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Claire

Summer

Creed Virgin Island Water

29th June 2015

Freshly squeezed limes, rum, coconut….it’s not an overly complex smell but it does what it says on the tin. Creed Virgin Island Water has to be the fragrance equivalent of the sentiments expressed in those 90’s Lilt adverts, where the running joke was about how laid back life in the Caribbean was, and how the only thing that got people stressed over there was how to pull your dinghy up from the sea to the beach bar in time for happy hour.

It smells like a cocktail with lime, Malibu, rum, and well, that’s about it. I think it’s massively over-priced and would be more suited to a body spray rather than a niche fragrance. But the smell is so good-humored and promising of drunken relaxation that I can’t see how anyone could actively dislike it. If you’re the kind of person who wrinkles their nose at a good cocktail, then I don’t want to know ya.

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Fruity Scents Masculine Oud Review

Amouage Jubilation XXV

25th June 2015

Fit for a king, they say about Amouage Jubilation XXV – and in this case, they mean it quite literally, because the Sultan of Oman frequently gifts bottles of Jubilation and Gold to other monarchs when they pay official state visits to his sultanate. And if I were a visiting monarch, I too would be delighted to find a bottle of this resting on my pillow.

Jubilation is a richly spiced oriental that has the best of everything in it – an opulent Frankincense, jammy fruit (orange and blackberries), warm pie spices, a hot, smoking oud, and a superbly salty musk and ambergris reconstruction extending it all at the tailbone. The opening, in particular, has a berry and dark chocolate effect going on that’s interesting (I assume it’s the patchouli interacting with the fruit and incense).

It’s very balsamic, from the myrrh, opoponax, and Frankincense, smoky thanks to the labdanum and guaiacum, and very sweet – almost syrupy sweet actually – thanks to the big dollops of honey. Sweet enough for a woman (this woman included). I love it.

Opulent, rich, oriental, smoldering……I’m thinking Omar Sharif with those bedroom eyes of his. But it’s classy, too. Although Jubilation is rich, it wears quite lightly and is a teeny bit famous for sillage that comes and goes all day, making you wonder if you’ve put on enough (you have). A couple of sprays under a shirt will provide subtle wafts of gorgeousness all day.

Funnily enough, I never would have thought of trying this for myself but for a mistake someone made while filling a sample for me. I had requested a sample of Jubilation 25, the woman’s version because I wanted to see if it was much different from the sample of the extrait I have. The sample came marked “Jubilation 25”, so I sprayed it on one wrist and a bit of the Jubilation 25 extrait on the other wrist. Immediately, I knew that it couldn’t be the same perfume at all – this one was far sweeter, softer, and more affable than the Jubilation 25 I was familiar with. I put two and two together, and interested, began looking into the reviews of Jubilation XXV.

Now don’t get me wrong – I love Jubilation 25, and as a piece of “art”, I still believe it to be greater than XXV. But Jubilation XXV is a much easier wear. It has a sweet juiciness to it that just comes off as more friendly and approachable. Jubilation XXV is a dopey Labrador to Jubilation 25’s sly cat.

I’m a fan of many Amouage fragrances, but I really feel that the Jubilation brother and sister pair represent the pinnacle of the house’s artistic achievement to date. Released to celebrate Amouage’s 25th birthday in 2007, the Jubilations kicked off a new era for the company. And out of the house’s “couple” scents, the Jubilations are also the most different from each other. Unlike the pairings that followed (Lyric, Epic, Memoir, and Journey), the Jubilations are utterly different in feel and texture to each other, and even the notes that do connect them (fruit and Frankincense) are treated so differently as to render any similarity between them on a purely technical basis moot.

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Masculine Review

Amouage Memoir Man

25th June 2015

Possibly my favorite Amouage for men, out of the four or five masculines I’ve tried from the house. Amouage Memoir Man is quite a sparse perfume – basically a mix of bitter herbs providing a layer of green crunch over dark and smoky Frankincense and a bone-dry, papery cedar. I like its austerity, and unlike the more opulently decorated Amouages, its stretched-out form allows room for each of the materials to “breathe”.

In its treatment of the famous Omani silver frankincense, Memoir is the dramatic inverse of Jubilation XXV: in Memoir, it strips the material back to a smoky, parched, and ashy skeleton, whereas the more affable Jubilation XXV piles on the honey and candied berries to counter the citric bitterness of Frankincense. If Jubilation XXV is Omar Sheriff exploding in fulsome Technicolor on our TV screens, then Memoir Man is Cary Grant in a black and white movie, smoking a cigarette and smiling wryly at poor Jimmy Stewart’s pathetic attempts to steal his woman. He doesn’t speak much, but then, he doesn’t have to.

The opening notes are a vivid one-two punch of minty basil leaf (with its hints of licorice root) and bitterish artemisia (wormwood). Artemisia is a silvery-green Mediterranean shrub that the French use to make absinthe. Absinthe, which until quite recently was illegal because of its reputation for making you hallucinate (or simply die), kind of tastes like Pernod, which is to say like aniseed, but far more bitter.

I see that both artemisia and absinthe are listed in the notes, and really, the opening does have a very pronounced “herbal bitters” flavor to it. To my nose, it is also somehow similar to the snapped-stalk astringency of fresh angelica and rhubarb. This wet, lush botanical greenness is much needed – soon after the opening, in rides this dry, smoky Frankincense and bone-dry woods combo that nearly sucks the moisture out of my airways. The dryness of the woods/incense actually reminds me of Naomi Goodsir’s Bois d’Ascese, which has a similar kind of pitch-black, charred, sooty aroma.

I’m not going to lie – there is also something fairly chemical about this phase, and something about it hurts my nostrils. But the green herbs and stalks from the opening notes are still there, in the background, offering a little flash of cool wetness here and there to relieve my nose. The dry-down is a beautifully smoky cedar, dry and papery, and wholly reminiscent of Dior’s Eau Noire’s dry-down, with its Finnish sauna and hot stones steaminess.

Mysterious, dry as a bone, and smoky as hell – I find myself thinking about Memoir Man long after I’ve finished my sample. I would drape myself over any man debonair enough to wear this.

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Masculine Review The Discard Pile Tobacco

Amouage Journey Man

25th June 2015

The first time I tried Amouage Journey Man, I was bowled over by the opening – a massive fist of dark tobacco leaves, bullied on both sides by a phenomenally bitter bergamot and a mean, biting Sichuan pepper note. It’s an almost opaque wall of smell coming at you – strong and bitter and tannic, like chewing on the Lapsang Souchong tea leaves left in your cup. It dries down into a slightly less bitter tannery leather, but overall the impression is ALL MALE.

There’s also an odd but memorable second act to this, coming in right after the tobacco opening, where it smells like a huge handful of damp earth. I don’t mean it smells like patchouli or vetiver (it’s neither moldy nor grassy), but literally like a flinty, mineral damp soil that you’d imagine worms crawling through. Really weird – am I the only one picking up on this? The soil note or accord is quite realistic.

The more I wear my sample, though, the less impressed I am. The opening is very distinctive, but the perfume gets pretty thin and boring towards the end. Plus, something about it reminds me of the old-fashioned fougeres that men wore in the 1970’s, all leather and ferns and tobacco and dry woods. No cream or sugar please! It seems to me that when the

It seems to me that when the fougere was born, the notes that defined masculinity – that old-fashioned, hairy-chested masculinity I mean – were also locked down. So from that moment on, perfumes that featured any one of those notes up front and center, without providing anything to soften them (like vanilla or sugar or amber), spell out “men only” to me.

I know that Journey Man is technically a woody-spicy perfume, but it reads as an all-male fougere to my brain, and I can’t handle it. If Journey Man was a person, it would be hairy-chested 70’s idol such as Sean Connery, or better yet, Burt Reynolds, lying back in bed and fingering his gold medallion.

Impressive, but not for me.

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Review Summer White Floral

Frederic Malle Carnal Flower

25th June 2015

My sample of Carnal Flower by Les Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle sat in my sample box, unloved and untested, for a whole year. I kind of fear tuberose, you see. It brings back unwelcome associations for me between the sleek, buttery smell of tuberose blooms in vases and rich ladies who lunch in hotels.

I used to work in one such hotel – Kelly’s Hotel in Rosslare Strand (Irish people will know it). Don’t get me wrong – the hotel was, and still is, a great place and the owners are wonderful. But never was I so aware of my lowly socio-economic status as when I stepped through the revolving doors into the tuberose-scented air of that hotel.

Over time, the smell of tuberose became linked in my mind with rich people, carpets so deep your heels sink into them, and the indefinable smell of wealth in the air. My prejudice is wholly my own, of course – it only means that I have an inferiority complex. But I am careful about tuberose because I am only human and don’t want to deliberately trigger those feelings.

I needn’t have worried about Carnal Flower. It’s less of the ‘wealthy hotel air’ smell of hothouse tuberoses and more botanical, earthy, natural in feel – like walking through a swampy field of tuberose stalks. It is a smell rooted in nature and not in something man-made.

The opening notes are luridly green and camphoraceous, and every time I get a mental image of the waxy leaves of a privet hedge and the stalks of the tuberose being crushed and offered to me to smell. The freshness is a surprise, every time, and it moves me. Slightly bitter, sappy, and evergreen, I wish it could last forever; it’s that intoxicating to my senses.

Eventually, the opening dies back and a creamy tuberose is revealed. To my relief, it is not the butter-and-candy disco flower of my worst nightmares (hello Fracas!), but a cool and restrained take on the infamous bloom. It is creamy, yes, but not overblown.

Hints of coconut and white musk round out the floral element. Although I like the opening more, I also quite like this last phase, especially in the heat, because the tuberose and coconut give off a natural, salty beach feel.

Despite the marketing and the name, I don’t find Carnal Flower to be sexy in the slightest. In my opinion, it is simply a tuberose presented in the most botanical, natural way possible. I think Carnal Flower does a brilliant job of showcasing the headiness of the flower as it appears in nature, and not in a hothouse environment, and for that alone, I will always love it. Will I need a whole bottle of it? Nah. But a vial of it to smell every now and then would be nice.

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Green Floral Summer

Vero Profumo Mito Voile D’Extrait

25th June 2015

Addictively green! Actually, green and acid yellow, because along with the garden’s worth of green leaves and a tree’s worth of dry, resinous galbanum shoe-horned into the opening notes of Vero Profumo’s Mito Voile d’Extrait, there is also a hyper-lemon or bergamot accord in there that feels like a million citruses pressed into action all at once. The bitter rind, the juice, the pulp – it’s all here, upfront.

And immediately, in the midst of all this green-and-yellow madness, a creamy white flower starts unfolding its petals, explosively, in a hurry to show off its pushy beauty. Magnolia? Maybe jasmine. Surely, at first it is magnolia – a creamy, non-indolic smell that smells like a magnolia freshly plucked from the tree, complete with the slightly poisonous smell of the green juice of the just-ripped leaves and stems.

It’s beautiful and heady, and yes, supremely botanical in feel. Mito feels like a dense, packed green thing at first, but it has development. It unfurls. The green, citrus ‘roid-rage’ opening unfurls to reveal a magnolia, and the magnolia parts its petals to reveal a very Diorella-esque note of overripe peach or melon. No fruit is listed, but I smell a sticky fruit of some sort.

This ‘rotting fruit’ core is the part of Mito that takes it from a merely botanical wonder of citrus and greens that might have been done by Annick Goutal (only 100 times stronger) to something more complicated, something closer to the slightly decaying, salt-grass-and-fruit chypres that form the bedrock of French summer-chic perfumery, specifically Le Parfum de Therese, Diorella, Cristalle, and even Femme.

Wearing Mito is an all-in experience. You get the lush grandeur of an Italian garden, the resinous greens, the citrus, and creamy white flowers. But you also get the gassy fruit and underlying decay. The extreme dry down of Mito is a surprise – on my skin, it’s all jasmine, with nothing green or botanical or chypre left to provide ballast. I find myself re-spraying to re-live the amazing opening and heart. That’s the part that I find exciting. I’ve gone through two samples, though, and am currently Mito-less. Damn it.

This makes the “maybe” list. Does the joy I feel in the opening notes justify the expense? Hmmmm. We will see.

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Review The Discard Pile

Ann Gerard Rose Cut

25th June 2015

I have to commend Rose Cut by Ann Gerard – its progression is really something. It manages somehow to lurch from a sickly sweet rum-and-aldehydes opening to a parched, mineralic dust in 2.5 hours flat. Has to be some kind of record for going from bad to worse.

The opening notes are a depressing microcosm of ‘niche’ – raspberry jam, rubber, rum, a pile of sugar crystals and the unnaturally white spackle of aldehydes. There’s an interesting rose note in there somewhere, but it comes and goes, and its pale little flutter gets covered up by a purple soap note and what smells like me to be mint. Something herbal and hotel-soapy anyway. It might be the peony. If I’m not mistaken, that’s the note that makes me struggle a bit with Dzongkha (although I respect Dzongkha and I keep trying with it).

It’s the base that I really dislike, though. It flattens out into a grey, mineralic powder that seems to emphasise the very worst aspects of benzoin, specifically that kind of bitter, resinous, catch-in-your-throat facet of bezoin. I’m less keen on that side of benzoin than on the vanilla and lemon cream side.

The oakmoss wood absolute, or whatever they’re calling the substitute for real oakmoss, is not a real replacement at all. So here we have the dry, salty woodiness of oakmoss but without the entrancing, deep inky sludge facets of the real deal. Again, like with the benzoin, this perfume is emphasising all the least attractive facets of the base materials and discarding the parts that make them smell interesting. In my opinion. (Anyone who watches the Good Wife will get that reference).

Honestly, the base just smells like hot, salt-encrusted rocks you find down at the seaside – all air-dried salt, minerals, and general grey stoniness. The patchouli is too pale and polite and cleaned-up to make any kind of impact. The rose has done a disappearing act. It has been “cut”. I keep catching a smell of rubber too – what IS that?

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Summer

Chanel No. 5 Eau Premiere

25th June 2015
Champagne
Sergey Melkonov / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

A beautifully sheer, crisp take on the enduring classic that is Chanel No. 5, the wonderful Chanel No. 5 Eau Premiere is perfect for anyone who adores the original but who finds it too rich and too bombastic for use in the summer heat. Or indeed, for anyone who can’t stand the original.

To be perfectly honest, although I do have a healthy appreciation for the original (especially in its vintage extrait form), it’s not a perfume I ever managed to love. I do love Eau Premiere, though. To me, it smells like a glass of lemony champagne poured over powdered rose, jasmine, and sandalwood. If the original No. 5 is a luxurious cashmere, Eau Premiere is a gossamer-thin silk. Just the ticket for a lunch out with girlfriends on a hot day.

It’s been reformulated. The first version, in the tall bottles, is the best, but is very difficult to find these days. The current version, housed in the more standard-issue Chanel square bottles (those tall bottles must have made the OCD folks at Chanel shudder every time they walked past a Chanel display in a department store), is closer to the original No. 5, and is all around a heavier, muskier, more abstract thing altogether.

I’ve been through a whole 150ml bottle of the original version, but now that I’m out, I’m not bothering with the new version. I’m done. Switching to 31 Rue Cambon instead from here on out.

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Summer

Guerlain Shalimar Parfum Initial L’Eau

25th June 2015

Well, technically, Guerlain’s Shalimar Parfum Initial L’Eau Si Sensuelle. That’s right – a flanker of a flanker of a flanker.

I don’t care. Laugh all you like! I love this stuff.

And get this – this was my first Guerlain. EVER. It was my neural pathway to the original mothership oriental herself, i.e., real Shalimar. (Every time someone says that a flanker was their introduction to the original fragrance, a Thierry Wasser gets his wings.)

I can’t believe they just discontinued this little beauty, the bastards. I know that people are a bit sneery about this being a flanker of a flanker, but, honestly, it is just a fabulous smelling perfume. Whereas Parfum Initial is heavy on the iris/berry/patchouli and more than a few degrees closer to Dior Homme Intense than Shalimar, this one reads as a true Shalimar Light.

L’Eau is also, dare I say, a whole lot better than Parfum Initial. It is like a summer sketch of the original Shalimar using only the gauziest of notes. The heavy, stinky bergamot opening of the original, which can be utterly frightening to the unindoctrinated, has been replaced by sunny, zippy orange, neroli, and grapefruit. It smells like lemon tart or lime cheesecake sprinkled with candied rose petals. The opening is so irresistibly delicious and aromatic, you will want to drink your wrist.

The scent, being simple and direct, reaches the heart and base very quickly, where it stays in a lightly spiced, lightly creamy vanilla register for the duration. The lime cheesecake smell is utterly delicious. It makes me ridiculously happy.

Of course, don’t go into this expecting Shalimar – there is no smoke, heavy vanilla, leather, civet, or amber here. But this works fantastically as a sort of summer cologne-style version of Shalimar when you want to stay on the lighter side of things. Highly recommended, and stock up while you can still find this in shops. Knowing Guerlain, they will probably re-release this or Parfum Initial in the bee bottles in twenty years and try to charge us all $450 a bottle for it. So….buy it now.

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Oud

Oud Satin Mood

25th June 2015

Oud Satin Mood by Maison Francis Kurkdijan is a big, fat Middle Eastern sweet, the kind that is doused in rose syrup, thickened with salep, aromatized with mastic, sprinkled with rosewater and pistachios, and then, finally, dusted with a thick layer or five of powdered sugar so thick your teeth leaves indents in it.

Which means, of course, that I love it.

How could I not? I live in a country so thoroughly marked by a Turkish occupation in the late 1500s that every second word in the food vocabulary is Turkish. And since Turkish cuisine is influenced also by high Persian cuisine, we have quite a few Persian words for food too. Lokum (Turkish delight), halva, tulumba (fried cakes doused in honey syrup), baklava, sutlias (rice pudding) and many, many others – well, you get the picture.

To be honest, I don’t like to eat that stuff – but I do love perfumes that are based on what they smell like.

To me, Oud Satin Mood is a real standout in the Middle Eastern “dessert” genre (if such a genre exists outside of my own head, that is). The opening smells like a thick jam of berries and rose petals stirred through a pot of condensed milk on the stove. We are preparing to make Kulfi here. As vanilla, milk, sugar, and rose petals are cooked down, the sugar and sweet milk combine to produce a sort of toffee-like note.

This sounds almost oppressively sweet, doesn’t it? But it’s not, I swear. There’s a shot of violet here too, which combined with the rose, injects the mixture with the powdery smell you get when you open a Chanel pressed powder compact. It smells, in short, like a Middle Eastern sweet crossed (and leavened with) a rich cosmetics powder accord.

There is also a very faint backbone of oud, and although it’s very subtle, it adds a medicinal woodiness that keeps the sugariness of the vanilla-milk syrup and rose jam in check. At this stage, it smells like MFK’s original Oud got together with Chanel’s Misia and had a baby. In a Middle Eastern pastry shop.

Oh, and the sillage, baby, the sillage!……this one wafts across crowded bars and noisy parties. A perfume as opulent and as powdered as this demands a generous bosom from which to radiate. Could a man wear this? I don’t see why not, as long as the man in question likes deeply sweet, powdery fragrances. He will be missing the cleavage, though. This perfume needs the cleavage.

It gets a bit too monotonously sweet in the dry down. The oud and rose disappear leaving only the hefty vanilla-amber and violet-y powder to do the heavy lifting. I wonder, with the amber and violet, if this smells anything like the fabled Guet–Apens by Guerlain? I’ve never smelled it, so I don’t know. Maybe someone can report back.

Anyone who dislikes powder or very sweet vanillas and ambers might have a problem with this. For a while, I could have sworn there was both caramel and white musk in this, so powdery and syrupy-sweet was the dry down, but I can’t see it listed in the notes anywhere. It must be the amber.

It reminds me somewhat of the crumbly butter cookies I smell in the far dry down of Tocade, but maybe even more of the oppressively-thick musk and caramel dry down of Dame Perfumery’s Black Flower Mexican Vanilla, which represents my own personal line in the sand when it comes to powder and sweetness. In short, I love most of this perfume except for the final last gasps, where it gets a bit cloying.

The price is €306 for 70ml, which is a bit too rich for my blood and especially for a perfume where the oud note – real or synthetic as the case might be – is simply too subtle to justify the cost. But there’s no denying that this is a real bombshell of a perfume and a standout in the Middle Eastern sweet gourmand/oud genre.

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