To be frank, 90% of the perfumes I smell are disappointing, if not downright awful. Which is why I’m starting a series dedicated to reviewing (or should that be ‘roasting’) the duds.
The Arabian Heritage Collection by Areej Le Doré is a deliberately minimalist collection, focused on the three materials that are not only critical to Arabian or mukhallat style perfumery but happen to be the recurring motifs of each Areej Le Doré collection – ambergris (Al Ambar), oud (Al Oud) and sandalwood (Al Sandal). As always, when I smell an Areej Le Doré collection, I try to evaluate what I am smelling through the lens of audience (who is this for?), identity (which hat is Russian Adam wearing now?), and the newcomer’s virgin nose (how would an ordinary person experience this?).
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
Floral Review Spicy Floral Tuberose Vanilla White Floral
Un Bel Amour d’Été by Parfum d’Empire
25th August 2024
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
All Natural Aromatic Balsamic Cult of Raw Materials Fougere Herbal Incense Independent Perfumery Masculine Oud Review Rosewood Saffron Smoke
Oud Taiwan by Areej Le Dore
22nd August 2024
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
Chypre Floral Hay Honey Incense Independent Perfumery Iris Review Violet
Epona by Papillon Artisan Perfumes: A Review
15th July 2024
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