Claire, Author at takeonethingoff.com

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The Ormonde Jayne Core Collection

15th June 2020

Ormonde Jayne set out its mission and values in its original core collection, and to this day, it remains the standard bearer for the brand. I’ve written about some of the perfumes in the Ormonde Jayne core collection before, but since I’ve been reevaluating much of my collection recently, I thought it might be useful to update or expand upon my thoughts.

In general, my unscientific belief that Ormonde Jayne is the English Chanel bears out. This is solidly-built, almost classical perfumery with a modern elegance derived from strong artistic direction and an admirably no-nonsense approach to the valuable role synthetics play in elevating naturals.

One thing I have noticed this time around is that the literal names – Champaca, Ta’if, Frangipani, and so on – are a Le Labo-ish piece of misdirection, suggestive of a soliflore-ism that simply isn’t there. Words have power, so there will always be those disappointed if the titular ingredient isn’t headlining the whole show. But on the flip side, newcomers to the brand who are able to park their expectations at the door may find their minds blown by the beauty arrived at via more circuitous routes.

Champaca

Champaca is a scent whose appeal eludes many. But you know what? Half the time it eludes me too. On its bad days, many of the slurs thrown its way worm their way into my head and nag persistently at me with the worry that they might be true – that Champaca is nothing special, that it’s too champaca or not champaca enough, that it’s nondescript, that it’s a dowdy green floral that Calvin Klein’s Truth did better and cheaper. Then there’s its musky loudness, which I always forget until I get called out on it by a colleague who is never backward about coming forward on the subject of my perfume.

But on good days, Champaca is the gently starched air from a bowl of Chinese greens and the damp, permeating nuttiness of brown basmati rice. It makes me think of stepping in from a cold, rainy afternoon in Cork or Limerick into the wood-lined hush of a traditional Japanese restaurant, slightly steamy from condensation and humming with low conversations.

I don’t understand the accusations of tropical yellow flowers or heady ambers in relation to Champaca. It is not even a particularly floral experience. To me, Champaca smells more like the fresh green peel of a Granny Smith apple rinsed with rainwater than a flower. Yes, technically, this all might be unexciting. The scent of an upscale Japanese onsen or spa is never really going to raise the barometer on anyone’s passion. But when I am feeling delicate, or in need of a friendly hand at the small of my back, then Champaca, with its gossamer-light bloom of starchy musks, rice steam, apple peel, watery bamboo, maybe mint, and the environmental exhalations of clean, blond wood, is what I find myself reaching for.

Orris Noir

I originally invested in Orris Noir as a poor man’s substitute for the far more expensive Tsarina, having identified a creamy-milky, anisic iris as the underpinning to both. Now, after taking the time to study both at leisure, I can say that while Tsarina is by far the creamiest, more luxurious ‘white’ leather scent I have ever smelled, in retrospect it doesn’t turn me on as much as Orris Noir, which, although less ‘beautiful’ than Tsarina, has more conversation.

Orris Noir has three or four distinct layers. The first is a doughy iris as dense as under-proved bread dough studded with dried fruit. A couple of years on, I now smell this as a rosy iris bread that’s been soaked in sweet milk, like the egg-rich Easter crown baked once a year in the Balkans. The second layer is an anisic myrrh with the same crystallized texture as found in other myrrh scents such as Myrrhe Ardente, albeit more golden and less overtly itchy-scratchy. The third layer is a minimally smoky cloud of wood or incense that lifts the perfume and makes it radiant (probably a combination of the Iso E Super and the Chinese cedar). Last but not least, there’s a bright, fruity jasmine that fizzes as sweetly as a glass of freshly-poured Coca Cola. Somehow, all of these elements hang together as naturally and as lightly as a silk shawl.

Orris Noir is a fantastic advertisement for the Ormonde Jayne style of building a fragrance, in that it is composed of many different layers, all of them as light as air, but which when laid one on top of another become a dense, velvety mass. I love Orris Noir for what it is – a beguilingly soft spice oriental – rather than hate it for what it is not, i.e., noir or even orris. Indeed, if Ormonde Jayne had named it something else, Orris Noir might have gained the respect granted to other similarly soft, hazy resinous-floral orientals such as Bois d’Argent (Dior) or Jasmin de Nuit (The Different Company). This is one perfume in my collection that has improved greatly upon (re)acquaintance.

Frangipani Absolute

Frangipani Absolute is at least accurately named, given that it smells more like the absolute than the living flower. The absolute smells green and waxy, like a nubbin of beeswax rolled in matcha powder; the living flower, which I had the opportunity of smelling for the first time in Colombia last summer, smells a bit like jasmine but without the indole and grape, and there is a buttery undertone that I associate with gardenia, minus the heavy bleu cheese aspects.

Frangipani Absolute freshens the waxy-green heft of the absolute by filtering it through lime and linden blossom, creating the impression of hothoused tropical flowers drenched in ice water and the glass partitions thrown open to salty sea air. The brightness of this topnote is undercut later on by the lush creaminess of the living flower, embodied by an accord that smells like a dairy-heavy rice and coconut pudding made out of tuberose petals, with pools of yellow Irish butter rising to the surface. A subtly salty musk and clean cedar hum in the far background, mainly there for support in case the almost unrelenting brightness of the lime-drenched white flowers falters.

Cleverly, the perfumer has made the floral component very peachy, to mimic the peachy jasmine-like aura of the living flower. Frangipani is therefore blessed with a suede-skin note that smells charmingly like the back of a rubber watch on a sweaty child. The scent shifts between these three main accords – green-aqueous-fresh, peachy-rubber, and creamy-buttery-tuberose – without ever getting pulled too far down in one single direction. That’s some balancing act.

Frangipani Absolute is an undeniably beautiful scent, and an interesting take on a flower that often plays second fiddle to more powerful headliners such as gardenia or tuberose. My hesitation on whether it stays in my collection or not stems from several different quarters.

First, the salty, quasi-aquatic musk in the drydown reminds me very much of Lys Méditerranée (Malle), already a wardrobe staple for me, which makes me wonder if it’s not duplicative to have two scents that represent largely the same ‘feel’, i.e., heady white flowers drenched in dew and the salty air rolling in off the ocean. The occasions when I feel the need for this precise combination are few and far between, therefore surely it is redundant for me to have two separate fragrances at the ready when this tight little niche corner of my ‘need’ rears its head.

Second, Frangipani is so pretty and well-presented that it makes me feel slightly uncouth in comparison. Worse, the prettiness reminds me of the golden, solar fruity-floral ‘glazed eyes’ affair that is J ’Adore (Dior), which is fine if you’re wearing something you can pick up from any Sephora or Douglas, but not great if you’re special ordering from a classy niche brand like Ormonde Jayne.

Third, the brightness of the lime-and-peach-hued white flowers feels a little too sharp and insistent at times, like when you neck that syrupy but metallic juice from a tin of canned tropical fruit. In other words, absolutely gorgeous at first but perhaps wearing a little on your nerves towards the last? Along the same lines of complaint (minor, but still), the vanilla tuberose pudding base flirts with heaviness; it clashes a little queasily with the citric acid of the lime, to the extent that it teeters on the precipice of a curdle.

Out of all the Ormonde Jayne scents I own, Frangipani Absolute is the one I agonize over the most. Do I need it? No. Does its classical (but slightly mainstream) beauty justify me keeping it? Maybe. But the fact that I swing between a yes and a no on this scent, personally, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t rank among the top tier of tropical floral perfumes I’ve had the pleasure of smelling.

Tolu

Despite not being wowed at first sniff, I have come around to the pleasures of Tolu. It has a bitter, spicy broom note that slices through the golden, balsamic sweetness of amber to create something that is both fresh and heavy, like a flourless chocolate torte that dissolves into fennel dust on the tongue. The kind of thing that invites you to take a second slice, even in summer. I can see this working as a sort of upmarket Dune. In that sense, this is definitely a floral oriental rather than a straight up ‘golden’ amber. It certainly doesn’t maintain a strict tolu balsam fidelity. Rather, Tolu has that sophisticated French floral-sandy feel to it that I associate not only with Dune (Dior) but also with 24, Rue Faubourg (Hermes), albeit with the innovation of a sweetly resinous base to tilt it ever so slightly in the direction of Morocco rather than Paris.

The more I wear Tolu, the more I appreciate its subtlety. I used to prefer the caramelized full frontal of one-the-nose resin bombs and ambers to the almost too quiet, too ‘mixed’ cloud of balsams, orange blossom, and musks represented by Tolu. But Tolu is, I realize, a mood. It is very perfumey meaning it’s been worked and reworked to the same point of abstraction as Coco (Chanel), Dune (Dior) or even Alahine (Teo Cabanel).

Tolu is the quintessential going out perfume for nights along the Riviera, where women and men are beautifully dressed and the warm air smells like a mixture of flowers, salty skin, and the balsamic twang of Mediterranean herbs and umbrella pines lining the promenade. It’s easy to argue that there’s nothing very unusual about Tolu, but what it does, it does extremely well. I will always have space in my wardrobe for this perfumey, French-smelling take on the warm, golden balsams I love rinsed out with flowers, salt, and herbs.

Tiaré

For a while, my interest in Ormonde Jayne stopped with OJ Woman, a perfume I’d struggled with for years before finally falling in love with it. That was, until one day a couple of years ago, I fished around in my sample box looking for something crisp and green to go well with a planned walk in a nearby castle grounds with my children and stumbled upon Tiaré.

Its lack of anything truly tiaré-like or tropical puzzled me at first. But I remember marveling at the champagne-like quality of the lime and green notes fizzing gently around the oily but fresh white flower petals. The damp, mossy drydown proved to be a perfect reflection of the elegance of the castle lake and grounds. There is something pinned-up and Victorian in its mien – not entirely me, but rather someone I aspire to be. It was the first sample from the Ormonde Jayne sample set that I drained completely. Whereupon I forgot about it entirely.

Fast forward to Summer 2017, which is when, while sweating our way through the forests and fields of the Sologne and Loiret, I decided that, really, nothing was more French or more crisply elegant than Tiaré, and that I desperately needed a bottle of it. Tiaré would be, I’d decided, my entry point to a new life in France that, although it never actually materialized, was the Big Plan in our family at the time, to the point of flying the kids out to various French cities in an attempt to decide where we would settle.

The firm belief that a life in France calls for a thoroughly ‘French’ perfume (as if my collection wasn’t already 75% made up of so-called French perfume) is why I am now the proud possessor of a totally unnecessary 120mls of Tiaré. (I am perennially guilty of daydreaming my life forward and allowing my purchases to lead the way. In 2018, I was so convinced that I was going to be hired by a British not-for-profit to manage their programs in Myanmar that I got emotionally invested in Indochine by Parfumerie Generale, a perfume based on Burmese thanaka wood. I didn’t get the job, but you bet I bought a bottle of Indochine. I don’t even want to say how many ‘Roman’ perfumes were necessary for me to settle into a new life in Italy.)

Anyway, back to Ireland in these early, post-Coronavirus times and Tiaré, like Cristalle (Chanel), doesn’t really suit the damp, cool conditions. Yet I am loathe to get rid of Tiaré, because, God knows, I will probably need it for when we finally move to France. In which case, I will also need the quintessential cognac-colored leather shopper, very pointy ballet flats, a chic haircut, and a perfectly-cut navy blazer. So, I guess I’d better start shopping now….

Ormonde Jayne Woman

Woman occupies a place in my personal pantheon of greats, but the route to loving her has not been easy. In fact, I have struggled with this perfume on and off for years. I imagine that, for people like me, with biological sensitivities to certain materials, getting past Woman’s many thorns is like loving someone who is beautiful but difficult.

Initially, my nose was so sensitive to the combination of woody ambers, sticky pine, and Iso E Super that the only notes I could smell were acrid, burnt, metallic – like burnt fuses and the La Roche Posay medicated acne cream. These unfortunate associations, plus the physical sensation I had of an ice-cold shiv driving into the tender recesses of my brain, are what made me keep my sample of Woman at a safe distance from my nose, wrapped twice in cling film and double-bagged.

Every so often, over the years, I would take out that sample of Woman and tentatively sniff. Now, here’s the strangest thing. As my exposure to the violent woody ambers and brutal Iso E Super used increasingly in niche increased, so too did my tolerance. I don’t mean that I started to like them, but rather that their presence no longer obscured large parts of a composition for me. This meant that perfumes such as Indochine (Parfumerie Generale), Musc Nomade (Annick Goutal), and Ormonde Jayne Woman were now ‘unlocked’ for me. I could smell all parts of these perfumes rather than slivers.

Having said that, progress was gradual. For example, for about six months, although I could smell all parts of Woman, all depth perception dropped off after about an hour or two, leading me to believe (mistakenly) that the perfume had simply stopped in its tracks. I now believe that this was due to the type of woody ambers used, some of which have a curious side effect of making a scent seem to disappear and then come back, over and over again, throughout a day’s wear. Ambroxan can have this odd ‘receding and resurging’ effect too; I sense it most keenly in Amouage Jubilation XXV, which my husband says he wears for other people because he himself cannot smell it after an hour (to his family, it seems quite big and room-filling).

Anyway, the reason I’m waffling on about this odd facet of Woman is that reviews are the little markers we drop along our journey, in the hope that they serve as clues to fellow travelers years down the road, right? I remember smelling Indochine and doing a Google search for something along the lines of ‘Why does Indochine smell like an ice pick to my brain?’ and stumbling across Kafkaesque’s review, which was the first source of answers for me as to why some materials were physically obtrusive to my nose yet imperceptible to others. I felt seen. I hope that someone struggling with Ormonde Jayne Woman finds their way to this review and gets comfort from knowing that they’re not alone, and that there might be a rational explanation for not immediately jiving with one of the most renowned perfumes in modern niche.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel, folks, there really is. Now when I smell Ormonde Woman, I smell the whole forest, the sugared smoke of gingerbread crumbs thrown onto the fire, and the inky mass of woodland violets and hemlock rolled out underfoot, and Scarlett O’ Hara’s dark green velvet gown made out of curtains and fury.

At heart, Ormonde Woman is a nugget of amber surrounded by tall conifers and hemlock, but its mysterious appeal can’t be explained by its notes or even how we think they all hang together. Woman is one of those perfumes you submit to, body and soul, without much hope of ever picking it apart. It took me years to be able to smell all parts of it but now when I wear Ormonde Jayne Woman now, I smell it all, and what I smell makes me breathe deep and easy.

Osmanthus

Osmanthus is not my favorite osmanthus-themed scent in the Ormonde Jayne stable (that would be Qi), but it is surely the prettiest. Osmanthus explores the softly soapy, ‘clean linen’ side of the bloom that marks it out more as vaguely cherry blossom than the pungent fruity apricot suede trope often plumbed in niche.

In fact, aside from a vaguely peachy or apricotty tinge in the topnotes, Osmanthus sidesteps its namesake ingredient and goes for pomelo peel and white petals plunged into ice water and polished to a high shine by radiant aquatic musks. It smells pleasantly cooling, like a tall glass of lemonade or the feel of fresh cotton on hot skin.

Think of it this way; if Qi is an apricot-colored suede pouch filled with green tea, then Osmanthus is a white broderie anglaise sundress and a pair of straw espadrilles strung over one perfectly tan shoulder.

All very nice but running a little too close to one of those Atelier Cologne citrus-and-cotton-musk scents for comfort. I always thought that Osmanthus would smell more ‘at home’ in the form of a body care product than a perfume, and it turns out I was right; the Osmanthus Hair Mist is lovely. Warmer and peachier than the perfume – to my nose at least – the pert, perfumey prettiness of Osmanthus makes more sense to me when spritzed through second day hair. It is still much girlier than I am, but at least in this form, it just creates the ~~manifest lie~~ impression that I am freshly bathed and impeccably groomed.

Ta’if

Ta’if is one of those fragrances where I seem to be experiencing something completely different to everyone else. People use the words ‘rich’, ‘dark’, and ‘exotic’ to describe it, which suggests a texture as heavy as velvet – close to Lyric Woman (Amouage) or Portrait of a Lady (Malle). But reality is miles removed. On my skin, Ta’if reads as a sheer peppery mixed floral layered over a musky, dried-fruit base. Neither the advertized dates nor Taifi rose show up for me, or at least not in any form I recognize (when I see ‘Ta’if’ rose, I expect a pop of fiercely spicy, green lemon-and-lime sharpness announcing a tannic rose).

In fact, I’d rank Ta’if alongside Rose Noir (Miller Harris) and Tobacco Rose (Papillon) as rose fragrances that bill themselves as one thing and then deliver another. Clearly, the sheer amount of admiration and positive reviews out there for Ta’if and Tobacco Rose demonstrates that it is possible not only to get over any cognitive dissonance related to their names, but to love them wholeheartedly for themselves.

On me, Ta’if is mostly a blowsy peach and orange blossom chiffonade, interspersed with brief flashes here and there of something that might be interpreted as a tart, green rose. The peachy-powdery feel of the fragrance makes me think of something functional I used to use when I was a teenager, like the Impulse O2 body spray. The dry down is a slightly powdery musk with a streak of dates running through it, which doesn’t tilt too literally in the direction of any one particular note. Rather, one is bathed in a fluffy miasma of musk, fruit, orange blossoms, and caramel that reminds me of some of the prettier ‘pink-smelling’ dry downs in designer perfumery, such as Coco Mademoiselle, or Elie Saab.

Source of samples: Based on a sample set generously gifted to me in 2015 of the niche perfumer store in Dublin, ParfuMarija, I subsequently bought bottles or partials of most of the above. The Osmanthus Hair Mist was kindly gifted to me by Ormonde Jayne PR a couple of weeks ago, along with a Petits Fours box of samples of four of the La Route de la Soie collection sent to me for review (review is upcoming). My opinions are firmly my own.

Cover Image: Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

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Incense Masculine Resins Review Smoke Spice The Discard Pile

Serge Noire by Serge Lutens

20th May 2020

The topnotes of Serge Lutens Serge Noire‘s smoky, dried fruit incense draw me in every single Goddamn time, like a mermaid’s song. And then I am dashed cruelly against the rocks that are this scent’s downfall – the unmistakably oniony sweat of unwashed (male) armpits.

Ask me how I know. No, really. I first smelled this when I was visiting Mont San Michel with my family when I was seven. The children had sat down in a grumpy, sun-beaten heap on the doorstop of the nth church, refusing to indulge our parents any further in their unquenchable thirst for the various religious icons and tchotchkes of French medieval churches, which seemed to us to be identical to the ones we had back home, only a little older and grimier.

From our vantage point, we got to study the interiors of everyone’s nostrils, skirts, and armpits. People passed over us; we were ignored, perhaps not even seen. A middle-aged man stopped under the mantel and leaned against the cool wall for a moment to gather himself, and in that moment, I understood that dried sweat could smell like onions and black pepper and celery – the makings of a mirepoix, practically – when suspended in droplets in the thicket of a man’s armpit hair.

The onion sweat accord can be parsed out later as clove, cumin, black pepper, and incense. While I love clove in stuff like Eau Lente (Diptyque) and the Eau de Parfum by Commes des Garcons, I admit that it can come off as sweaty and metallic to an almost objectionable degree. But the operational word is almost. There’s always something in those fragrances to reign it in – herbaceous oppoponax, a bit of honey, some sandalwood. In Serge Noire, the clove business simply goes too far. It sidles up to the breaking point of human endurance and then waltzes brazenly past it, lurching unchecked into pure onion sweat territory whence it cannot be redeemed.

I keep trying it, hoping I am wrong or that my perception will loosen up, allowing me to glimpse the true beauty of this scent as others describe it. But as of May 2020, and upon my 14^th attempt, I have to admit defeat.

Source of sample: Purchased over and over again from Notino.uk to no avail, because I do not and will never ‘get’ this scent.

Cover Photo By photographer Jens Karlsson, Creative Director at Your Majesty, NYC, available here via Stockpholio.net

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Ambrette Aromatic Blogging Carnation Citrus Collection House Exploration Iris Jasmine Musk Oud Review Rose Sandalwood Spicy Floral Suede Thoughts Vanilla White Floral Woods

The Ormonde Jayne Gold Collection

19th May 2020

Rose Gold

Rose Gold opens with a fiercely fresh green rose that briefly hints at the rose in Ta’if before folding its lemon-rind-and-black-pepper topnotes into the folds of a richer, pulpier rose that smells as lush and ‘full-bodied’ as the traditional rose and sandalwood attars once produced by Amouage – I am thinking mostly of Ayoon al Maha and Majan attars here, but also the spicy sandalwood-rose core of the stupendous Lyric Woman. Let’s say that Rose Gold falls halfway between one of those Amouage greats and the homelier but nonetheless moving beauty of the heavily peppered rose and carved sandalwood elephants of Caron’s Parfum Sacre. I mention these perfumes not just for your reference, but for mine – perfumes like Parfum Sacre and Lyric Woman were among the first perfumes that brought me to tears. They are my North Star of what I consider to be important ‘smells’ in my life. That I am comparing Rose Gold to them should tell you that I think Rose Gold is special.

The traditional rosy ‘attar’ scent is what dominates here, and it is unmistakably regal. There is a flare here and there of the initial lemony freshness of a Ta’if rose, but this only serves to highlight the deep red velvet backdrop of the more sensual Turkish rose. There’s a hot-to-the-touch quality to the perfume, and a note that makes me think of spicy crab apple jelly – both reminders that the presence of carnation is what links Black Gold to its baby sisters, Rose Gold and White Gold. Although this remains quite dry and spicy throughout, the rose centerpiece softens the rather masculine pepper-carnation-sandalwood-oud heart of Black Gold, making it an option for those who thought the original too hairy-chested.

Rose Gold would come close to de-seating Amouage Lyric Woman and Caron Parfum Sacre as my favorite rose-based perfumes were it not for the rapid unravelling of richness and complexity after the roses, spice, and carnation have roared their loudest. Quite simply, Rose Gold becomes too quiet, too soon. A rather plain but pleasant smelling mélange of creamy, rose-tinted blond woods, made radiant with the usual Ormonde Jayne dollop of Iso E Super, is left to carry the load on the remaining 40% of the scent’s journey.

If I were rich, though, I’d have no qualms about buying the biggest bottle of Rose Gold I could find (a veritable jeroboam of the stuff!) and spray, spray, spray to get that glorious start and midsection going again on my skin at the first sign of flagging. Millionaires can buy all the Viagra they want; I’d buy mine in the form of Rose Gold.

White Gold

I am trying to say this with the greatest respect, but in many ways, White Gold is the most department-store-smelling iteration of the Gold series. By this, I mean that it smells like an abstraction of white flowers, white orris, white powder, white musks, and white woods (even white spices) all blurred into one haze of cloudy white scent molecules. White Gold is made of the kind of white noise that I find very difficult to pick apart and analyze when I am sniffing perfumes at the department store. There’s very little for me to hang onto. My nose feels around for the boundary lines between the notes but fails to locate any.

I think that the perfumes that have most in common with White Gold are not Rose Gold or Black Gold, but the white cube perfumes and Pure Musc by Narciso Rodriguez, which, to my nose at least, all smell like minute variations on the same theme, i.e., the freshly-poured cement muskiness of cashmeran and fluffy white musks, the basic model altered with one drop more or less gardenia or rose or ylang. I get that most people find this sort of thing comforting. It’s like the warm, plush terrycloth robe you pull straight from the dryer and put on when you emerge shivering from a cold shower. It’s just that it’s too simple, too easy. Mindless comfort is good for those moments when you need a liquid hug. But it doesn’t engage the brain cells. I can’t help but hold that against it.

White Gold traps the naturally effervescent, floaty white dust that emanates from orris and folds it into a cloud of silky ambrette and lab musks, which hover weightlessly over the freshly-scrubbed wood and concrete floor built by cashmeran.

The flowers – jasmine mostly, but also some rubbery freesia and orchid – smell clean and expensive, like an upmarket shampoo that sets you back around 50 quid from your hairdresser’s. Abstract and more than a little perfumey, the floral components smells more like artistic, man-made representations of a flower than the rude, fleshy vulgarity of live blooms.

There is a 1990s perfume that White Gold reminds me of strongly, but I can’t recall the name. Something made by Armani, the Lei/Lui series perhaps? Naturally, White Gold smells a lot more expensive and plushly-upholstered than any department store perfume. But there’s a fruity-nutty-sticky sweetness here that hints at the Galaxolide-and-Maltol candy-ness of designer musks and florals, and it’s an impression that proves hard to shake. Overall, I’d peg the color of White Gold as a cloudy, almost milky white, tinged in places with a rosy pink stain. Although easily my least favorite in the series, I think White Gold would make for a perfect bridal perfume or special occasion perfume for someone who might view it as a cashmere wrapped upgrade to the very floral, very clean, musky designer perfumes they already know and love.

Black Gold

I remember loving Black Gold when I tested it in 2017, and even wrote about it here as part of a shambolic, rambling essay on my journey through the Ormonde Jayne stable. But now, when I look back at that review, what I really remember is how hard I had to beg Essenza Nobile to release a sample to me (Fragrance Daily, where the review appeared, was the blog loosely tied to Essenza Nobile, the fragrance retailer which would regularly send the blog writers samples they’d requested).

If I recall correctly, Linda Pilkington was being very strict about where the pre-release samples of Black Gold ended up and even how copy for the fragrance was being worded, so Essenza Nobile was concerned that a negative or even slightly critical review of the perfume might harm their business relationship with the brand.

Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash

Essenza Nobile needn’t have worried, for two reasons. First, I absolutely loved Black Gold. I wouldn’t sell a kidney to buy a bottle, but I’d happily accept a bottle from a loaded relative, should I ever succeed in identifying one. Second, while Ormonde Jayne is clearly invested in controlling the narrative and distribution of its perfumes (as it should be), I don’t think they put much stock in reviews as part of their business model.

None of this bothers me unduly. I’m conscious of the business reality for brands outside of the artificial blogger/vlogger bubble. Brands like Ormonde Jayne have to be protective of their products where they can. They are the Chanel of English perfumery. If Ormonde Jayne ever sells to an investor, then their good name, their grip on distribution channels, and the customer perception of the brand’s core values (taste, luxury, exclusivity) is all calculated on the balance sheet as a ‘goodwill asset’. Goodwill assets monetize all those values we associate with the name of Ormonde Jayne even if we can’t see or touch them.

Ormonde Jayne operates mostly outside of the reviewer bubble. The brand doesn’t enter the fray of perfume blogs or reviews in the ways that other brands do. They don’t promote or circulate positive reviews of their perfumes; nor do they openly contradict or wade into reviews that are less than complementary. Their relationship with the outside world seems to be smoothly commercial, almost transactional in nature, i.e., they are a company whose primary objective is to sell luxury perfume and perfumed goods to those who can afford it, not to get chummy with writers and blogs and YouTubers. The brand isn’t rude or dismissive of the review crowd; we just don’t figure much in their strategy. And that is perfectly valid.

Reviewers like me can request to be put on the Ormonde Jayne PR list to receive samples. But again, there’s that thorny issue of how to reconcile being sent press samples and offering an independent, fair-minded review to readers that has nothing to do with the ‘free-ness’ of the sample. I haven’t figured out an answer to that dilemma yet. I want access to the perfume, my reviews depend on access, and yet the sincerity of the review will always be in question (even in my own mind) if the sample was sent to me for free by the brand.

That’s part of the reason it’s taken me so long to write about these Ormonde Jayne exclusives; some of the samples were (very kindly) sent to me in PR. I am not on anyone’s PR list normally, so I’m grateful, but conflicted. Can you trust me on these, at a distance of three years? I hope you can. Maybe the passing of three years has created a sort of decontamination chamber for the perfumes, cleansing them of all trace of expectation, guilt, and reciprocity.

I will do one more post in the Ormonde Jayne series covering the perfumes from the original (core) collection; this will be less angsty because any full bottle of Ormonde Jayne perfume I own, I paid for. But there will be a little angst – there has to be – because I’ll be reviewing my bottles of Ormonde Jayne perfumes with a view to deciding which ones I sell and which ones I keep.

Source of samples: My sample of Black Gold was sent to me for free to write about by Essenza Nobile, the large European fragrance retailer and distributor, for the blog Fragrance Daily linked to the site (the blog is now defunct). My sample of White Gold was sent to me by Luckyscent for the purpose of writing the copy for White Gold on their site. My sample of Rose Gold was sent to me by PR at Ormonde Jayne, for free and with no expectation or demand to write about it.

Cover Image: Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash

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Aldehydes Ambergris Aromatic Balsamic Citrus Collection Floral Floral Oriental Fougere Green Herbal Iris Leather Osmanthus Oud Review Rose Sandalwood Spice Spicy Floral Suede Tea Tobacco Woods

Ormonde Jayne Four Corners of the Earth Collection

6th May 2020

Nawab of Oudh

Stupidly, I ignored this one for the longest time, believing it to be yet another Westernized take on oud. Guess what? It isn’t. The penny dropped just as I ran out of money, or at least the willingness to spend more than that €1.2 per ml limit Luca Turin originally advised us to stop at. This means that I don’t, and never will, own a bottle of Nawab of Oudh, which is terrible because this thing brings me to my knees.

But let’s make some lemonade out of dem lemons. I like to pretend that my bottle of Nawab of Oudh is hanging out at Roma Store, a small profumeria in Trastevere I frequent. Every month, I take a leisurely stroll down the Tiber to visit with the bottle of Nawab of Oudh the shop is kindly (but obliviously) hosting for me and douse myself liberally in its glorious juice. Then I walk back home, sniffing myself with a huge, dopey grin on my face, oblivious to how I look to passers-by.

Describing what Nawab of Oudh smells like is like trying to catch butterflies with a teaspoon. It has that gauzy, dizzying abstraction characteristic of so many Ormonde Jayne standouts like Black Gold and Rose Gold, and features – as far as I can tell – peppery spice, juicy mandarin, champagne-like aldehydes, roses, sandalwood, and a mass of creamy floral notes.

But I’m not sure any notes list adequately conveys the fierce joy of this scent. Better to say instead that this perfume gives you that Saturday morning feeling of good things to come – a crisply folded newspaper, a fresh pot of coffee, warm bread rolls, cold Irish butter, and a day of leisure stretching out in front of you like a cat. It smells like sunshine in a loved one’s hair and a just-cancelled meeting.

There is a point at the center of this fragrance that makes me think perfumer Geza Schoen might be playing around with an old Roucel-ian template of a green-ish magnolia bathed in a silky bath of citrus, honey, roses, and heavy cream (last seen in Roucel’s Guerlain’s L’Instant for Women and Rochas’ Tocade). The magnolia is viewed obliquely here, through a haze of spicy pepper, pimiento, cardamom, and cinnamon-dusted rose, but it’s definitely got some presence.

I love that when I spray it heavily, Nawab of Oudh coats the back of my hand with an aggressively oily sheen but then immediately radiates off into the air with an aldehydic swagger. Despite the name, there is little oud to speak of here, aside from a slightly sour, leathery tint to the soapy sandalwood in the base. I love this fragrance and believe it to be one of the most elegant and accomplished spicy oriental-florals that a woman or a man could wear.

Tsarina

Tsarina is a creamy, anisic floral suede that was the object of my ~~affection~~ obsession for much of 2016. It is a decidedly cool-toned fragrance; if it were an eyeshadow palette, Tsarina would be all dove greys and silvery taupes in the sort of satin finish that makes your eyelids appear expensively buffed. If it were a textile, it would be a length of raw silk, dotted with nubbins of texture that ride up pleasurably against the palm of your hand. Did I crack under the pressure of desire? Of course I did. It was 2016 and I was still spending money on perfume like they were bottles of H2O.

But even though I split a bottle with a friend during the famous Ormonde Jayne Black Friday event, Tsarina turned out to be an eye-wateringly expensive purchase. Not so much because of the price I paid, but because I never wore it as much as I thought I would. And a perfume sitting unloved in a collection is the costliest cost of all.

Three years on, I’m trying to understand my sudden and brutal withdrawal of affection for Tsarina. I suspect it covers too much of the same ground as Orris Noir (also by Ormonde Jayne), with its anise-tinted iris and myrrh, and maybe also L’Heure Bleue, with its medicinal heliotrope-iris tandem, for me to get any relief from this nagging cognitive dissonance. There’s also some overlap with the plasticky, clove-spiced benzoin creaminess of Guerlain Lui, which I also (somehow) own. But there’s also the fact that, for the 2020 me, Tsarina is now too rich, too claustrophobic.

But it is beautiful. Tsarina opens with the characteristic Ormonde Jayne blur of uplifting citrus and pepper notes, fueled by aldehydes, before quickly settling into that anisic, peppered ‘cream of wheat’ milkiness I associate with floral sandalwoods like Dries Van Noten (Frederic Malle) and the Pheromone attars produced by both Sharif LaRoche and Abdes Salaam Attar. Ormonde Jayne’s Vanille d’Iris, I find, recycles the same core of buttery iris suede, stripping it way back, and adding a dollop of plasticky vanilla to dull its ethereal gleam. As for Tsarina, once the first burst of spicy freshness dies away, both I and the fragrance miss it dearly.

Tsarina is soft and stodgy, like a bowl of porridge. Its lack of definition is probably why I sought it out so insistently the first time around, because I’m drawn to the boneless torpor of cream-sodden florals with little in the way of ballast propping them up. I find them comforting. However, for my money, stuff like Alamut by Lorenzo Villoresi – an exotic rice pudding-custard made out of tuberose, nag champa, and lots of civety sandalwood – satisfies the same itch and at less expense.

Of course, I didn’t know Alamut back then. Sure, if I could go back and tell my 2016 self that some of the perfumes I am passionate about would be rendered obsolete down the line by perfumes I was yet to smell, then I might have chosen differently. But I’m letting myself off the hook here. Tsarina is still a beautiful perfume judged against any parameter. It’s just that my 2020 self wants Nawab of Oudh more.

Qi is constructed to make no great statement thus offending no one. Lest you think I’m being bitchy, that sentence comes from the Ormonde Jayne official copy!

Normally, my shackles rise when I hear anyone describing a perfume as ‘inoffensive’ or, worse (shudder), ‘mass-pleasing’, because if that’s the end goal, then there’s no need to spend $425+ on a bottle of perfume when you can spend $5 on a bottle of that chocolatey, oudy Axe spray my husband is invariably wearing whenever I complement him on his lovely smell.

But honestly, Ormonde Jayne is onto something here. Osmanthus – for those not overly familiar with it – is a material that shares a rudely pungent quality with Hindi oud oil, black tea, and leather, all materials that have undergone some kind of process like soaking in water, tanning or smoking that lend them a distinctly fermented facet. I’m a fan of the fermented, but the uninitiated might find this particular floral note a challenge. The trick is to trim back the ruder, earthier facets of osmanthus absolute, and to capture only the fresh, pretty notes of the flower smelled straight from the plant.

And that’s exactly what Qi does. It is a super clean, bright take on osmanthus – a glowy little pop of apricot over soapy musks and fresh green tea (maté) that create enough of an illusion of leather to catch at the back of your throat. The osmanthus note is sustained for a remarkably long time, the fresh tea and soft leather notes soaked in an indelible peach or apricot ink. There’s also a whiff of clean rubber tubing – a pleasant inevitability whenever tea and osmanthus share the same space.

Despite the complex array of notes, though, Qi smells charmingly simple and ‘honest’. I can see this elegant glass of green tea, aromatized gently with a slice of apricot, appealing to many people. Ormonde Jayne is a rare house that knows what to do with osmanthus, and for me, Qi is its shining example. I prefer it to the also excellent Passionate Love, which is constructed along similar lines as Qi, but duskier, with a mineralic vetiver-and-Iso-E-Super drydown I’m less fond of.

Montabaco

An interesting fragrance. Revolving around a dank, green sage-tobacco accord that’s been lightened and spaced out by tons of Iso E Super, Montabaco is both dark-smelling and airy. Despite the distinctly aftershavey, fougère-like aspect to Montabaco that tags it as masculine, I have enjoyed smelling this on my skin and trying to break it down.

It’s worth mentioning that the two or three times I’ve worn this, my nine-year old son has sought me out to tell me that I smell really good. That makes me wonder if it’s just that Montabaco has huge sillage (thanks to the Iso E Super) or if there’s something in this fragrance that calls out to males.

I know that I’m not best placed to evaluate. When I smell a ‘classic male aftershave’ accord, something in the analysis part of my brain shuts down, blanking out the individual notes or components of the scent beyond the first and all-encompassing impression of ‘maleness’. But even to me, it’s clear that Montabaco is several pay grades above something like Brut or Azzaro Pour Homme.

And am I picking up on a sleight of hand here? With its flourishes of dry green herbs, ‘clovey’ spicing, and cleansing bay leaf, the central accord smells far more like cedarwood to me than tobacco leaf. This impression is underlined by a dollop of powdery amber that adds no sweetness but instead a pleasantly dustiness that softens the mealy bitterness of the cedarwood (or tobacco).

We are spared the intensely syrupy dried fruit and cacao notes that usually accompany tobacco. In fact, the vermouth-like dryness of the tobacco leaf in Montabaco reminds me very much of Miller Harris’ Feuilles de Tabac, pumped up with the creamy cedarwood baritone of Creed’s Royal Oud and fleshed out with a traditional barbershop fougère’s worth of spices and herbs. I liked Royal Oud and Feuilles de Tabac well enough, but Montabaco is more nuanced, more complex. If any of my male relatives were in the market for an interesting interpretation of a traditional tobacco or cedarwood-heavy fougère, and had the funds to go niche, I’d definitely point them in the direction of Montabaco.

Source of Samples: The staff at the Dublin niche perfume store ‘ParfuMarija’ generously included a sample set of the Ormonde Jayne house as a gift with purchase in 2016. The set included samples of the Four Corners of the World collection.

Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

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Ormonde Jayne Love Trio: Sensual Love, Passionate Love, and True Love

30th April 2020

I write a lot about indie perfumes. Partly because that’s where most of the derring-do of OG niche went once niche plumped for sales over ‘art’ (God, that sounds pretentious even to me, sorry), and partly because if you’re a writer, then writing about small artisans is a way to show support.

But I’ll be honest; I don’t own a whole lot of indie perfumes. Because most of my collection was built in 2014-2016, by the time I’d discovered the excitement and pleasure of the indie perfume sector, I’d run out of both money and appetite. These days, therefore, while I’m happy to sample indies and shine a light on them through reviews – for what that’s worth – I am rarely moved beyond admiration to shell out for them.

What I’ve found is that the older I get the more importance I place on polish. I am also increasingly aware of time and place. The fire in my belly for the grungiest of leathers, the nastiest of smoke bombs, and the swampiest of aquatics has abated in step with my dawning realization that it’s not nice to alienate your colleagues or family with all that raw-edged, ‘experimental’ stuff just because it’s your right to wear it. There are more important hills to die on than scent suffrage.

Therefore, when I know that I’m going to be out in ‘polite’ society and not just ruminating in my own 4-day old funk (working from home mid-COVID-19 in a Northern country has its benefits, one of which is that no one can smell me through Zoom), I turn to the predictable elegance of group of houses that never lets me down, namely Chanel, Guerlain, Hermes, and, in niche, brands like Ormonde Jayne, Heeley, and Papillon (though the latter is actually artisanal, it possesses the elegant, no-brainer smoothness I’m after here).

I’ve written about Ormonde Jayne before here. As the years passed, the brand branched out from their original core market (reassuringly expensive, classical but with a twist, always elegant) to exclusivity marketing (country or city exclusives) and an ever more aspirational audience (roughly the same target market as for Roja Dove and Clive Christian).

Correspondingly, though my appreciation for their perfumes continues unabated, I find myself a little out-priced by the brand. My pain level hovers around the pricing of the original collection: with a bit of saving and strategic Black Friday shopping, I have allowed myself to buy and own Champaca, Orris Noir, Ormonde Woman, and Tolu. But I can’t afford to buy two big loves of mine, which are Black Gold and Nawab al Oudh – both more aspirationally-priced than the core collection. And I’m totally fine with that. I don’t have to own everything I love.

Anyway, despite me ‘ageing out’ of the original target market for Ormonde Jayne, I am still almost irrationally fond of the brand. Actually, I love Ormonde Jayne, I’m not going to lie. I’m going to spend the next couple of blog posts talking about fragrances they released after their core collection, so if there’s anyone out there like me who loved the original line-up but find their noses pressed against the store window of the brand’s now higher-than-one-would-like-to-pay prices, then read on.

Let’s start with the Love trio of fragrances released in 2016: Passionate Love, True Love, and Sensual Love. I know nothing about these new releases, but given that Ormonde Jayne gets a lot of walk-in traffic from people who are not necessarily into perfume but are ready to invest in that one special fragrance to mark a special occasion or to gift to a special person, it’s safe to assume that this trio was designed to capture a portion of the bridal or just-engaged market.

This makes perfect sense. Special, privé, bespoke -all words you see over and over again in Ormonde Jayne’s marketing and perfume; all reinforcing the image of gently English exclusivity, the sort of velvety inner sanctum hush of a Saville Row tailor that seems to embody the Ormonde Jayne experience. And this is exactly what you want when you’re getting married. The Love perfumes are expensive enough to elicit a sharp intake of breath but not so expensive that you feel like the money would be better spent on a holiday.

Sensual Love

Sensual Love is an 100% embodiment of the Ormonde Jayne house style. It hits that sweet spot between novelty and beauty – i.e., exciting enough to make you think about the ideas that went into it, yet smooth enough to enjoy in an almost mindless manner. Something about the combination of tart citrus, micro-explosions of pink pepper, green leaves, and the misted spray of (largely indeterminate) fruits and flowers bypasses the ‘perfume’ signal in my brain and short-circuits to the fizz of freshly-poured rosé champagne.

Spraying again and again, I try to focus. What’s here, really? It’s so abstract it’s hard to tell. There is the sharp purple pop of cassis and a suggestion of something fruity that might be osmanthus, but really, to me the overall impression is of a fizzy cloud of crushed green leaves, pepper, and grapefruit. Grapefruit is, of course, not listed. But maybe I’m smelling grapefruit because it shares with cassis a fruity urinous quality.

The peppery, peachy rose note that appears briefly reminds me very much of Ta’if, and you know, perhaps it is Ta’if – but dipped in a sherbety lime powder and acid pink grapefruit. Something about the cool, tannic element here also makes me think of green tea, which of course makes me think of Champaca. But these perfumes are old friends, and I’m certainly not complaining about seeing their familiar faces round this joint.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but every time I smell the opening of an Ormonde Jayne fragrance, I feel first an intense upwards lift of my spirits (hesitate to call it joy, but it’s in that general direction). Then, once the effervescence of the more volatile notes have settled, I almost always get to thinking that Ormonde Jayne is the one of a tiny group of ‘commercial niche’ or ‘luxe niche’ houses whose perfumes consistently highlight the value of the perfumer’s talent in translating a brief over the value of the raw materials that go into them.

Sensual Love is good because Linda Pilkington asked for it to be made in a certain way and Geza Schoen has the talent to execute her vision, rather than because of any qualities intrinsic to the raw materials used.

Sensual Love doesn’t do anything else much other than sparkle hard in that upliftingly tart grapefruity-berry-leafy way, but that’s ok, because she’s gorgeous and she knows it. It’s a June morning of a scent. A radiant bride’s face when the veil is lifted. The ‘white’ fruity effervescence of Sensual Love is no doubt shored up by the Iso E Super that Geza Schoen is so fond of, but honestly, in his hands, for Ormonde Jayne, it rarely gives the finished perfume a chemical feel. There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb, even within the Ormonde Jayne line-up, but in general, Schoen has been carefully directed by Linda Pilkington to keep the Iso E Super at a classy and unobtrusive level. The effect is radiance, but never at the cost of naturalness.

Sensual Love would be great for a summer bride, or indeed for a summer bridegroom. If you like Escentric 04 (also by Schoen), but would like a softer, slightly more floral take, then Sensual Love is worth looking into. I also can’t help feeling if that if you like Chanel Paris-Deauville, especially as a fresh, leafy ‘drencher’ in summer (I do), then Sensual Love would perform much the same function.

True Love

True Love is a quirky gourmand floral that is nonetheless so flawlessly put together that it never feels less than grown-up. At the beginning, there’s an interesting tarragon note to hold our attention – sort of woody, not hyper clean-smelling, more of a sludge grey-green than bright herby green – welded to a pink pepper and citrus framework that freshens its breath.

But underneath this, up swells a wonderfully stretchy bubble of something between honey-flavored Hubba Bubba and strawberry marshmallow whip. This very thick, chewy note elasticizes the fragrance, stretching it out in all directions like Elastigirl from The Incredibles. This is far more sophisticated than it sounds. It smells pink and tangy with strawberry gum, but also peppery and herbal. This is a very interesting way to bring what would normally be very girlish notes into the realm of adulthood.

And then! Oh boy, oh boy. The banana-flavored milk of my dreams. This is the oft-promised but rarely delivered banana pudding facet of ylang, present and correct. I am very excited to finally experience this in scent form. I have only glimpsed it once or twice in Tasnim (Abdes Salaam al Attar), though even that is more a delicate egg yolk custard faintly aromatized with nutmeg and ground almond flour than the full-on artificial banana custard or milk thing that I’m looking for. I quite like Felanilla (Parfumerie Generale) too, but with its gippy-textured saffron and starchy iris, that is far more the woody, inedible banana stem you accidentally get in your moth and spit right back out again than the lush fake banana of my dreams.

I am making this sound juvenile and trashy, but it’s really quite elegant. Let me be explicit: there is indeed a yellow banana-flavored milk accord in the midsection of True Love, but it’s been mellowed out with silky, spacey musks and florals to such a degree that anyone from a bride to a businesswoman could pull it off.

The wearer might think ‘banana milk’ and luxuriate secretly in this knowledge, but to everyone else, this will smell vaguely like a warm milky cloud of rosy, fluffy lokhoum (Turkish delight). Although the sweetness and white-muskiness of drydown is ultimately a little generic for me, I enjoy True Love as much as I enjoy Traversée du Bosphore (L’Artisan Parfumeur) or Niral (Neela Vermeire), which is a lot. If you love the idea of a fluffy pink cloud of marshmallowy loukhoum buffering against the harshness of the world like a force-field, then add True Love to your list. It’s exactly the kind of thing I want to wear when I’m feeling delicate or in danger of eating my feelings.

Passionate Love

If you’re curious about osmanthus in general, or you Googled Passionate Love and came across this review, then let me tell you that (a) Passionate Love is all about the osmanthus, and (b) if you’re not sure what osmanthus is supposed to smell like, then smell this because it’s quite true to the scent of osmanthus absolute.

After an odd start composed of gin and tonic, and rickety old garden furniture, Passionate Love explodes into a gorgeously rubbery, pungent apricot-skin suede with the whiff of fermentation that both oud and osmanthus carry in their bones. It is not sweet, really, but somehow in the opening it manages to smell quite densely syrupy and full-on, kind of like the cheesy fruit leather of Miyako (Auphorie). In fact, Passionate Love is very like the other osmanthus perfume in the line, Qi (I don’t really count Osmanthus itself, as that is more of a citrusy white tea kind of thing), but its atmosphere is far thicker and throatier. It’s Qi with the lights turned down.

Soon, however, the fleshy assault of the osmanthus lightens up and dries out until you could (almost) call this fragrance airy or ethereal. Most osmanthus accords are accompanied by an undertone of black tea, a facet that is naturally present in osmanthus absolute (think dark, strongly brewed Chinese tea left to grow cold), and Passionate Love is no exception. The tangy, tannic tea in Passionate Love is not the milky-green tea or brown rice of Champaca, yet there is something similarly nutritious, like the wholesome cloudiness from washing pearl barley. Threaded throughout this singular accord is a nubbin of spice, perhaps something fiery and nutmeggy, like white pepper.

Passionate Love manages to hold up in this osmanthus soliflore track for most of its midsection, and if we were to dwell here, I’d rank this and Qi up alongside the osmanthus greats, which for me include the minimalist tea-apricot of Osmanthe Yunann (Hermès), the civet-soaked, creamy-desiccated leather of Oud Osmanthus (Mona di Orio) and the gigglier, freshly-washed hair of Osmanthe Interdite (Parfums d’Empire).

However, Passionate Love unravels a bit in the drydown, flattening out into that mineralic vetiver-and-Iso E Super-woods base familiar to me from many classic freshies, most notably Terre d’Hermès (Hermès) and Grey Vetiver (Tom Ford). Don’t get me wrong – there’s definitely a time and a place for this grassy, earthy-salty accord, but when it’s tacked onto the tail end of a glorious osmanthus soliflore, it feels a bit incongruous. But all in all, Passionate Love manages to really do it for this osmanthus lover, as least for two thirds of its useful life. Apply half an hour before walking up the aisle, and the bouquet will bloom right as the veil is lifted.

Source of samples: Very kindly gifted to me by the Ormonde Jayne PR way back in 2017, with no obligation or pressure to review them. However, the fact that I’m reviewing these samples in 2020 is probably why brands don’t usually send me samples. I am absolutely terrible. I’m sorry!

Main Photo by olivia hutcherson on Unsplash

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Animalic Aromatic Floral Independent Perfumery Jasmine Review Rose Tonka White Floral

Quasi Un’Absurdia by Chris Rusak

13th April 2020

Quasi Un’Absurdia by Chris Rusak is a rare joy. In the modern hodge podge of brutal woody ambers and syrupy eau-de-department-store florals, instances of classical beauty are few and far between. So a minute of silence, please, for the feat that’s been pulled off here by a small artisan.

I’ve no idea whether if it’s innate talent – genius untrammeled by the stifling stays of the classical perfumery education corset – or the simple good luck of a five year-old who accidentally hammers out a Monet with a potato stamp, but I’ll be damned if Chris Rusak, probably armed with nothing more than a small perfumer’s organ of essences, hasn’t created a glorious floral to rival that of giants such as Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue or Grossmiths’ Shem el Nessim.

Quasi Un’Absurdia is a cinematic sweep of flowers that elates my spirits in the same way as the first swell of sound from the orchestra pit. I experience the opening as a rush of colors and texture – the purple velvet of jasmine, the buttery yellow of ylang against the polleny green-yellow of narcissus, and the greenery of lily stalks. In the roar of color and sound, I swear I smell the aromatic crushed bud of French lavender, but this may just be the civet punching its way through the floral mass and drawing a phantom Jicky-lite shape in the air.

The polleny narcissus aroma splits the difference between the eyelid-droopingly indolic, over-stuffed scent of a room filled with the flowers and the tartness of freshly-cut daffodil stems plunged into water. I find the rich, true smell of the jasmine and rose absolutes used here to be intoxicating in the way only the real flowers can be. This perfume makes me feel like I’m Dorothy, walking through that field of poppies, drugged up to my eyeballs on their narcotizing scent.

The gasoline beauty of pure jasmine absolute alone would have made this an easy sell for me, even if Chris Rusak hadn’t been clever enough to underline its Sambac-like quality with the pleasantly watery bitterness of mint or artemisia and its Grandiflorum-like qualities with a bubblegummy ylang. But he has, so there you go. The arrangement here – the complex juggling and trade-offs involved in keeping this great slew of natural floral absolutes afloat – is flawlessly executed. Especially impressive is the fact that the benzyl acetate facet of natural ylang and jasmine has not been allowed to dominate, thereby saving the composition from the grapey dopiness of the standard big white floral.

A bouquet this rich in white flowers risks heaviness. But thanks to the sharply woody civet and a lily tincture that leans more towards the crunchy green-and-white freshness of muguet than the funeral meatiness of lily, the overall impression remains remarkably crisp. Quasi Un’Absurdia is definitely not as lily-dominant to me as perfumes like Malle’s Lys Méditerranée, but actually, there’s a time and a place for the insistent salty, almost aquatic-tinged heavy cream of lilies, and this is not it. The ‘lily-ness’ of Quasi Un’Absurdia is perfectly dosed.

There’s some civet here, but it’s been used less as a keystone note and more as a means by which to texturize and sharpen the fuzzy beige carpet of tonka padding out the florals all the way down to the base. Quasi Un’Absurdia isn’t terribly animalic, therefore. However, there is a subtle ‘freshly-washed crotch’ nuance here that works very well against the sweet floral mass. This too is Guerlainesque, a cheeky reference perhaps to Jacques Guerlain’s assertion that all Guerlain fragrances contain something of the undercarriage of one’s mistress.

The drydown of Quasi Un’Absurdia will be an unmitigated pleasure-fest for anyone who loves the intricate yet cozy abstraction of the great Guerlain perfumes such as L’Heure Bleue or Chamade but doesn’t adore the sometimes fussy powderiness of their finish. This perfume’s Guerlainesque almond-custard denouement is streamlined by comparison, a product of cantilevering a huge bouquet of flowers over a sharp, airy base of woods, civet, and soapy musks. In fact, Quasi Un’Absurdia is the equivalent of a John Irving novel: it spins a cracking good yarn in the classical tradition of Alexandre Dumas but borrows the dreamily absurdist, abstract style of Gabriel García Márquez to tell it.

Source of Sample: I purchased this sample as part of a sample set directly from the Chris Rusak site, here. Quasi Un’Absurdia is currently all sold out, but apparently will be made available again in 2020/2021 when the new batch is ready (the perfume contains a rare lily tincture that Chris makes himself). It costs $140 for 30ml, and $190 for 50ml. The perfume features real civet, as per the website, which means that it is not cruelty-free.

Photo by Nathan Jefferis on Unsplash

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Parfums Prissana and Strangers Parfumerie: A Sampling

12th February 2020

I’m fascinated by the individuality of the models at play in the indie perfume sector. Some houses, like Diane St. Clair and Papillon work slowly, releasing an average of one perfume a year (if that), willing to wait until every single detail is ‘right’ before releasing what is a highly-finished work to the public. Others, like Prin Lomros, work gonzo style – restlessly creating, releasing, and then wiping out whole perfumes, like an artist furiously rubbing out a sketch he is suddenly unhappy with.

What this boils down to is the notion of risk. Just how much risk is Prin Lomros willing to take? In my opinion, a lot. This is a guy who has had quite a few brands and sub-brands in a very short period of time (I count three, including one disappeared, one prestige, and one diffusion, although in the last few days, I think a fourth might have been sprung upon us), populated with perfumes that appear and then disappear, never to be seen again. Other perfumes get the chop, only to return a year later under a different name.

Sure, this all sounds like Prin Lomros is having a lot of fun – but what about us? Though there’s nothing permanent in perfumery these days – Penhaligon’s glorious Ostara came and went in the space of two years, despite its critical success, and half of the 13 Gucci Flora flankers will probably have been removed from the shelves by the time I finish this sentence – expecting even the most committed of indie perfumery supporters to lay down $160 on a 30ml bottle of liquid that might be axed on a whim four months later is an exceptionally big ask.

Generally, a perfumer can only bet on their customers accepting this level of risk if one of two conditions have been met. Either a) the raw materials are of such rarity or unusual quality, like vintage Cambodi oud oil from the 1970s or a hunk of white ambergris from the Western shores of Ireland that customers buy out of the fear of missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime experience, or b) the compositions themselves are so artistic or clever that customers are inspired to invest wholesale in the creative real estate locked inside the perfumer’s head.

For the former, you only have to look at the success of Areej Le Doré, Sultan Pasha, and Ensar Oud to know that the feverish fanboyism around the cult of raw materials is more than adequate to keep the ship afloat. Brands, if they are clever, might seek to co-opt a bit of this market for themselves by introducing special one-off editions focused on rare, limited run materials; Eris Parfums did this recently with Mxxx. (review here) to great effect, using a fantastic piece of white ambergris to turn their regular Mx. from a silky white cotton t-shirt into a $1,500 cashmere wrap.

Prin Lomros’ perfumes lean a bit on the precious raw materials thing, but really rely more on the perfumer’s artistic vision as the hook with which to reel customers in. He takes quite a few creative risks – which makes sampling his work huge fun (but blind buys ill-advised). What this means for me is that although roughly 60% of what he turns out doesn’t work for me, the ones I do like I really, really admire and find myself thinking about long after I’ve put the sample away. Heck, even the ones I wouldn’t wear to save my life linger in my head.

I worked my way through 18 – count them, 18 – samples from both Parfums Prissana and Strangers Parfumerie during a time of great stress this January, when multiple deadlines and the arrival of a new management team at work meant that I survived on crisps and wine for nutrition and rarely got more than five hours of sleep a night. Normally, conditions like these would taint my perception of whatever I’m testing or wearing; but, a grosso modo, the Prin Lomros stuff still emerged with a big fat thumbs up from me.

Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t a few problem areas. For one, the perfumes are all a little front-loaded, with drydowns that, while long-lasting (lots of ‘beastmode’ performers here), are a little wan compared to the richness upfront. Two or three of the perfumes I tried were marred with an overdose of noxious ‘power tool’ aromachemicals – Ambroxan, maybe, Norlimbanol, and a few of those ‘new wood’ captives; these ones were an immediate line in the sand for me. But even in those, I was able to find little pockets of something interesting or playful that kept me plugged into the experience. To say that his perfumes surprised me and challenged my preconceptions is really quite something, only because I am jaded as fuck.

I think Mandarava (Prissana) is utterly horrific but many people whose opinion I respect think it’s a masterpiece. While clearly well made, its dense cloud of indeterminable flowers, incense, and musk is unbearable to me, because note for note, it smells like someone emptied an entire aerosol of nag champa-scented room deodorizer into a small room and closed all the windows. It has the same overwhelming stuffiness and cheap, greasy-powdery musk overload as Koh-I-Noor by Areej Le Doré but lacks that scent’s more fine-tuned sense of balance that somehow keeps everything in check; Mandarava is unhinged in a way that sets my teeth on edge. But, you know, people other than me love it.

I don’t normally review so negatively, so you have to know there’s a redeeming angle here. And here it is – the drydown is weirdly good. I’ve worn this three times in the name of science, and each time the drydown takes me by surprise in a good way. Unfortunately, I never quite managed to make it to my notepad in time to write down what it is that I think almost redeems Mandarava, so you’ll have to believe me that the texture of the scent changes about six hours in, emerging from the cardboardy fug of nag champa to become sharper, woodier – more interesting somehow. If I ever subject myself to Mandarava again – which, to be honest, is unlikely – I’ll come back and update this review.

If you’re skimming this post for an entry point, then Ma Nishtana is probably the easiest and most immediately likeable perfume in either the Prissana or Strangers Parfumerie line. A judiciously-spiced church incense scent, Ma Nishtana splits the difference between the soapy, aldehyded, Coca-Cola-ish airiness of Cardinal/Avignon and the warmer, breadier, more caramelic-ambery thickness of Contre Bombarde 32 by SAUF or Samharam by Arte Profumi. The drydown drones on a bit, thanks to an application of the dreaded Norlimbanol, but even as a No-Limbs-Left-At-All-hater I have to admit that it’s applied with an unusually subtle touch here.

I don’t know that Ma Nishtana distinguishes itself so much from the stalwarts of this rather cramped incense genre to be worth the price, but of course, this is a deeply personal thing. The most innovative or unusual thing about Ma Nishtana is really that faint whiff of armpitty cumin or turmeric that’s half under-proved doughnut and half curry-sweat, but if you own either Grimoire by Anatole LeBreton or Al Oudh by L’Artisan Parfumeur, I think you’re covered. Ma Nishtana is very nice, very good – but not entirely necessary, at least in my opinion.

Photo by The Creative Exchange on Unsplash

Tom Yum is a thing of beauty! A fantastically fresh and sour take on the classic French eau de cologne, it is something like Eau Sauvage or Ô de Lancôme flushed with the mouth-stripping aroma of lemongrass – half lemon, half rooty grass – and freshly-squeezed limes. These tart, aromatic topnotes are all under-pinned with a gorgeously sweet and dusty galangal note that stands in for musk and serves an a pillowy extension cord for the citruses well into the drydown. Although Tom Yum doesn’t smell as authentically hot, sour, or herbaceous as a bowl of Tom Yum itself, and is therefore not nearly as exotic as the notes list wants you to believe, it is still the rare ‘update’ to the eau de cologne model that actually works (and lasts).

Tom Yum is just sour enough in the topnotes to refresh, herbaceous and soapy enough in the midsection to offer that essential coolness, and sweetly spicy enough in the tailbone to avoid that throat-catching sourness of laundry musk that tires my palate in most modern takes. For me, Tom Yum competes head-to-head with the basil leaf-inflected blast of air conditioning that is the bottle of Paris-Deauville (Chanel) I keep in the door of my fridge as a substitute for, you know, actual air conditioning. If you have the money to spend on an eau de cologne-style perfume and want it to last a fair amount of time without having to choke on nasty woody ambers or oceans of white musk, then I highly recommend Tom Yum.

Somewhat along the same lines, if you love neroli and want a complex, natural-smelling version, then Natsumeku is very good. In keeping with its Japanese inspiration, it smells quite like a Di Ser perfume in that its tingly, orangey citrus notes (neroli in this case) tinged with the wintergreen finger snap of camphor and silvery, refined hinoki wood. In other words, neroli filtered through a Japanese sensibility rather than through the regular ole channel of an Amalfi citrus grove. It is fresh and sharp, and quite medicinal, like the cool, steamy air in a Japanese onsen on Hokkaido island, where you are getting rubbed down by a masseur with unpronounceable Japanese herbs, damp sea mosses, and yuzu-style citruses that probably only exist within 2 miles of the onsen and nowhere else. It smells like, for want of a better word, the “Other”.

I am less enthused about the solid-but-plain-Jane drydown of Natsumeku, because I am not a huge fan of neroli, and this does get very ‘neroli’-ish in the end. It might be just me who has this issue, but I always tire of the incessantly cheerful soapiness of neroli. In this instance, if I am choosing to smell soapy and clean, then I’d much rather be wearing Tom Yum, above.

Thichila is an interesting one indeed. Sorry to be bossy, but I’m really going to have to insist you disregard any reviews you see for Thichila that make it out to be tremendously complex, floral, incensey, old school, or even chypre-ish – it’s really none of those things. Because Thichila is one of those perfumes that happens to be composed in an Eastern style and uses complex-smelling, exotic naturals, many people – mostly Westerners – may mistake its complexity for a matter of construction. As a matter of fact, Thichila is simply one big bridge built between two massively complex materials – a natural Thai oud oil and a big, rustic myrrh. These two monoliths happen, in this case, to share a peculiarly rubbery-rooty-oily-anisic character that makes it difficult to tell where one ends and the other takes over. I find Thichila fascinating precisely because of this.

The Thai oud smells charmingly like the inside of a party balloon or a bouncy castle – plasticky, rubbery, with the far-off twang of trampled fairground straw and sticky, jammy-fruity children’s handprints. It reminds me very much of one of FeelOud’s more unusual-smelling oud oils, whose name I can’t recall right now, but which smelled like the air that escapes from plastic lunchboxes that you’re opening for the first time in three months when the new term is starting.

At some point, the sweet, plasticky rubber tube of oud rolls into the scent of myrrh – gloomy and rubbery, but also sweet and crunchy, like giant golden sugar crystals dipped in anise and spread in a hard, glittery paste across your skin. I think Thichila is, on balance, a great perfume, but fair warning – you have to love this particular style of oud oil and this particular sort of myrrh for it to be a success for you. A very specific perfume, therefore, for a very specific taste.

Maruyama smells to me like a richly vegetal cis-jasmone or immortelle scent, i.e., floral notes with clear overtones of burnt hay, maple sugar, or strange exotic herbs like lovage that smell half like a white flower, half like celery. It reminded me at first of Comme des Garcons’ Sequoia and then of Cardamom Rose Sugar by Solstice Scents. There’s always a point at which this sort of thing smells pleasantly like a glazed maple-cider doughnut to me, and then slightly but ever so insistently of curry and caramelized brown sugar mashed together, at which point I don’t really want to smell it at all. If you don’t hit that plateau quite so quickly as I do, then I highly recommend Maruyama as an exotic Eastern take on the classically French ‘Sables’ (Annick Goutal) territory.

Mohragot is the nouveau fougère of the line, kind of analogous to the place that Mousse Illuminée holds for Rogue Perfumery, or Eiderantler for January Scent Project, but with a thrillingly damp earth accord that whips us away from that lavender shaving foam ‘daddy’ picture and plunges us instead deep into the bowels of a violent thunderstorm in a forest, the rain and wind ripping up the soil and hurling broken branches, leaves, and air molecules into each other.

It took me forever to work out why I love the wet, dark, green ‘mustiness’ and soil-y ‘moldiness’ of this opening, until I realize that it replicates the same ozone-in-turmoil atmosphere of Supercell by Sixteen92, and to a lesser extent, the ‘old’ and ‘clay-like’ green earthiness of Oakmoss (Muschio di Quercia) by Abdes Salaam Al Attar.

Someday, I’ll figure out what it is about this sort of scent that moves my black soul, but right now, all I can think of is that this kind of mossy vetiver smell is alive and dead in equal measure. The mold and the dustiness, the ‘aged’ browny tint of the earth smell, its overall murk and gloom – this reminds me of the ‘newly-opened tomb’ dead air that billows out of Onda parfum (Vero Profumo) and Djedi (Guerlain).

But here and there, there is the juicy rudeness of new plant life poking its way through, the air crackling with ozone. So yes, though the hummus-rich, brown-green earthiness is all-encompassing at first, soon you notice that it is pierced here and there with the minty vase water of oakmoss.

On balance, however, this is not a particularly fresh or herbal example of a fougère. Pandan leaf, or screwpine, is mentioned in the notes list, so perhaps the gentle sweetness of those screwpine ittar they use to flavor syrups, tobacco, and cosmetics in India is what is relieving Mohragot of that tiresomely ‘Brut’-like, aftershavey bitterness that usually makes fougères such a bore to wear (as a woman). The pandan leaf note gives Mohragot an interestingly milky, nutty tonality, yet it is not as piercingly sweet or as fruity as an actual screwpine ittar. I find Mohragot one of the more interesting perfumes in the Prissana line, because it takes a while to pick apart, and even after three or four wears, parts of it remain impenetrable to me. I do appreciate that the ubiquitous 21^st century finish of dopey tonka bean has been swapped out for a softly musky tobacco accord that smells like an idealized vision of an autumn walk. Unfortunately, Mohragot disappears from my skin within three hours. Now, I’m no longevity bore, but for $160 for 30mls, that’s just taking the piss.

If I’d been dipping my toes into Strangers Parfumerie to test the waters and encountered Aroon Sawat first, I’d have turned 180º on my heels toute suite. Its clumsy mish-mash of woody ambers and big, syrupy fruit is bathed in a chemical radiance so powerful and all-reaching that my eyeballs hurt even to remember it now. It is a perfume whose finer points are wasted on me completely, obscured as they are by this big, thick gloppy blanket of amber-wood-syrup-resin-fruit aromachemicals. It’s just atrocious. A crime against perfume.

Thank God I operate a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy, because all the other Strangers Parfumerie perfume turned out to be either memorably quirky, or charming, or at least interesting enough to redeem the utter horror that was Aroon Sawat. In fact, in general, I liked the Strangers Parfumerie as much as, if not more than, the perfumes in the more upmarket (and more highly priced) Prissana line. The fact that they represent much better value for money is almost beside the point.

SM Café is possibly one of the most successful coffee-based perfumes out there, and I say that as someone who rarely thinks that coffee-scented anything works (apart from the real thing itself of course). The SM in SM Café stands for sado-masochism, but there’s nothing really risqué about this nicely-balanced dance between the intense, burnt flavor of freshly-roasted coffee beans and the clean sweetness of wood, musks, and amber resin. The coffee does smell undeniably dirty and grungy, but it’s more the funk of damp coffee grounds you’re cleaning out of the pot than anything S&M or leather related, and anyway it all gets balanced out by the milky ambers and beeswax in the base.

Although not terribly fruity, the sour morello cherry accent and the coumarin add a certain pipe tobacco angle to the concoction that I find broadly handsome – it also makes SM Café the indie synonym for Close Up by Olfactive Studio. But truth be told, SM Café is far more austere and masculine-leaning; in overall orientation, far closer to the dusty, burnt, 1970s character of Coze by Parfumerie Generale than to the sweetened coffee-tobacco of Close Up.

I’m confused by just how much I enjoy the gourmand perfumes in the Strangers Parfumerie line-up. Gourmand perfumes are not generally my thing. The designer ones are gloppy glucose bombs with zero distinguishing features, the niche ones use higher quality or more interesting sugar-choco-frooty aromachemicals but unfortunately tend to arrive at much the same place as the designer ones (and cost about $200 more), and the indies, well, in their effort to be all weird and ironic and indie about it, push the gourmand notes into ever-increasingly grotesque forms just for the sake of it (with few of them very wearable in the long run).

So Fetch, for example, has a protein bar accord and is based on a phrase from Mean Girls, so you’ll forgive me if I say I was ready to automatically class this with the third category. But I WAS WRONG. This stuff is just delightful. It has sass. It opens up on a huge whoosh of cherry-flavored fizz, as if someone dropped a whole packet of Love Hearts into a 2 liter plastic bottle of 7-Up and shook it all up until it exploded like a trailer park Prosecco.

So Fetch makes me feel young. It makes me imagine what Bendelirious by État Libre d’Orange might smell like if cross-pollinated with the rubbery tennis balls of The Soft Lawn (Imaginary Authors). There are, at points, beguiling little whiffs of rubber tires, fuel exhaust, and lemon-scented sherbet powder. In the drydown, notes of pink lemonade, strawberry erasers, and marshmallow fluff float into the picture – basically the same soft, billowy lokhoum fun of Douleur! by Bogue, minus the enamel-stripping rose oxide. Really, really good stuff.

Sangre Dulce is darker in tone than So Fetch, but no less weird or interesting, or ultimately, wearable. Immediately on application, there is something here that reminds me of something Lush or BPAL would make: burned sugar crossed with the headshop murkiness of amber cubes and dragon’s blood incense, or some mysterious dried herb concoction in a burlap sack. It smells very indie – not in the super-fancy artisanal sense of the word, but more in the sense of the Etsy crowd dropping a Solstice or Hexennacht release of perfumes honoring the Moon or witches or something. Not saying that to knock it, by the way – many of my favorite perfumes are indie oils from the latter category (I am just not into the witchy side of things).

I smell in Sangre Dulce a whole host of confusing but really pleasing notes that seem to hang together very well – burned sugar, rubber galoshes, sugar mashed into dirt, bathtub booze, and in the far drydown, something that smells like over-baked wheatgrass and granola bars (maybe this is where that protein bar ended up). If Luca Turin were to smell this, I’d imagine he’d find a way to praise Prin Lomros for his off-the-wall thinking, in the same way he (almost wistfully) loves the Constantine father and son duo at Lush for having the guts to just throw everything into a pot as a mad experiment and see what works (“Someone seems to be having a lot of fun over there” as he might say, in that impish way of his).

A basic way to describe Sangre Dulce is to say that it smells like sugar cubes and burned wheat that took a wrong turn somewhere and fell down a dark cellar into a pot of hooch, dragging with it some Converse sneakers and a vial of herbal folk medicine. In fact, I’m pretty sure that was the creative brief for Lush’s All Good Things.

Cigar Rum seems to be one of the most popular scents in the Strangers Parfumerie stable, probably because the handsome, complex aroma of tobacco absolute never fails to please. This is a good but hardly unique take on tobacco leaf – most of the heavy lifting is done by the tobacco absolute, but there’s a flash of warm, boozy rum up top to dress it up, and it skips over the heavy vanilla or dried fruit stickiness of Tobacco Vanille.

That said, it does nothing special or new above and beyond the real baseline for indie tobacco perfumes, which remains Tabac Aurea by Sonoma Scent Studio. Cigar Rum is also one of the Prin Lomros scents that falls flat in the base – there’s very little there to hold it together once you get past the richness of the tobacco opening. If you’re thinking of investing in an indie tobacco, I’d still go for the best-in-class of Tabac Aurea.

Cigar Rum Intense is the same, but is obviously a concession to the bros, who always want something more chemically radiant and beastmode. Anything nice-smelling or natural about Cigar Rum has been wiped out by the heavy woody ambers in the Intense version. Honestly, I’d steer clear and leave this one to the bros, because God knows those poor guys are under-catered to/s.

Burning Ben is so, so good. You definitely need to love phenolic scents to like it, but as long as your fetish is smelling like beef jerky on a campfire, then Burning Ben will really do it for you. It runs along the same lines as Le Labo Patchouli 24 or Slumberhouse Jeke – basically big, billowing bombs of birch tar, cade, and lapsang souchong smeared over a sweet or boozy baseline. But it features an innovation so good-smelling and so damn right that I can’t believe nobody’s thought of before now: coffee! The burnt, aromatic ‘fresh roast’ coffee bean note lifted out of SM Café and grafted right on top of the burning cade-birch heart of Burning Ben makes for a smoky, tarry coffee darkness that smells fantastic.

At first, as you might imagine, it’s a bit too intense, like a billycan of coffee that’s boiled over on a campfire and is now sizzling meanly on the embers beneath. The addition of the coffee gives the birch tar leather a more masculine bent, and for part of this ride, I feel like I’m wearing my boyfriend’s leather jacket, infused with his scent of aftershave, manly musk, and general ‘maleness’ – this I find sexy in a cross-dressing way, and for people who find Patchouli 24 not masculine or butch enough, well, voila Burning Ben.

But before all of these intensely burnt, roasted flavors can run over into harsh or bitter, an oriental-ish and sweetly nutty base arrives to soften the edges. The basenotes are vague and amorphous in a way that makes you think, ‘Mmm, that smells good’, but also leaves you at a loss to define any one particular note or accord that’s making it so.

The best I can do is to say that it’s more like a texture than a taste, like those firm salted toffees whose pleasure lies mainly in the chew. Salty-sweet amber, toffee, beeswax, crushed hazelnuts – a sensuous mélange of silky, warm ‘brown’ flavors that are the perfect accompaniment to the sharper, smokier ‘brown’ notes of birch tar and coffee up top. Burning Ben is one of the Strangers Parfumerie scents that smells ever better the more it goes on – perhaps the forceful nature of phenolic scents in general is what ensures the richness doesn’t attenuate as quickly. Anyway, I love this category of scents, so it follows that I love Burning Ben. Beyond my general bias, I think that Burning Ben manages to pull off a bit of innovation in a genre that I suspect is rather a self-limiting space.

As good as Burning Ben is, I’ve left the best for last. Salted Green Mango is, for me, the standout of the Strangers Parfumerie line. The mango note is not really the point – it’s just a momentary swelling of something syrupy and green-tropical behind the avalanche of musk and vetiver, subsiding into the ether far too quickly to be a feature.

The thing to pay attention to here is the salt. Salted Green Mango is basically a huge, spacey cloud of sparkly vetiver-musk molecules that mimics the invigorating scent of salt air. It smells clean, but despite the probably industrial amounts of white musks or Iso E Super used here, also quite organic, like what I imagine the air around the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah smells like on a breezy day. And yet, there is something clearly lab-made about the scent; it feels engineered, ergonomic, and therefore a bit more chic or more modern than just a simple clustering of naturals.

I’m in love with how this (really quite simple) scent of white, clean, salty woods and musk gives me that ‘my-skin-but-better’ aura; it’s effortless and sensual. I’m willing to bet serious money that people who love those modern, shape-shifting floral-woody musks made to smell like 50% cyborg, 50% warm human skin – stuff like Glossier You, Diptyque’s Fleur de Peau, and Le Labo Ambrette 9 – will love Salted Green Mango. For me, it knocks all those modern skin musks, as well as Jo Malone’s (really excellent) Wood Sage & Sea Salt, right off their perches. This one goes straight on the full bottle list.

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Eris Parfums Mxxx.

7th February 2020

Mxxx. by Eris Parfums is an almost embarrassingly sexual scent – the result, I imagine, of an experiment to cross breed the silvery, driftwood aroma of a far-off beach bonfire with the boudoir-ish scent of smoked butter, incense ash, and the baritone subwoofer of 88% cocoa powder.

I really liked the original Mx., which, with its creamy-spicy-woody character (à la Cadjméré by Parfumerie Generale), was a bright and casual affair. The innovation here, with Mxxx., is that Barbara Hermann and her perfumer for Eris Parfums, Antoine Lie, decided to up the stakes by adding a large dose of 7% natural ambergris tincture, cacao from Trinidad, and hyraceum tincture to the formula. The difference this has made to the bones of the perfume is striking. It’s not just that the natural ambergris has made the perfume warmer, siltier, more animalic – which it has – but that the furniture has been rearranged in a way that makes me think it’s another room entirely.

Each time I wear Mxxx., it overwrites my memory of the original a little bit more. I remember the original smelling like sandalwood, if sandalwood was made of pine, milk, hazelnuts, and chocolate oranges – sexy in a tousled, white cotton t-shirt kind of way. Mx. was firmly unisex, or just ever so slightly feminine-leaning, and clearly a perfume for daylight hours.

Mxxx., by contrast, is a smeary creature of the night and more emphatically masculine. The bright chocolate-orange sandalwood of the original has been replaced with a smoky butter note, which is held in place by an quasi-fecal cedarwood with bitter, chocolatey undertones.

In its total effect, Mxxx. still smells like sandalwood to me, but a much earthier, more aromatic version than the milky ‘saffron orange’ sweetness of the original. The butter-cacao undertone here is unctuous but roughened with a kitten’s lick of grey sea salt that catches at your throat and stops the scent from smelling overtly gourmand. The incense, subtle spices, and the musky cedarwood give the scent a dry, gauzy texture, like ash from a wood fire blown into the air.

Animalic? Technically, yes, I suppose it is. But Mxxx. isn’t one of those fragrances that sacrifices smoothness or wearability at the altar of animalic authenticity. I think we’ve all smelled scents where castoreum smells like the pissiest, driest, most urine-soaked piece of leather imaginable, or where their natural ambergris smells alarmingly like halitosis, horse dander, and low-tide harbor. While I admire those kind of scents for pushing boundaries, and for testing our tolerance for the unabridged ‘realness’ of animal secretions at their rawest, they sure as hell can be a trial to wear.

Give me something like Mxxx. any day. It smells great, and sexy in a skin-like kind of way, but never like something that’s playing a game of chicken with me. It really isn’t any more challenging or animalic than, say, the full-bodied, all-original-woods-and-civet-intact lasciviousness of 1980s-1990s perfume, like Samsara (Guerlain) or Ubar (Amouage) or Creed’s fantastic Jasmin Impératrice Eugenie (not that Mxxx. smells like these, particularly; I’m just referring to a similar ‘generosity’ in their proportions of thick, pongy-sandalwoody-French-perfumeyness).

The smoked butter note is, for me, the primary animalic element. It smells a bit fatty and skin-like, at first, before the smoke and ashy woods arrive to dry it all out. The smoke here is subtle, rising in curlicues up from the bottom of the scent, and sifting its way lazily through the salty, melty cocoa-butter of the topnotes. This is not the strong smoke of cade or birch tar, but rather the rubbery, sweet smoke of the tire leather in (vintage) Bvlgari Black.

It’s a genuinely sexy perfume, this minxy Mxxx., but not in an immediately obvious way – far more Hot Priest from Fleabag, let’s say, than the knowingly calculated (and boringly obvious) head-tilt of George Clooney.

Source of sample: Barbara Hermann very kindly sent me a sample to test (with no obligation to write about it), for which I am very grateful. I believe that wearing it has increased my sexual attractiveness by about 156%, but I work with scientists, so I should say that there’s no real evidence to support that figure outside of my own imagining.

Photo by Pablo Merchán Montes on Unsplash

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Eve and Pandora: Two Perfumes by Diane St. Clair

4th February 2020

I don’t know how to say this without sounding condescending, but one sniff of Eve and Pandora, the new duo of perfumes from Diane St. Clair, is enough to tell that there has been an evolutionary leap somewhere between her first group of releases and this one (I haven’t smelled Casablanca, so perhaps this is the missing link).

Don’t get me wrong – I really liked the first Diane St. Clair releases. First Cut, Gardener’s Glove, and Frost were quiet études of a lifecycle as viewed through the eye of a woman intensely connected to it; each perfume a little door cracked open onto an internal dreamscape. I liked that you could tell that these were perfumes made from a woman’s perspective: there was a female sort of tentativeness or ambiguity that I don’t feel in the work of, say, a Josh Lobb or a Hans Hendley. Her first perfumes are little crawlspaces between absolutes, allowing you to breathe and just be.

But Eve and Pandora are perfumes in which you can instantly smell all of the rich, bosomy vintage perfumes that Diane St. Clair has smelled her way through in the meantime. Eve and Pandora are confident florals that have something to say and aren’t apologizing for taking up space. They both smell like flowers, clearly, but this time painted confidently in oil rather than politely in pastel.

Others better and more interested in backstory than I have explored who Pandora and Eve were, and the vein of rebellious curiosity that unites them; all I will say is that both perfumes do justice to the conflicted, imperfect condition that is womanhood. They are abstract and perfumey – a bit resistant to analysis – mixing the bitter with the sweet, and appealing to purely adult tastes. Like women (and bank vaults), Pandora and Eve take a single set of variables, shake them up, and arrive at very different results.

Out of the endless permutations that Eve could have settled on, we arrive at innocence. Well, at first anyway. Powdery woodland flowers – violets, freesia, and a fresh, crunchy green apple note that has the good manners to smell natural for once, rather than the lurid Jolly Rancher version we usually get, or worse the fake apple-cum-Ambroxan freshness of some Creed masculines. This is the prim crispness of apple soap or apple shampoo, with a lemony lick of vetiver for that freshly-mown grass thing that goes so well with apple.

Lilacs hide and then emerge – all sullen, thick-lipped sexuality, turgid and dormant, trapped inside a prim high-necked blouse, not fooling anyone. Does that description of lilacs surprise you? Are you violently disagreeing with me as you read? Talk to me when you’ve lived for years in a neighborhood so thick with lilac bushes that you feel ganged up on. Lilacs smell soapy and prim and Victorian in the singular, in isolation, but when roaming in packs of five or six, you notice that their scent has a tipping point, where it spills over from soap into this hugely ripe, fertile, polleny smell that occupies the air like a shape. Lilacs are the smell of something that pretends it is being restrained but in reality is already touching you inappropriately. And yet, and yet…that lemony vetiver keeps the outer garments smelling as a fresh as a daisy.

Eve is for lovers of Opardu, or better yet, Warszawa, both by Puredistance, by which I mean that it will appeal to people who appreciate a certain old-fashioned, Veronica Lake-style glamour in their floral perfumes – the scented equivalent of a high-necked white satin blouse hiding a ridiculously lush shelf of a bosom.

Pandora spins the dial on the same set of notes, but the safe opens with a satisfying click on a completely different cavity. Pandora is the Hussy – Joan Holloway to Eve’s Peggy Olsen. It opens with a perfumey blast of heavy, bittersweet gasoline and hairspray mixed with fruit – the gaseous and thick aroma of an apple perhaps, rotting slowly in an organic wrapper of green leaves and flowers. In the background, there is a civety floral musk flushing the air pockets of the scent.

This is – and bear with me here – a fruity, waxy chypre backwashed in a gauze of cigarette smoke. It smells a bit like Lucien Lelong’s Indiscret, a 1940’s femme fatale type floral that derived much of its character from a grey-green, grainy galbanum that cast a hazy fag ash aura over the whole shebang. Thanks to the passion of a close friend for Indiscret, I invested in a vintage bottle from eBay, and was left a little underwhelmed by the perfume apart from this one unique aspect – that weirdly attractive ‘turned perfume’ smell you get from old perfumes whose formerly green or fresh-smelling galbanum, or oakmoss, or God knows, coriander have slowly disintegrated over time until they’ve coagulated into this brown gunk that smells alternatively of coffee grounds, brandy, and hairspray, with a hint of stale Rive Gauche haunting the far corners.

I love this smell to the point of fetishism. I chase vintage perfumes now not really for a glimpse of how they once were, in their fully pristine, original beauty, but for the signs of this incipient decay, like a dog hunting for truffles. The combination in Pandora of this thick, gassy fruit and that ashy galbanum-vetiver is what I’m jonesing for, to be honest, and it might not even be the hook the perfumer intended to reel me in with. Whatever the intention, the top half of Pandora smells to me like the topnotes of a long-sealed-up vintage perfume, sludgy and indistinct with now banned damascones and nitro-musks, like a 1940’s Coco. I get a whiff of this with some of the DSH perfumes too, most notably Jitterbug. It effectively conjures up that fictional (fictional to me anyway) atmosphere of ladies, possibly your mother included, sweeping into the nursery with their long fur coats and Chanel lipstick and long cigarettes held preciously in long cigarette holders, wafting the mysterious musk of perfumery perfume (the ‘good stuff’ worn only on special occasions). The fact that Pandora has flashes of stale lipstick wax or cosmetic powder helps that illusion along even further.

But if I came for the perfumey decrepitude of Pandora’s first half, I stay for the wild vetiver finale. The vetiver here almost has a texture to it, like a cup of black coffee thick with spice and wood. Addictive, rich, and very moreish, this is the saturnine heft of European style gingerbread stuffed with enough black pepper to flavor a goulash but still perfumey enough that you’d know better than to put it anywhere near your mouth. Pandora remains determinedly abstract and fuzzy-bordered throughout, and you have to love that commitment.

Photo by Les Anderson on Unsplash

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Dusita Le Pavillon d’Or

6th December 2019

Although I’ve always worn make-up, my reasons for doing so have varied dramatically over the years. As a teenager, my first and only concern was to make my face into a blank mask to submerge any of the features that made me me and replace them with a ‘fake news’ version of myself. I used make-up to disappear myself. In my twenties and thirties, I used make-up in a purely utilitarian way, zipping through the Holy Trinity of skin-eyes-mouth simply to avoid subjecting strangers to the raw, peeled potato-ishness of my naked face. I cultivated a short-list of favorites and did not deviate, except for dropping concealer altogether when I realized that I’d stopped caring whether people saw my flaws or dark circles.

But now, in my forties – a renaissance of sorts! I have fallen completely in love with the artistry and self-expression side of make-up. And I use it now not to hide, not to cover, but to play. I can be a different woman every day, if I want. But only because I want to shape-shift or it amuses me, not because I feel I have to conform to someone else’s expectations. The pleasure I get in playing around with soft, lavender duochromes from Nabla that shift from blue to pink when you turn your head or going bare-faced with only a bright red mouth to focus the eye – well, it’s extraordinary to me. It’s equal to the pleasure I get from perfume.

The only reason I’m ~~banging on~~ talking about this is that Dusita’s Le Pavillon d’Or reminds me very much of the watercolor blush technique demonstrated by make-up artist extraordinaire Lisa Eldridge in this video, and also of the Japanese-inspired blush placement technique called igari, as demonstrated here. Though different in intent, the two techniques share a focus on the overlapping of delicate, watery layers of color to create a diffused effect that balances richness with translucence. Le Pavillon d’Or seems to be built along the same lines, with several layers laid down until something like the iridescence of a butterfly’s wing is achieved.

Gosh, it’s so pretty. 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. There is also a whisper of fruit, but one so phantasmagoric that it might all be in my head.

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.

Although perfumer Pissara Umavijani’s inspiration for Le Pavillon d’Or was drawn from three different lakes, this perfume smells more pastoral than aquatic to me. It carries the green-gold-lilac duskiness of post-harvest meadows and field margins and hedgerows.

The final layer in this igari blush-style fragrance is a crepuscular haze of almond-scented lotion, due to the heliotrope, a plant beloved of midwives for its babyish innocence. But while in less elegant hands the heliotrope might turn fudgy and turgid in that yellow cake way of Etro’s Heliotrope, Pissara has threaded the note through gossamer layers of green florals and iris so delicately that the finish retains the freshness borrowed from the first layer laid down. Simply lovely.

Photo by Linh Ha on Unsplash

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