness that one can almost feel at the back of the tongue. The Listerine-like bitterness almost always fools me into thinking – absentmindedly – that I have sprayed one of my more toothpaste-y tuberose perfumes recently and simply forgotten about it.
The drydown is a marvel, the woody tea and camphor levelling out into a note of sweet, papery tobacco and sun-scorched hay that takes on an unexpectedly rustic feel, diverging from the cool, urban aesthetic of the first half of the fragrance. Bohea Bohème does not have any heavy amber or vanilla weighing down the tea, just a surprisingly weightless benzoin that shifts through the air like a ribbon of smoke from a far-off campfire.
Weightlessness and transparency are also thoughtful features of Le Pavillon d’Or by Dusita Parfums, a fragrance that carries the green-gold-lilac duskiness of post-harvest meadows and field margins and hedgerows inside of it. Mint, iris, and honeysuckle combine to form a fresh, green opening that sometimes reminds me of Chanel. No. 19 and sometimes of Diorella (and sometimes of neither). There is an illusion of galbanum minus the bitterness, or of vetiver without its dankness. The main note here is fig leaf, which would explain the faintly milky quality to the greenness, but there’s none of the urinous quality that often sullies the vibrant smell of fig leaf. These opening notes are quickly coated with an overlay of what smells to me like the sweet, musty alfalfa grass notes (half hay, half Quaker’s oats) borrowed from one of my favorite Dusita perfumes, Erawan, but minus that scent’s dusky cocoa. There is also, here and there, a touch of Chanel’s Poudre Universelle Libre – a discreetly-perfumey, buff-colored skein of powder dusted over the scent’s cheekbones.
And, of course, there is always Iris Silver Mist by Serge Lutens. This is not perfume. It is either art or a form of water boarding, but it’s not a perfume. Iris Silver Mist teeters on a tightrope between beauty and brutality. The first blast out of the gate is of the purest iris root note ever created. I can almost taste the smell on the back of my tongue – mud, earth, metal, roots, dry ice pumped from a machine at a festival. Again, not perfume, not really. Raw potatoes soaking in ice cold water, rotting carrot tops, and the acrid fug of alcohol fumes rolling off a Poitín still. There is also the high-toned acid sting of fresh urine from a baby’s nappy but devoid of any of the warm, sweet-sour honey and hay overtones that makes baby pee such a friendly smell. This is cold and denatured, ureic acid grown in a sterile lab. Nothing of human origin.
Iris Silver Mist is not pleasant but it stirs my soul in a way that more pleasant perfumes do not. It makes me think of uncomfortable scenarios – teenagers facing the wall at the end of the Blair Witch Project, the tops of those dark pine trees swaying in the wind in Twin Peaks every time Coop entered the Red Room in the Black Lodge, the guy in nothing but y-fronts and a WW2 gas mask striding across a corn field at the end of episode 3 of True Detective. Think of basically anything that has ever chilled your soul, and that’s Iris Silver Mist. It is a work of art. Art in a gimp mask, yes, but still, art.
Source of Samples: All purchased by me in either sample or full bottle form at one point or another.
Cover Image: Photo by John Price on Unsplash
Narcotico
Narcotico follows a pattern I’ve begun to notice in the work of Giuseppe Imprezzabile, the perfumer behind Meo Fusciuni, in that the perfumes are all either monstrously complex facades hiding simple ideas, or deceptively simple perfumes masking an astonishing richness of detail.
Narcotico falls in the former category. The perfumer places an odd ‘upturned sod’ patchouli material, with nuances of sour soil, dry air, creeping rot, blood, metal, and leather, atop a relatively simple, powdered baby’s bottom of an amber-talc base. It’s like an unwashed wolf perched on top of a kitten. Everything interesting is happening inside the bounds of that patchouli material front-loaded into the first hour. Rather than beautiful, it smells half alluring, half foul. A thing of nature, yet also inorganic and strange.
Narcotico is an empty promise, though. It soon fizzles out into its quiet talc-like base, making you wonder if the first hour had happened at all. At the beginning, I was thinking that this was a truly different and original take on patchouli – a fertile cross between Noir Patchouli, Aromatics Elixir, and Vierges et Toreros – but its sudden cop out into a barely there amber affair feels like the ultimate bait and switch. Marescialla by Santa Maria Novella does what Narcotico promises to do – exorcism by patchouli – but for half the price.
Odor 93
Unlike Narcotico, Odor 93 is complex all the way through. Peel back any piece of its skin over its 24 hour trajectory and you’ll uncover a door cracked open to a different part of Narnia. Ostensibly a tuberose plunged into the gloom of soil, tobacco, and spice, it differs from other ‘darkened’ or ‘sullied’ white florals (Tubereuse Criminelle, Tubereuse III Animale, Daphne) by way of a clever and constant counterposing of notes that smell cheap and expensive, fun and salubrious, organic and chemical.
The opening is all Listerine, petrol, and bubblegum, but clearly also deeply floral, which is pleasantly confusing. There is a striking patchouli note that smells like earth – not patchouli, but soil, like a clump of dirt dug out of a forest floor, rich in humus and eau de decayed leaves. The tuberose itself is nightmarish in that it is syrupy sweet, bubblegummy, and a bit chemical, like a white floral cube of Turkish Delight peeled away from a plastic tray. But this in turn is compensated for by a rich, yellow, urinous-smelling narcissus and a horsey, honeyed wood-oud accord, which conspire to smell like the inside of a tobacco curing shed in summer. This is an extraordinary perfume. A bit hard to wear, yeah, but extraordinary.
On occasion, when I am smelling the very far drydown of Odor 93, I forget what I am wearing and it is only then that I understand this perfume to be built around a serious oriental-chypre base. It has the burnt-end ashiness of oakmoss (the dusty tobacco and patchouli acting in consort), a huge dollop of talc, and the bitterness of those ruby-red clove orientals that dominated the late 1980s, like Cinnabar and Opium. On balance, the perfume it most reminds me of is the older, original version of Sacrebleu by Parfums de Nicolai, another spicy-bubblegummy tuberose oriental, but one that lacks the complexity of Odor’s surround sound system. Odor 93 is an example of a perfume that, while it doesn’t suit my personal taste at all, is so unabashedly brilliant that anything other than a glowing review would be stupid.
L’Oblio
L’Oblio is a lovely, pleasing perfume, but it lives up to its name – oblivion, forgetfulness – by gliding over the curves and grooves of my brain and out my left ear like a half-remembered thought. And like my half-remembered thought, I am sure it was genius and that the world is all the poorer for not knowing it, but what can I do? It is gone now.
L’Oblio is one of those Meo Fusciuni perfumes that makes you understand how his entire oeuvre is divided into two textures – one ethereal and gossamer-light, the other as dense as wax. L’Oblio belongs to the former category. It is almost maddeningly vague, a whispering thing of spearmint breath, blue bottle Nivea, gum, green tea, Japanese stick incense, and the papery dustiness of old books (benzoin), all extremely pleasant and yet of no definite shape other than a faded memory of those cornstarch-dusted candy cigarettes they would give children in the 1980s. The sourness of old tea hangs around at the end, adding a musty, brackish note that fights back against the nothingness of the scent. Ultimately, though, it amounts to very little, like someone who has their hand raised last in a Teams meeting and realizes too late that everything interesting or important has already been said, so ends up muttering ‘I’d just like to add my support for what Allison said’.
Source of Samples: I purchased my Meo Fusciuni sample set from the Italian retailer, 50 ML, here.
Cover Image: Photo by davisuko on Unsplash
Luce
Luce is like a plain girl whose face suddenly transforms when she smiles. Full of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments that shuffle so quietly underneath its sweet, minty beeswax skin that you’d be forgiven for writing it off as an amber, this is a scent that rewards close study. My first impression is of sugared aniseed and vinyl set against a dark green backdrop of fir trees, underscored with a touch of adiposal fat coagulating on a dead animal. Somehow, this works – a multi-dimensional taste at the back of your tongue that draws all the bickering fresh, bitter, fatty, medicinal, and plastic notes to a warm, soft bosom that stifles all sound, let alone conflict.
It is only later, when Luce has moved on from its camphoraceous to its long, sweet, powdery drydown that I realize that this is an essay on benzoin. No wonder people look at this and think ‘amber’. But to me, benzoin on its own smells at once more subtle and more complex than when it is placed in an amber accord with vanilla and labdanum. Here, shorn and unadorned, it smells uniquely of itself – slightly ‘gippy’, like dampened potato flour, minty-camphoraceous, and of course, like incense, specifically unlit papiers d’armenie, those little strips of porous paper dipped in benzoin resinoid. This accord is attractively moldy or even ‘musty’, a quality your brain doesn’t normally associate pleasantly with a perfume but switches gears when it smells the same thing in a library full of old books, wafting decaying lignin spores into the ether.
Much of the same in the drydown, except for a hawthornish suede accent – think elegant Chamois glove leather – that lends the bookish dust some much needed structure. There is also, in my mind, a memory link between the hawthorn note and the anise note at the beginning, something hauntingly gripe-watery, sweet, and herbal.
Luce feels very original to me, but of course, as I write and sniff, three fragrances with similar vibes jump to mind, namely; Guerlain’s Bois d’Armenie (those sweet, dusty incense burning papers), Mona di Orio’s Bohea Boheme (a slightly bitter, camphoraceous benzoin-tea scent with a powdery drydown), and Guerlain’s Cuir Beluga (the same white, creamy hawthorn suede). Quiet scents all, but Luce is quieter still. In fact, sometimes, I strain to hear its little voice at all. I rarely ask for scents to be stronger than they are – because someone somewhere will inevitably hear that as a plea for more Norlimbanol or Clearwood – but in the case of Luce, I would love the volume turned up by 30%, please.
Notturno
Notturno is bad, but doesn’t even have the grace to be memorably bad. It is just bad in a ‘thin, doesn’t smell great, and definitely doesn’t belong in the catalogue of an artisan perfumer’ kind of way. Unlike my other Meo Fusciuni samples, which I use to the last drop either to make sure I fully understand them or because I enjoy smelling them, Notturno is the only one that lolls around on my dresser, half full, until I inevitably spot it, wonder if I’ll like that, spray some on and instantly remember that not only do I not like it at all, but I clearly can’t remember a single thing about it, hence the cycle.
Here’s why it’s bad – not why I think it’s bad but why it’s objectively bad – it is really nothing more than a single rum ether stuck on top of a burnt sugar, Maltol-sticky wood aromachemical that smells like a section excised from By the Fireplace and spread out in a thin schmear on your skin. I hate this note, primarily because it is a grandstanding gesture rather than an idea, but also because rum itself is cringe beyond the age of 19. For all of the 30 seconds it lasts, 5 seconds of it smells impressively like real rum (though we’ve established that that’s not the plus anyone thinks it is) and 25 seconds like the little bottles of rum flavoring you buy to put in cakes.
And that’s it, that’s the best part of this scent, done and dusted in under half a minute. What follows this damp squib of an opening is the chemical litany of whatever molecules people are stringing together these days to suggest leather, wood, or tobacco to an increasingly gullible (or nose blind) audience. Notturno means nocturnal, and from the reviews, it seems that most people are buying into a fantasy of whatever nocturnal means to them rather than smelling the scent for what it truly is. For once, the perfume isn’t the one with projection issues.
Source of Samples: I purchased my Meo Fusciuni sample set from the Italian retailer, 50 ML, here.
Cover Image: Photo by Jack Asis on Unsplash
#1 Nota di Viaggio (Rites de Passage)
The opening is pure Italian apothecary chic – a veritable cacophony of brackish herbs, aged citrus, and homemade toothpaste underscored by a streak of medicated foot powder and ye olde throat pastilles. Not unpleasant per se, but a jumbled up wall of smell that I associate with many of the openings of Italian artisanal perfumery, like Mem and Noun from Bogue, Lafeogrigio or Ladamo by O’Driu, or the more aromatic scents of Annette Neuffer (not Italian, but the style is similar).
Once this rather harsh, resinous basil-ade dies back, however, the rest of the scent is a wonderful chiaroscuro featuring a creamy, vegetal patchouli-vetiver accord, made more oily and bitter with a heady dose of rosewood – velvety, lush, dark – shot through with a bright floral sherbet of ylang and other flowers. The contrast between the salubrious, serious basenotes that tilt towards the bowels of the earth and the effervescent, slightly ‘Love Hearts’-ish accord is delightful. It’s deep, aromatic and soulful, but at the same time, filled with slivers of dancing light. I am determined to buy my husband a bottle of this for his next birthday.
#2 Nota di Viaggio (Shukran)
This is probably the most immediately arresting of the trio. It smells so strongly of spearmint and citrus soap in the beginning that I feel slightly sick but also like I’m just out of the shower. This feeling is confusing to me, in that I like its unusual freshness but dislike when the line between perfumery and toothpaste is crossed so decisively, and all within the first few moments. I begin to like this accord better once the glare on the mint softens a bit, allowing me to smell the other green, aromatic notes, like lemongrass and the gentler, honeyed hay-like tones of the chamomile.
I fool myself into thinking that this is heading in a Moroccan mint tea direction when suddenly, a boldly spiced tobacco leaf note swims into view, and from then on, I smell nothing but. The tobacco accent is light, untoasted, blond almost, but also so tightly threaded with clove, cinnamon, and star anise that it smells like a very unsweet gingerbread – a pain d’epices they might serve in a medieval monastery, where honey or dried fruits are considered a mortal sin and kept far away from the kitchen. If you’ve ever smelled Tan d’Epices by Andree Putman, then this is similar – indeed, so much so that I would hazard a guess that the same material has been used here, or the tobacco leaf-spice accord built out in the same way.
But before I can start fully warming up to #2, it is gone. Poof! And I mention that because performance beyond a four hour window is important to some. On the other hand, if you love Eau d’Hadrien by Annick Goutal or Eau d’Orange Verte by Hermes, for example, and treat them for what they really are – a ‘parfum du matin’ until you put on something more serious later on in the day – then #2 Nota di Viaggio (Shukran) could be a worthy addition to your wardrobe. It is unusual in that it takes extreme freshness in a thoroughly different direction, with mint and spicy blond tobacco substituting for the more standard citrus and moss.
#3 Nota di Viaggio (Ciavuru d’Amuri)
Something about this perfume is so incredibly nostalgic to me that I am not sure if I can review it objectively. Perhaps it is because it smells green, aromatic, and gently powdered to begin with, making me think of mimosa or Cassie flower, as well as the figs my Montenegrin mother in law picks from her tree before drying them and rolling them in a mixture of cornstarch and powdered sugar. Or perhaps it is because there is a ylang material in there that smells like the slightly dry, smoky leather accent in Cuir de Russie or the post-2015 Mitsouko. Whatever it is, it brings me right back to when I lived in the Mediterranean (Sicily, Montenegro), and, more than a place, to a time in my life when I was beginning to really discover perfume (or really great perfume), with that starchy ylang-mimosa like material acting as my own personal Proustian madeleine.
Objectively speaking, though, what I think makes this perfume great is that the perfumer connects the scent of ripe figs and the coarse, fruity creaminess of ylang via a note of rubber. Fig perfumes can be woody and coconutty (Philosykos) or astringent and pissy-fresh (Ninfeo Mio) but if you focus intently enough, you will notice that they are always, always slightly rubbery underneath the sweet, green freshness. A milky, sappy kind of rubber. The fig in #3 is far less green, woody, or coconutty than other examples, in that it smells warm and closely textured like the flesh inside the fruit, and as clean like a fig note in a clarifying shampoo. But there is a lingering undercurrent – subtle but present – of a gentle rubber, dusted with a fine white powder of unknown origin.
This accent connects so seamlessly with the grapey, fuel-y rubbery-ness of that ylang that you hardly notice that the core note has shifted from fig to ylang, from fruit to flower. I think it’s because these notes, that we think of as creamy or liquid, are quite dry here, drained of their essential humidity as the scent progresses. But there’s more to this scent than this skillful transition. These core accords are bathed in this gentle, herbal aura that is half sugared aniseed, and half resin dust – the kind of resins that have a cleansing, antiseptic character, like elemi or pine sap. #3 is not too much of one thing or the other, in fact, its defining character being that of having no fixed character at all. This is an ethereal changeling that makes you chase it down one leg of a maze and then another, smelling of completely different things from one wear to the next. Out of all the Nota di Viaggio series, #3 is the one that has charmed me the most.
Source of Samples: I purchased my Meo Fusciuni sample set from the Italian retailer, 50 ML, here.
Cover Image: Photo by Federico Burgalassi on Unsplash
Un Bel Amour d’Été by Parfum d’Empire has been described – by the perfumer himself – as a suntan oil and flip flops kind of beach scent, while Luca Turin thinks it is a midway point between Jicky and Fracas. Going out on a limb here, neither of those are particularly accurate. To the first point, this is no suntan oil bit of fluff. It is a serious piece of floral perfumery – big, classical, sensuous. To the second, the dirtiness that Turin identifies as Jicky-esque is more the moist, body odor-ish roundness of cumin than the sharp, herbal (and dare I say masculine) civet that is the secret to the Guerlain. In truth, Un Bel Amour d’Été comes shockingly close to vintage Songes by Annick Goutal, specifically the eau de parfum version, with a side swipe of the spicy-milky tuberose bread pudding that is Alamut (Lorenzo Villoresi).
But there are key differences. The first bright, creamy explosion of tuberose and gardenia (for a few minutes, this is clearly a stunning gardenia recreation) is far more savory – saline almost – with a bready nuance that smells like the apricot-jam-slathered sandalwood of Jeux de Peau, a clear departure from the grapier nuances of Songes’ jasmine and ylang notes. Further differentiating it are a greenish ‘snapped leaf’ note, something that smells like red modelling clay, and a coarse apricot note so resinous it feels like the last, thick dregs of a carton of peach juice that burn your throat as they go down. The cumin and turmeric notes are also more audaciously spicy.
But in all honesty, it is more like vintage Songes than not. The opening is as momentously floral, powerful to the point of being pungent, and it is also similarly intensely cuminy. Both are extremely sensual – beads of glossy lady-sweat popping out and then drying on the surface of Carmen Miranda’s skin under that Bahia style dress. Though Un Bel Amour d’Été does finally swap out Songes’ creamy sandalwood for a lactonic (but also strangely dry) vanilla, there is always the overriding impression of a densely savory floral bread pudding soaked in second day lady sweat and wood.
As a Songes devotee, I am bowled over by this, but even I am sensible enough to know that there really is no justification in me owning more than a sample of something that, while not note-for-note derivative, is similar enough to an older model. Objectively-speaking, however, Un Bel Amour d’Été is more modern, richer, and honestly, probably better constructed than Songes, and it may be an option when my vintage bottle (with real sandalwood) runs out. I am impressed that there are perfumers like Marc-Antoine Corticchiato who are unafraid to play in waters so crowded by monsters like Fracas and Songes. It must be like trying to create a spicy floriental just after Coco and Opium came out.
Source of Sample: I purchased a manufacturer’s sample of Un Bel Amour d’Été from Fragrance & Art in Sweden.
Cover Image: Photo by Vicko Mozara on Unsplash
Oud Taiwan by Areej Le Dore smells great, but not the ‘perfume’ kind of great. It smells great in the way that certain spaces – a carpenter’s workshop, a fuel court, a supplies closet – smell great because of what they hold. After a brief sinus-clearing Listerine topnote, I smell the inner workings of a car repair shop. There is the smell of metal pistons sliding into cold hollows, cans of gasoline soaking into the porous concrete slab, a two-bar electric heater heating up, and the splutters of a dirty exhaust pipe being cranked up. A furry indole note adds to the chemical – or inorganic – feel of the scent with its rubbery ‘Magic Marker’ twang.
This makes me understand two things. First, that natural materials like indole or camphor can smell like chemicals. Second, that some chemicals just smell incredible. Think of the smell of school glue, the binding of a book, the pages of a magazine, or nail polish.
Oud Taiwan doesn’t smell entirely inorganic, though. The third spike of the wheel – counting the wintergreen mouthwash/Dettol accord and the car shop miasma as the first and second respectively – is an oud oil that smells initially like a funky wolf pelt smeared with toothpaste but increasingly like a stack of horse blankets, pleasantly damp with dander, horse sweat, and once-pissed-upon hay. This adds a mammalian warmth and roundness to the cold, hard steel of the more industrial-smelling accords of the car shop. I say ‘adds’ but in truth, the two accords – one cold and chemical, the other warm and animal – gnash their teeth against each other rather than merge smoothly, which makes for an unsettling effect.
The oud oil that went into Oud Taiwan is warmer and sweeter than the oud accord in the scent, with its nuances of caramelized wood and woodsy-horsey finish. It smells like wool, leather, and skin – not clean per se but not filthy either. Just a lightly exercised animal steaming post-trot with all the other animals in a heated barn in winter.
Where Oud Taiwan differs from its constituent oil is in its hardcore myrrh finish. Fans of myrrh’s bitter, latexy gloom will love the drydown of Oud Taiwan. It smells like Scandinavian licorice rolled in cathedral dust. There is no sparkle to this incense resin. It is severe and moody, the Snapes of the resin world. What’s more, myrrh opens up a hollow space in the scent that throws me for a loop.
It also tires my nose. The myrrh note, coupled with the persistent industrial chemical miasma, which one always finds intoxicating at first but then almost nauseating after sustained exposure to it, begins to wear me down. Something here is overdosed. It drones on, seemingly interminably, which is never good, because the longer an accord goes on, the more time I have to find bones to pick with it.
In short, I think Oud Taiwan smells great, in the way that some places smell great. But while I admire how it was constructed, I did not want to wear it past the testing phase. It doesn’t wear like a perfume, which, um, forgive me for being basic, is how I want to experience a scent.
But in my house, the testing of Oud Taiwan over the course of a week became a family affair, with every member weighing in on it. My husband loved Oud Taiwan because whenever he smells real oud – and there is a significant amount of it here – his jaw tightens and he paws the ground. He says it takes him back to being in a leather store with his father when he was young.
My sense of Oud Taiwan being the scent of a place rather than a perfume is borne out by his comment on the second day of testing, when he noted that it also smells like walking into the family’s old village house near Skadar Lake and breathing in the smells of the salamis hung up to cure from the roof, the smoke from the neighbors clearing the land of scrub, and the soot and dust snaking up every surface – smells that, over time, ingrain themselves into the fabric of a house and turn it into ‘home’.
My teenage son said that, for an oud, it smelled really great and not too animalic, but rather like an old, clean house or stables somewhere desolate. I think what both of them were trying to say was that Oud Taiwan is a whole atmosphere, not just a perfume.
Source of sample: Sent to me free of charge by Russian Adam for review. My opinions are my own.
Cover Image: Photo by Francisco Gonzalez on Unsplash
Epona is pure gorgeousness. Though I do have an equestrian background myself, horsey perfumes can be a little bit too on the nose with the mane accord – Arabian Horse by Pierre Guillaume, Corpus Equus by Naomi Goodsir, for example – for people sans horsey background to really enjoy. Epona sidesteps the trap of literalness by being a fully-fledged perfume built around an agrestic scene rather than a hammer hitting the pony button over and over again. Let me put it another way – this is a horsey perfume for someone whose idea of horse heaven is more Chanel’s genteelly-saddle-soapy Cuir de Russie or a horse seen through the soft glow of a Tiffany lamp than the actual animal itself.
The opening, for example. With its rush of astringent violet and iris ionones, you are plunged into a forest glade with spring flowers and roots pushing up through the frozen soil. Rather than sweet, it smells chalky, like stamens and roots split open, diffused in a cloud of wood or floral esters that make my head swim as effectively as waving a newly opened bottle of grappa under my nose. Emotionally remote flowers in cold storage, plus the beginnings of something mossy and brown-ish that makes me think of Jolie Madame or Miss Balmain (Balmain). On reflection, this makes sense to me because there is something about Balmain perfumes, especially in extrait form, that smells modern and old at the same time.
Past the chilled ionone rush of the topnotes, there develops a sweet, slightly smoky-grassy note that I first felt was hay, but am confident now is incense, and specifically an unlit stick of nag champa. This dusty-powdery accord comes in so closely behind the chalky violet-iris opening that it momentarily confuses the direction of the perfume – you begin to wonder, is this an austere Miss Balmain-ish thing or are we going in the direction of a New Age momma? I got my son to smell my arm, and he said immediately, old church.
And for a while there, Epona does smell ‘old’ in a really good way, like the wood in an old church, dusty old clothes in a trunk to explore, and so on. What I appreciate about Epona, though, is that this is just one stage in its development, because just when I begin to wonder where the horse in this picture is, the perfume begins its slow slide into the outdoors, all sun-warned hay, narcissus, alfalfa, woodruff, a light starchy leather, and the softly ‘rude’ aromas suggestive of, first, a pasture, and then, finally, a horse. But only the vaguest suggestion of a horse.
The trajectory from cool to warm is so smooth, you barely register what’s happening. Though mostly a pastoralist aroma-scope, the warm, boozy aura makes me think of a childhood spent walking into rooms where the adults are or were drinking glasses of a slightly smoky Irish whiskey. Perhaps it is the ionones creating a familiar sweet, newspaper-whiskey tonality (subliminally Dzongkha-ish in my memory palace), but either way, it is extremely pleasant.
So extremely pleasant, in fact, that I can’t stop imagining that Epona – in this phase at least – smells like the Caronade the way I remember it, fully loaded with Mousse de Saxe and those complex, brandy-ish De Laire amber bases. Now, it is no small feat to pull off an approximation of an older Caron extrait (En Avion and Nuit de Noel are the ones that jump to mind here), and I have no idea if that’s even something Liz Moores was aiming for, but that is exactly what I feel I am smelling here – a complex, mossy-smoky-sweet leathery floral that is half spice and half face power.
Of course, nothing this beautiful lasts forever, but I enjoy the hell out of this Caronade phase until it trails off into a persistent honey note that smells like a pissy narcissus material to me, not a million miles from the drydown of Tabac Tabou (Parfums d’Empire).
This is by far my favourite of the Papillon perfumes.
Source of Sample: Gratis sample sent to me for review by Liz Moores.
Cover Image: Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash
The only possible reason why Annette Neuffer is not discussed in the same breadth as other talented, self-made European perfumers (Andy Tauer, Vero Kern, Antonio Gardoni, etc.) is because, unlike these, she has been unable to professionalize her operations or achieve economies of scale in her production so that her perfumes are priced at a point where regular perfume wearers can buy them.
In Europe, at least, there is great respect for Annette’s style, and a rather robust grey market in swapping samples and full bottles of her work. But not even a glowing review from Luca Turin in the Guide 2018 wasn’t enough to shoot the brand into the indie stratosphere currently occupied by Teone Reinthal, Manuel Cross, Clandestine Laboratories, Zoologist, Tauer, and so on.
Which is a shame because it proves that a certain measure of market exposure and self-promotion is what gets some perfumes talked about, therefore keeping them ‘alive’ in the mind’s eye, while others, none the less important or beautiful a creation, risk trailing off into the darkness of the void. This is why it’s important for people to write about Annette and people like Annette. I don’t claim that my words have any impact – blogs have been dying for years now, and this one is no exception. But as the lights start to go out on this ship, there is a certain sense of freedom in realizing that I can write about anything that strikes my fancy, with no regard for what might be current or ‘hot’, because nobody is watching.
And what I want to write about today is Annette Neuffer, because unless she suddenly starts sending free bottles of perfumes out to YouTube and Instagram perfume ‘influencers’, her work will remain largely unknown to all but those who deliberately seek her out. Her perfumes are as worthy of the intense fandom discussions that swirl around around Teone Reinthal or Zoologist. A jazz musician living in Freising, Germany, she works completely in naturals, but with a deftness of touch that made even Luca Turin – famously a critic of all natural perfumers – marvel.
I don’t like everything she makes, but even those I don’t like, I find myself thinking about and trying to understand how they work. Enter clumsy yet obligatory metaphor about jazz; though I don’t understand jazz and its weird, cacophonic ‘non-structure’, I enjoy it at a subliminal level once I stop trying to analyze it. I think that’s probably the key to Annette Neuffer’s work too.
First up, three roses.
Honeysuckle Rose is a fat but wilting white flower, a vine of jasmine or tuberose curling in on itself, buried in swathes of beeswax and furniture polish. It smells like sweet tea and nectar and female skin putrefying in a Southern heat so intense that you can almost see the beads of moisture popping up. I smelled a honeysuckle bush once in the South of France and was shocked by how fleshy and sultry it actually is, in contrast to its rather innocent reputation.
This perfume smells like honeysuckle in the air – heady, rudely floral, honeyed – but powdery and slightly dank on the skin, like a cup of over-stewed tea. The oily cedar-like notes of a dank rosewood add to the impression of a flower floating in a gong bath, a flash of something white and delicate in the Vantablack gloom.
It is only later, once the bitterness of the tea and woods has subsided, that Honeysuckle Rose reveals its final, true form – a sunny orange blossom busily licking the sticky grunge of beeswax and rosewood off its fur. The contrast between light and dark is startling, like a bar of the whitest goat’s milk soap carved from a block of resin. A trace of warm, dark honey lingers underneath this, like licked skin, recalling some of Vero Kern’s perfumes (Rozy in particular, with its attractively stale, louche rose breath).
Rosa Alba is based around a rare, white Bulgarian rose varietal named, well, Rosa Alba (rose of the dawn). It has simple but powerful beauty of a freshly picked rose from a wet garden, with its alluring mixture of lemon zest, geranium leaf, and finally, a trembling, jellied, pink rosewater loukhoum nuance tucked deep into the tightest folds near the heart.
A resinous, powdery (slightly sour) sandalwood is the only other element here, lending the fragrance the feel of a traditional Indian attar. This is the immense, timeless beauty of a flower stuffed inside the flimsiest of shells. And though arguably a direct copy of nature, you’d have to be a marble statue not to be moved by a smell like this.
Avicenna White Rose & Oud is my personal favorite of Annette Neuffer’s takes on rose, perhaps because it turns such a (by now) familiar paradigm on its head. The marriage of rose and oud is a natural one, the gentle, bright sweetness of rose tempering the sour, moody darkness of oud, and as such is a popular trope in perfumery. But even a template this good gets old after a while.
What I love about White Rose & Oud is that it reimagines the rose-oud pairing in the context of a witch’s apothecary in the Middle Ages, giving it new angles I hadn’t considered before. The opening is a pungent herbal lemonade that has dried to crystals on a mantelpiece somewhere, before being swept into a pestle and mortar with a bunch of dusty culinary herbs and ground to a fine powder. But before you think, wow, this is super sour and harsh and I don’t like it, in rolls an intoxicating lush, Turkish delight rose that softens all the sharp edges. The interplay of that rosy loukhoum against the tart, almost brackish oud – which you realize is what the deeply sour herbaciousness in the topnotes was camouflaging – is brilliant.
The umami, wheaten sandalwood in the basenotes interacts with the oud and other woody notes to create an accord so dry and 3D and aromatic that it feels like watching plumes of barkhoor smoke hanging heavy in the air or hot benzine shimmering in the thick air at the fuel court.
But while recognizably (finally) a rose-oud scent, White Rose & Oud never feels exotic in a tokenistic manner, perhaps due to its persistent streak of antiseptic sourness – that medieval apothecary vibe – that runs through it from top to bottom. I like to think that Bernard Chant would have liked the witchy 1970s feel of this, even if he didn’t quite get the whole rose-oud reference the way modern perfume wearers do.
Source of sample: I bought a sample set directly from Annette Neuffer’s website back in (I think) 2017 or 2018.
Cover Image: Photo by Christina Deravedisian on Unsplash
When you move to Africa after a whole life spent in Europe, you quickly begin to grasp the economies of scale (and lack of trade tariffs) that made your nine euro litre of olive oil or four euro bottle of Pantene conditioner possible. In Africa, the rule of thumb is that everything that is imported is eye-wateringly expensive, while everything homegrown, like avocadoes, shea butter, and Uber drivers, can be had for pennies.
Interestingly, however, Middle-Eastern perfume, though technically imported, is as cheap as a bag of mangoes. This is because the import-export relationships set up by the large Saudi or Emirati-owned corporations catering to the significant Muslim population in East Africa (Carrefour is franchised, for example, by the Emirati firm Majid al Futtaim) allow Middle-Eastern perfumes to ride into this region on the same economies-of-scale train that travels the length and breadth of the European trade bloc.
All this to say, while I ration my single block of Parmesan cheese for months at a time, shaving it off in razor-thin slices onto my pasta as if it were a Goddamn white truffle, I have not been so parsimonious with the ole Lattafas. Now, fine perfume this is not. It is big, it is bold, and it more often than not is knocking off something way more expensive. But. But. There is something to be said for sinking your whole self into the sensory pleasure that is perfume for the price of one whole tube of CeraVe moisturizer.
Let’s take a good, long look at everything I’ve smelled, what I’ve gifted to others, and what I decided to buy for myself over the past year, because not even cheapies should be immune to critical inspection. I mean, sooner or later, three or four Lattafas add up to a whole bottle of olive oil, so one must draw a line somewhere.
The Good
Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash
Lattafa Nasheet
Ostensibly a dupe of Nishane’s Ani, I find that Nasheet to be the better scent experience. It resolves several problems I have with Ani. First, while I love the green, almost pungent pop of ginger root and citrus of Ani’s topnotes, I find it meanders into a brief but mawkish ‘designer store aroma’ phase that I don’t love, before eventually re-righting itself into a creamy, resinous amberilla (half amber, half vanilla). Of course, that bit is as heavy as a brick wrapped in a duvet, so sometimes Ani’s drydown feels right-sized but sometimes it feels like trying to lift weights under water.
Nasheet’s innovation is that it feels like 60% of Ani on a good day. I can breathe in and around it. It carries the spice – more cardamom than ginger, meaning it is both fresher and less powdery – further into the amberilla accord, laying it out over the golden sweetness like a lace veil made of zesty black pepper. A beautiful orange peel note haunts the structure, more the scent of an orange peeled three hours ago in a nearby room than the volatile juiciness of a fresh one.
The glittery, sandy amberilla in the drydown is a spackling of mica on the skin, as diffuse as starlight. People call Ani a vanilla, which I don’t quite understand – if you add enough hard, crunchy resin to vanilla, what you end up with is amber. (I am conceding to the daub of vanilla that lurks within this amber accord by calling it an amberilla).
People also say that Nasheet is weak and disappears within two hours, but all that tells me is that a whole generation of noses have been permanently altered by over-exposure to brutish aromachemicals chosen for their extreme radiance, Amberwood, Norlimbanol, and Ambroxan among them. I feel sad for them, but also honor bound to point out when their poor, deformed noses are simply wrong – Nasheet hangs around all day long. It is discreet, yes, but present enough for colleagues to comment on my scent trail after an 11-hour day at the office. For those of you old enough to remember when perfumes lived and died on their own merit rather than limp on for eons via the easy-won brutality of modern woody ambers, listen to what I am telling you. Nasheet is endlessly pleasant without a trace of those modern poisons. And at twenty odd euros, I consider that a win.
Musamam White Intense
Of all my recent acquisitions – and this one I bought blind – Musamam White Intense is the most baffling. I bought it because all the descriptions I could fine online were for a creamy but fresh coconut-sandalwood scent. The only lactones I love are the ones that exist in nature, i.e., milky notes wrenched from peach skin, fig leaf sap, or sandalwood, rather than from an off-the-shelf aromachemical labelled ‘milk’ or ‘gelato’, so the naturally blond-on-blond idea of Musamam White Intense appealed greatly to me. But smelled blind, I would have pegged this more as the lime peel and rubbery, peachy undertones common to some frangipani materials, over a tart, pale lumberyard-ish wood that might be sandalwood but that could also be hinoki or oak, given its vague, slightly featureless woodiness (I guess I was right about the blond). While it’s true, technically, that there is a tiny bit of milkiness and a nuance one might conceivably define as coconutty if you squint hard enough, the character of this scent is mostly sour, silvery woods washed in a mineral stream with citrus rind.
Despite the gap between expectation and reality, I quite like Musamam White Intense and wear it the most out of all my recent acquisitions. Or, maybe it’s not so much that I like it but that I have yet to figure out what it smells like to me. It continuously evades my grasp, which frustrates me. It might be the rare case of a Lattafa that is abstract and therefore complex, or it might be that what this scent is going for is something like the scent of driftwood on a winter’s beach, in which case it nails the brief. Spun as a citrusy, woody ‘ambergris’ beachcomber scent, I get it. I can see that. Try to sell me Musamam White Intense as a creamy-milky-coconut thing, though, and I start to believe that most of the people reviewing it are either full of shit or are aping the review below them out of fear that what they are smelling must be ‘wrong’.
Bade’e Al Oud Amethyst
The neighborhood where I live is roughly 50% Muslim, 50% Christian, so I see my fair share of ladies wearing everything from the hijab and a relaxed niqab to the full-on burqa. They all seem to be wearing either Yara or Amethyst, billowing regally from beneath their voluminous folds. I was at a drag race rally (not sure if this is the right name for it) around Eid-al-Fitr in April, which I enjoyed intensely not because of the car racing but more for the deeply exotic scents mingling in the warm air – the hot rubber and asphalt from the screeching tires, the spicy, cuminy sweat of unwashed men’s shirts, and the intensely jammy rose and jasmine loudness of the combined perfumes steaming in thick roils off my niqabi ladies.
Amethyst captures everything of this event – the smoky, rubbery petrol fumes, the rich roses, the Turkish delight rosewater flavour, the Arabian jasmine – and even if it does immediately smell a little synthetic, it smells so fabulously out there and regal that you can’t help you be wowed. The thing that makes me pause – and the reason I haven’t bought a bottle yet – is that the drydown is a little sour and ashy, like me after a night in the pub. Still thinking about it, though.
Raghba
Kalemat on steroids. It smells exactly like warm treacle tart, which is made with Lyle’s Golden Syrup and breadcrumbs pressed gently into an all-butter, short-crust pie shell, but over a rubbery, slightly sour oud wood note that, although more joss stick than actual oud, is surprisingly effective at balancing out that syrupy sweetness. At its heart, it’s an amber, but I always feel that it is much more than that, and that the best I can do is to say it is warm dry wood meets nag champa meets toasty resin and a syrup facet that might be fruit or grain derived, but it doesn’t matter because it is both homespun and slightly exotic in a generic manner. I love it.
Khamrah Qahwah
People say that if you have Khamrah then owning Khamrah Qahwah is redundant – I strongly disagree. Khamrah Qahwah is a substantially better perfume. The addition of the bitter coffee grounds and fresh, almost green-lemony cardamom notes turn a dull, date-heavy dessert into something far more aromatic and rich in contrast.
The synthetic sawcut drone of the Ambroxan and the cheap, greasy coconut hairspray nuance of the original is muffled under the thick layer of warm, messy ambers and spices, and only ever bothers me when I’ve been swimming and the pool chemicals have peeled all this back to reveal the ugly synthetic skeleton. In general, though, this is smooth, rich, and a warm, nutty ‘brown’ scent on me, a sort of Lutensian-lite, easy listening shortcut to orientalia. I like that it reminds me of living in Brcko, where older Bosnian Muslim ladies taught me how to suck down the thickly matted Turkish coffee through a single cardamom pod clasped between my upper and lower front teeth. Khamrah Qahwah is similar in that it’s gently, not rudely, exotic.
Ana Abyedh Poudrée
Ana Abyedh Poudrée is a creamy, fluffy musk with enough rose and other florals to make it feel chewy, like a soft, white nougat wrapped in edible sugar paper. Loaded with what feels like cashmeran as well as several type of white musk molecules, it achieves a doughy cream-on-cream effect that I personally find irresistible. It is somewhat similar to Teint de Neige by Lorenzo Villoresi, but a little sharper and without the overwhelming density of powder that the Villoresi scent famously brings. The powder aspect of Ana Abyedh Poudrée is at first milky, like a doughnut soaked in tres leches, then super dry – almost tinder box dry – like the trail left by an incense stick or ash in the air after burning Palo Santo. It is this shifting contract between sharp and soft, doughy and dry, milky and powdery, that I find so appealing. It may not be everyone’s idea of an ideal white musk, but it comes close to mine.
Liam Grey
Though famously a dupe of Gris Charnel, I love this as a perfume in its own right – it is a bright, citrusy green fig leaf brewed in rubbery black tea, with the masculine prickle of cardamom and a cooling veil of icy iris milk straight from the fridge. Both aromatic and creamy, I feel like a lighter version of myself when I wear it. Slightly woodier than the original Gris Charnel and sweeter than Gris Charnel Extrait, it straddles a happy middle ground that is not so one or the other than you feel guilty for wearing a dupe.
Further, unlike Gris Charnel Extrait, which unspools into a messy, synthy woodsy affair upon reaching the four hour mark, Liam Grey holds on to its smooth quality until the bitter end. It smells like the milky masala chai I drink from a local coffee house. Perfumes like Liam Grey make me think someone at Lattafa has realized that not everything they turn out have to have that rubbery synth edge for a perfume to be beautiful and long-lasting. I would never spend BDK prices of a bottle of Gris Charnel, partially because I already own a scent in the same genre (Remember Me by Jovoy) and partially because I think only Caron has the right to charge over 300 euros for a genuine extrait (though I wouldn’t pay Caron prices for the state of Caron output these days). But I was and am happy to take a 25 euro gamble on a bottle of Liam. For me, it is a ridiculously high return on investment for a scent that gives me everything that the original does.
Ishq Al Shuyukh Gold
Ishq Al Shuyukh Gold is a thick welterweight of a perfume – a doorstopper actually – featuring a meaty, red, drippingly iodic saffron leather boot left to fester and ooze and impregnate a bowl of the heaviest vanilla cream imaginable. The pungency of the saffron is immense, with its burnt tire and bitter, metallic medicine aspects out on full display, all adding up to a rich, rubbery leather note that seems too raw and bloody to be put in the front window, but you feel the economic pressure to rush it out anyway.
The thick, custardy vanilla lapping at its raw, meaty edges is a dopamine rush that you can hear thundering at you a mile away, like the hot oatmeal pouring down the hill towards the villagers in The Girl and the Porridge Pot story. It is so dairy rich. Though a bit rough and scary at the start, the beauty of this scent is in the drydown, when everything smells like soft, buttery, but still a bit leathery, like a vanilla pod removed from its bath of cream and split open easily with the merest touch of pressure from your fingernail.
It is very similar to Vanagloria, without the fresh pineapple weirdness, which I guess makes it similar to YSL Babycat and Rosendo Mateu #5, but if I could get the 135 euros back that I spent on Vanagloria (Laboratorio Olfattivo), my favourite of this genre, and put 35 euros down on Ishq instead, then I would. Since they all traverse the same basic trajectory from a thick, tight knot of sticky resins, leather, and saffron to a smoother, more relaxed ‘black vanilla cream’ suede aroma, there is not much point in owning more than one of these exemplars. However, I am happy with keeping a bottle of Ishq in Africa and a bottle of Vanagloria in Europe. Separated by continents and whole economic markets, they each occupy a different plane of existence, like similarly sized planets in solar systems millions of light years away from one another.
The Bad
Photo by Niklas Kickl on Unsplash
Qaa’ed
I bought Qaa’ed for my husband in 2021 and all four of us have rued the day I did ever since. Taken in (and not for the last time, I bet) by all the mentions on Fragrantica of warm gingerbread or cardamom cookies, and conveniently ignoring all the reviews that mentioned how it smelled like a loud men’s aftershave, I imported it at some expense from Indian eBay, from whence it was dispatched – it seemed to me, given the seven weeks it took to arrive – on the back of manatees and elephants.
Exotic back story and all, you might say my expectations were high. One spray was enough to reveal the gravity of my mistake. Give it some time to ‘macerate’ they said, and that synthetic-smelling roar will die down to reveal the glories of a highly spiced, leathery, caramelized woody scent. Reader, it’s been three full years since this thing got shoved to the back of the sock drawer, and having pulled it out again just now, it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that Qaa’ed needs a full 36 months of aging to smell a mere 10% better than it did when you first opened the bottle.
Rather than tell you what’s ok about this scent (a short list indeed, and includes the bottle), I am going to tell you about what’s wrong with it. First of all, the combination of treacly, syrupy sweet notes over those brash ‘burnt wood’ aromachemicals make it smell like any generic designer scent that markets itself as ‘smoky’ or ‘oriental’ these days – anything that comes in a black bottle, basically – and is unfortunately close to the chemical marshmallow BBQ stench of By the Fireplace. The cardamom and other spice notes barely register against the burnt but radiant woody amber, so the gingerbread cookies remain trapped in your hopes and dreams rather than making it out there on your arm. Lastly, its spicy masculine leather notes take it beyond the outer limits of my personal gender stretchiness – I would no more wear this than I would Brut or Old Spice (but obviously, I am not you, so you do you).
Lastly – and yes, I know I already promised that the last point was ‘lastly’ but since my hatred of this knows no bounds, I shall continue – it contains a sulfurous chemical that smells like boiled cabbage or broccoli farts, which means it’s giving a little Hard Leather, another monstrosity, this time of the Norlimbanol sort.
Bade’e Al Oud Honor and Glory
A garish, synthetic-smelling nightmare of a fragrance that pairs a strung-out pineapple note over a depressingly Ambroxinated amber for a result that would be obnoxious in an Axe spray, let alone a personal fragrance. It brays sporty blue masculine in big neon letters, even though the billing is all crème brulée and lush, tropical, juicy pineapple.
And you know, I am not sure what it was about that description that made it sound so attractive to me in the first place. Possibly the worst thing you could find at the bottom of a bowl of crème brulée are chunks of pineapple. I mean, have you seen what too much pineapple does to your tongue? Just imagine what it will do to the soft, wobbly custard. Curdle city, baby,
Anyway, all I can smell is the dreadful screech of whatever woody amber they have stuffed into this thing, but I am sure that the people who hate this scent will blame it for being ‘too spicy’. Spicy, my ass. Spice is pleasantly nose-tickling, even at its most aromatic or fiery (chili, black pepper) and cannot be held responsible for the almost physically painful nostril sand-blasting effect of nasty, loud aromachemicals.
Someone, somewhere will bleat plaintively, but what about the turmeric? To which I say, what about the turmeric? Turmeric is the face flannel of Spices. Sure, it can boast of its brilliant ochre dyeing properties and its anti-inflammatory effects, but let’s get real, sensory-wise, it smells like licking the surface of your child’s first attempt at an un-Kilned bowl at a pottery class. It’s an off-brand saffron, or an even cheaper henna, with a dusty, astringent medicine feel. It is not going to set your tongue or nose on fire. No, that’ll be the Amberwood or whatever aromachemical accounts for Honor and Glory’s special flavor of screech. I see this scent clearly, and unfortunately, it is ug-leeee.
Bade’e Al Oud Oud for Glory
My father wears this, which surprises me, because his favorite perfumes are fresh, woody-citrusy vetivers – think Timbuktu, Terre d’Hermès, Eau Sauvage, and Quercus. I asked him about it, and he said that he only wears it at night when watching TV, so that he is not disturbing anyone but himself. ‘It’s a bit loud, alright,’ he admitted sheepishly. A bit loud? The Krakatoa Eruption was probably quieter. It is one of those perfumes that I have difficulty perceiving individual notes, obscured as they are by a noxious cloud of greyish, fuzzy Cilit Bang-like chemicals that bloom suddenly and violently, like the blast wave of an atomic bomb. People say they can smell leather, oud, and patchouli in this – I cannot. All I smell is harsh.
Khaltaat Al Arabia Royal Blends
This is another one of Lattafa’s super potent, Amberwood-powered spice bombs aimed squarely at being the loudest bish in the room. The tech bros will love this one, because like Bade’e Al Oud Honor and Glory, Soleil de Jeddah Mango Kiss, and Erba Pura, it is yet another attempt to make fruit butch. Now, I don’t know why fruit has to be turned inside out with woody ambers so strident they will strip sebum from your pores at a distance of five meters for them to be macho enough for the bros to wear, but pleasant they are not.
I feel the same way about Royal Blends as I do Erba Pura, which is to say, puzzled at what the pear or apple ever did to anyone to deserve being dipped into Windex and rolled around in cigarette ash until there’s enough grit on it to pass as manly. Men, why can’t your mangoes and apples just be soft, juicy, and sunny? Let fruit be fruit, not a cigar, or a glass of whiskey, or the whole darned library, or whatever other masculine trope they are throwing at the genre these days. I can smell Royal Blends on my clothes after two wash cycles, which is never a good sign, but God knows, maybe that’s what men want. I don’t know.
The Meh
Photo by Sinitta Leunen on Unsplash
Teriaq
From the few glowing reviews I’d seen on YouTube for this, I gather that people are hyping this one to the rafters almost entirely because it is by a ‘name perfumer’ – Quentin Bisch in this case – rather than the usual anonymous perfumer toiling behind the curtains at Lattafa HQ. I don’t have a problem with perfumers being named because the company shelled out big bucks to get them in, but I do have a problem with everyone assuming that the perfume is going to be amazing just because there is a ‘famous’ perfumer behind it.
The truth – and to be honest, this is something that most vloggers specializing in Middle Eastern cheapies or the pay-to-play, social influencer-paying brands like Parfums de Marley won’t realize – is that for every perfumer with one great perfume to their name, there will be fifty more perfumes in their portfolio that just keep the lights on for a brand somewhere or that came 4th or 5th in an in-house competition brief and were idling on a shelf (or notebook) for a few years until there was a chance to up-cycle it elsewhere. Quentin Bisch is no exception – he did Angel Muse, which I love, and Ganymede, which many people rate highly, with perhaps the latter being his sole claim to an original, groundbreaking piece of work. But on a day to day basis, what he is really good at is producing slightly generic-smelling, always syrupy sweet modern compositions that turn out to be commercial hit makers for companies like Gaultier and Parfums de Marley.
My guess is that much of the praise for Teriaq, therefore, comes from the name recognition of a perfumer associated with some of the most rip-roaringly popular feminine perfumes of the last ten years, like Delina (Parfums de Marly), all of the Le Belle perfumes (Gaultier), Fleur Narcotique (Ex Nihilo), and so on. The man turns everything he touches to gold, commercially speaking. Teriaq itself is an example of a perfumer phoning it in for a brand where they think nobody will notice, least of all the genre’s rather uncritical audience, for whom a bottle of perfume need only cost 30 euros for it to be proclaimed a work of genius.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, Teriaq smells like a mixture of Le Belle (Gaultier) and Pink Sugar (Aquolina), all burnt sugar caramel thickness, but with a lingeringly bitter, green edge that makes me think of immortelle and specifically of Afternoon of a Faun (Etat Libre d’Orange). There is also a prominent cis-jasmone-heavy material in here that smells like heady jasmine mixed with celery leaf, something that not everyone is going to like, but again, reminding me of the slight bitterness of the myrrh in perfumes like Alien Essence Absolue (Mugler) and indeed of La Belle Le Parfum (Gaultier), the latter penned by Bisch.
I would describe all this as a rough, green-brown syrupy smell that can’t decide whether it’s the corduroy and pipe vibe of a men’s immortelle chypre along the lines of Afternoon of a Faun or a femme caramel/burnt sugar tonka bomb with a lot of DNA in common with the thick, musky floral sugars of most of the Gaultier and Mugler feminine line up. For this reason, I think it borders on unwearable, which makes it interesting to see all of the reviews of people struggling to reconcile the lore of the famous perfumer with the over-sweetened, vegetal glop that is being served up here. It is not a bad perfume, but it is not a good one either.
Nebras
The hint of red berry combining with the vanilla gives the topnotes a sweet, anisic character, but with a cheap edge, like those Licorice Allsorts sweets that are a clear anise gel inside and covered with tiny fruity pebbles on the outside. What strikes me about Nebras from that point onwards is how nice but unremarkable it is. A sugary vanilla with a faintly dusty edge that might be cocoa but might also be practically anything else, the fruit and anise accents leaving only a trace of a black licorice gumminess. I almost admire its roundness and lack of edge, but even I – having bought a whole bottle of it – cannot pretend it is anything but a banal little Vanilla Fields body spray type of thing.
And actually, this is how I’m using Nebras, as a gentle layer of something vanilla-ish, set at the indoor voice levels of a scented body lotion, under sharper, bustier perfumes that need their edges smoothing out a little. I realize, of course, that I could achieve the same objective with the Yves Rocher Bourbon Vanilla body lotion, but that is super expensive and hard to find in Africa, so Nebras it is.
Ansaam Gold
I have never smelled Oriana by Parfums de Marly, after which this is supposedly modelled, but I can confirm that Ansaam Gold is in the same wheelhouse as Love, Don’t be Shy by Kilian, the OG of this particular scent DNA (very little being genuinely original in perfumery). If you like that sweet, orange blossom-scented marshmallow fluff kind of scent, then Ansaam Gold is precisely that and there is no real need to buy a niche variant for $200-300 more. I was going to add ‘unless you’re actively trying to avoid the garish-looking bottle of the Lattafa’ when I remembered that the Parfums de Marly bottles are equal in the eyesore stakes.
I don’t personally aspire to smelling like a fluffy, orange-y marshmallow but Ansaam Gold is not bad either. It is just a little too cute and girlish for it to be something I reach for more than once a year. I will say, however, that there is a powdery, woody nag champa note in here that is missing in the By Kilian scent, and that this is a marked improvement, as it tamps down the syrupy sweetness of that childish orange blossom note to a bearable degree.
Art of Arabia I
A very simple, fresh citrus scent with a touch of astringent black tea. The tannins and silvery, woody blast of bergamot lightly mark the scent out as masculine, though as there is nothing so particularly butch about it – no oakmoss, lavender, or coumarin – that a woman couldn’t pull it off. It doesn’t feel overly synthetic, even though it hovers close to the functional category. I just don’t find it very compelling. I bought a 20ml bottle of it for my son and though he likes it well enough, I think its main attraction to him is as a quick sprucer-upper in lieu of a shower.
Khamrah
I bought this for my son as part of his Christmas presents last year because he is 13 and gets all his perfume recommendations from Tik Tok (oh, the indignity). Angel’s Share by Kilian is hugely hyped on that channel and people suggested this as a dupe. Now, Khamrah is not a dupe of Angel’s Share and we were both smart enough to know it was the near identical bottle that created this impression rather than the scent itself, but ‘similar vibes’ was all he wanted.
Still, expectations properly tempered and all, we were both a little disappointed in Khamrah. It is sweet to an unpleasant extreme, like dried fruit macerated in sugar syrup for three months and then poured over one of those potent, spiky ambers that have more to do with Amberwood or Iso E Super than actual resin. The combination of sweet and synthy comes off as slightly cheapened – a feature emphasized by an ghostly coconut Glade note that haunts the drydown – and based on how little my son wears or talks about it, I can tell he also doesn’t think it measures up to the hype.
Perhaps I poisoned the well a little by giving him a travel bottle of Ambre Narguilé by Hermes while we were waiting for the Khamrah to arrive, because what else is Angel’s Share but a poor copy of Ambre Narguilé? I knew when his pupils expanded as he took his first sniff that Khamrah never stood a chance.
Yara
This is THE mall scent in East Africa. Ladies of all ages from pre-teen to matron seem to be wearing it. Having tried it multiple times, I can only guess that the desire to smell clean, fluffy, and feminine is universal among women who view perfume as an extension of their grooming ritual and not as the wild, yearning carpet ride into the belly of my imagination as I do. Seen through this lens, one could do much worse than Yara. It is a warm fruity-floral suffused with a rosy, marshmallowy musk that has no sharp corners to it at all and no delineation between one note and the next.
Some reviews say this smells like fluffy strawberry milk, the appeal of which I do understand, but this is very much a case of wishful thinking. I think the general idea here is good – pillowy, soft, clean – but either spring for something that goes full hog on it, like Teint de Neige, or spend the Yara money on the equally cheap but far more beautiful and fluffier Ana Abjedh Poudrée.
Oud Mood
Despite the name, this is not similar to Oud Satin Mood, nor is it supposed to be. Rather, it is a jammy, synthy rose-oud that would be unbearable to me were it not for the odd little shifts in its trajectory that keep me entertained. It starts out as a jammy rose with the regular Lattafa oud – a vile, rubbery synth that smells like tries covered in caramel and signed with a blowtorch – before suddenly shifting into a wet, sheepy labdanum that feels shockingly moldy.
But before I can begin to pigeonhole this, it morphs again, this time into what I can only describe as a dollop of strawberry-flavored marshmallow fluff. This odd accent, making its oddly late entry, develops into the most delicious scent of doll head I have ever smelled. It is the kind of scent I follow strange women into crowds for, trying to find out what it is. I don’t know why I love this incredibly sweet, dopey smell so much, the only explanation that makes sense to this Mitsouko-wearing, middle-aged woman being that it triggers a Proustian flashback to me playing with My Little Pony when I was a kid. This accord acts like a sugar high, complete with post-ingestion self-loathing and shame.
The last twist is that somewhere in the drydown it flips 180 degrees from a syrupy, dollhead-esque rose-oud into a gritty, benzoin-based amber that smells like speckles of brown sugar on a pie crust. It takes me a few wears until I realize that they have shoehorned the dregs of Raghba into the bones of this scent, making everything else stand atop its sturdy legs.
Listen, I don’t think Oud Mood is a particularly well-designed perfume. Neither is it objectively ‘good’ under any lens you might examine it under. It is loud and scratchy and obnoxious as heck for a solid 70% of its development trajectory. But I’m keeping it around on the off chance that some day, I myself am feeling loud and scratchy and obnoxious and need a fragrance that can stand shoulder to shoulder with me.
Source of Samples: I bought my bottles from various sources, among them Notino, eBay, Perfumes Wallet, Middle Eastern Perfumes Kenya, and the Arabic perfume stand in my local mall in Nairobi. A few samples were included with my orders for free, and several more I smelled at the mall without buying. I don’t receive PR from Lattafa.
Cover Image: Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash