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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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Ambergris Animalic Aromatic Balsamic Chocolate Independent Perfumery Review Sandalwood Smoke Spice Woods

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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Aromatic Floral Green Green Floral Hay Herbal Independent Perfumery Iris Milk Review Woods

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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Aromatic Green Independent Perfumery Review Rose Rose Oxide Thoughts

Douleur! By Bogue

20th November 2019

Douleur! by Bogue, a collaboration between Freddie Albrighton, a tattoo artist and erstwhile perfume blogger, and Antonio Gardoni, the beloved beardie of Bogue Profumo, has already garnered quite a bit of reaction on the fragrance scene. So, on a scale of one to Sécrétions Magnifiques, just how terrifying is Douleur? Well, it’s definitely quirky, but you won’t a fainting couch or anything. Actually, I kind of love it. And that’s coming from someone whose taste lies somewhere on the scale between ‘deeply conventional’ and ‘willing to experiment on occasion, albeit briefly, and in very small doses’. Last week, I allowed myself to be talked into attending a performance by the Armenian experimental jazz pianist, Tigran Hamasyan, at the Rome Jazz Festival. For the first hour, I sat in silent rage as he jabbed at the ivories like an unsympathetic gynecologist (the fact that he seemed to be wearing diapers didn’t help), but by the end of the performance, I had realized that, under his hands, the piano was not a piano after all, but an oboe. Mind, if not blown, then opened a crack.

While I won’t be listening to experimental jazz or wearing Douleur! every day, I’m genuinely glad to have experienced them. The smell of Douleur! – strawberry erasers on crack mixed with toothpaste and sports aftershave, essentially – is both fizzily exciting and weirdly nostalgic for me. I’d never buy or use a bottle of it but I’d love to smell it every now and then. Does that make sense? A friend of mine mentioned that he’d like to smell it on a handkerchief or blotter rather than on the skin, and I get that. As it turns out, I managed to get a bit of Douleur! on the sleeve of my trench coat, so there it will live in perpetuity, sending up a nuclear cloud of sour, rosy toxicity every time I pull it on.

Mind you, you have to like rose oxide to like Douleur! I have a real thing for it. But you might not. With its uniquely high-pitched ‘castrato’ tonality, rose oxide feels more like a whine from an electric saw than a smell. Think pear-scented nail polish remover or geranium leaf or those hard-boiled rhubarb-and-custard sweets that people in Ireland and the UK will remember for their porny balance between the creaminess of fake custard and a bright pink streak so sharp it peels your taste buds back from your tongue. This sharp, metallic smell is as chemically exciting as a pure aldehyde. Have you ever smelled Opus X by Amouage? That’s rose oxide.

But stuff like Opus X wears on you very quickly – rose oxide can drone on somewhat unless you temper it with something. In Douleur! the rose oxide has been mixed with a seaweed note, which introduces an aquatic fougère note, a bunch of toothpaste-y mint, and a strawberry cotton candy accord that smells like, well, Maltol. All this makes for an admittedly grotesque opening. You smell everything separately at first – the metal, the candy, the mint, and the melony aftershave note – and the effect is jangly and cacophonous, like an orchestra warming up.

Past the opening, though, the notes jostle into place and the whole thing settles. The cloud of semi-poisonous rose oxide remains but softens into the smell of those strawberry erasers we girls used to huff at school. There’s also a rubbery cedar or oak note in the mix here that reminds me of the milky juices that you could work out of a pencil if you chewed on it long enough. I know that Freddie Albrighton is a fan of rose oxide and strawberry, but I wonder if the innocent, almost child-like air in Douleur is coming from Antonio? If he’s anything like me, then he spends a lot of his time trying to wrest those strawberry-scented, rubber knickknacks like Shopkins, LOL figurines, and My Little Pony from their packaging, and maybe this drydown is his smoke signal to other parents of girls. Or maybe a cigar is really just a cigar.

Anyway, all you need to know is that the minty, rosy bitterness of the acid rain opener eventually melts into a big, pink marshmallow, and there’s just something about this trajectory from unsettling to fluffy that is compelling. It makes me want to smell it again and again. There’s a nutty, rosy loukhoum accord in the drydown that smells like a cross-section of Sweet Oriental Dreams by Montale and that makes me smile. In execution, Douleur! reminds me of a limited edition indie oil from Arcana called Strawberries Crave Waterfalls, which features notes of rain, woodland strawberries, fresh water, petitgrain, osmanthus, clover, and smooth amber, and despite a more amateurish finish, arrives at a similar result, i.e., artificial strawberries over an aquatic fougère base. But Douleur! has something that the Arcana oil doesn’t have, and that’s a sense of humor. I don’t know how it’s possible for a perfume to have that, but Douleur feels very playful.

So, is Douleur! weird? Yeah. Quite a bit. But plenty of things are weirder to me than the smell of Douleur. Like, it’s weird that people talk about Xerjoff perfumes like they are blown into bottles by virgins in an Amalfi lemon grove when most clearly have more in common with an ‘after’ photo of Thierry Mugler than a piece of fruit. Dior Sauvage is weird and metallic but also vile-smelling, and bafflingly, men seem to love it. And it’s super weird that, more and more, people are praising perfume for being ‘inoffensive’ and ‘mass pleasing’ as if those are not both words that mean ‘blah”.

Fuck me. I’d much rather smell a charming little weirdo like Douleur! than 99% of the insta-niche I get sent to write about – and I hope I’ve conveyed just how normal and boring my personal taste is. Douleur! is an anachronism. Smelling it makes me realize just how much we’ve sanitized every corner of our perfume to drive out any sign of eccentricity or nonconformity. Modern niche perfumery seems locked in a race to the bottom of the aromachemical sludge jar to find that single, all-pleasing, common denominator scent that sends out the unequivocal signal that we are freshly plucked, powdered, and ready to be mated with.

I’m not interested in writing about the depressing and seemingly endless parade of $300 niche perfumes whose only provocativeness or shock factor is in their marketing. (Tom Ford is releasing a new perfume called – wait for it – Rose Prick. A dildo-pink bottle of (likely) ‘meh’ juice that you know in your heart of hearts is aimed at people more interested in penis-related double entendres than in perfume). But something like Douleur? Yes, now that is worth writing about. Something that wears its weirdness as an artistic badge of honour rather than a sales ploy always is.

Photo by Daniel von Appen on Unsplash

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Amber Aromatic Balsamic Floral Oriental Incense Independent Perfumery Iris Myrrh Oriental Resins Review Rose Sandalwood Tonka Vanilla

Papillon Artisan Perfumes Bengale Rouge

8th July 2019

I have an opiate opoponax problem. It started with an unexpected capitulation to the Red Hot charms of Eau Lente, segued into a sudden and slavish devotion to Jicky, and culminated in a shameful episode a few weeks ago, when I found myself outside a train station at 7.30 a.m. palming a wad of cash to a shady eBay guy for a brown paper bag containing two smeary half-bottles of Carthusia’s Ligea La Sirena.

Ambergris Animalic Aromatic Attars & CPOs Balsamic Floral Oriental House Exploration Incense Independent Perfumery Jasmine Musk Oriental Oud Resins Review Rose Round-Ups Saffron Sandalwood Smoke Spice Spicy Floral Tonka Tuberose Vanilla Vetiver White Floral Woods

Areej Le Dore Koh-i-Noor, Malik al Taif, Oud Luwak & Baikal Gris

15th November 2018

In autumn 2018, Areej Le Dore released its 4th generation of fragrances. Russian Adam very kindly sent me a sample set, which I’ve been playing around with for a while now. Without further ado, here are my reviews of Areej Le Dore Koh-i-Noor, Malik al Taif, Oud Luwak & Baikal Gris.

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DSH Perfumes Series: Gourmand

21st September 2018

Welcome to Part 3 (Gourmand) of my series on DSH Perfumes, the American indie perfume brand helmed by the talented and prolific Dawn Spencer Hurwitz. For those of you joining me just now, let me recap a little.

Animalic Aromatic Balsamic Floral Green Independent Perfumery Masculine Resins Review Rose Sandalwood Smoke Vanilla White Floral Woods

Zoologist Tyrannosaurus Rex

11th September 2018

Antonio Gardoni’s style is so distinctive that his work can almost be graded in Gardoni-ness, with Noun being a 9/10 (i.e., immediately identifiable as an Antonio Gardoni creation) and Aeon 001 being a 3 or a 4 (identifiable as a Gardoni only if you think hard about it). I’ve never had the chance to smell Gardelia, but from all accounts, its honeyed white floral softness places it slightly outside Gardoni canon, so perhaps a 1 on the Gardoni scale.

For those unfamiliar with the Gardoni style, the recurring motifs might be loosely defined as (a) a lean and elegantly bitter mélange of apothecary herbs and spices, tending towards medicinal, (b) a butch, non-traditional treatment of white florals, especially tuberose, and (c) a complex, brocaded drydown that mixes resins with musks, castoreum, ambergris and/or other animalics. More prosaically, I always think of Gardoni’s creations as possessing an authentic ‘golden’ vigor that’s masculine in an old school manner.

Zoologist, as a brand, could also be said to have a distinctive house style. Of course, since each perfume has a different creator, it’s more difficult to pin down the specifics beyond the fact that all seem to be built on an exaggerated scale, with one chosen element (woods, smoke, leaves, fruit) blown up until it towers comically over the composition like King Kong. They are all exciting, vivid fragrances, but often quite rough, probably because they aren’t put through the glossing filter that most other niche scents go through to reach market these days. As an example, Hyrax would be a 10 on the Zoologist scale, because its filth-and-dried-urine-inside-burning-tires aroma makes it one of those hardcore ‘I dare you’ scents that only the nichiest of niche-heads would wear, whereas something like Hummingbird is a solid 2: a frothy whirl of fruit and flowers that won’t scare the horses.

Apologies for the lengthy preamble, but anyone dithering over a blind purchase of either a sample or a full bottle of Zoologist Tyrannosaurus Rex will want to know how Gardoni it is, and also possibly, how Zoologist it is, on a scale of 1 to 10. My short answer is that Tyrannosaurus Rex is a 4 on the Gardoni scale, and a 8 on the Zoologist scale. In other words, I don’t know that I’d guess it’s a Gardoni creation from smelling it blind (although digging in, there are a few clues), but I’d confidently peg it as a Zoologist release.

Tyrannosaurus Rex opens with a furnace blast of burning tree sap and smoke, featuring both the rubbery green soot of cade and the piney sharpness of frankincense. This sounds rather par for the course for anyone who’s ever collected or smelled the most popular scents in the phenolic category, like Encens Flamboyant (Annick Goutal), A City on Fire (Imaginary Authors), or Revolution (Cire Trudon), but Tyrannosaurus Rex immediately distinguishes itself from this company by layering a core of buttery floral notes through the rough-grained miasma of smoke.

In particular, a thickly oily champaca stands out, smelling not of the its usual fruity-musky cleanliness but of the almost rancid, stale ‘Irish butter’ gardenia undertones of Indian champaca, the red ‘joy oil’ stuff that gives Strangelove NYC’s lostinflowers its pungency. Picture the greasy saltiness of gardenia, rose, and ylang butters thrown onto a burning fire with some laurel leaves and fir, and you’ll get a sense of the opening here. It smells like something charred to purge the air of impurities and sickness; the smoke element more medicinal than holy. This facet, plus the fact that it smells the way frankincense gum tastes, identifies it as being Gardoni-esque.

The sheer brute force of the opening, however, is more Zoologist in style. The marriage of smoke and oily floral takes some getting used to. It smells rich and addictive, but also a little too much of a good thing, like staying too long at the fuel pump to breathe in the gasoline fumes, or walking through a rubber plantation on fire fully aware that you should run before the toxic fumes get you but also weirdly narcotized into a trance-like state.

The smoke, in particular, is what pushes this one up on the Zoologist scale. It’s an element I associate with, in particular, Hyrax, a 2018 Zoologist release, which smells like a well-used rubber incontinence sheet set on fire. While Tyrannosaurus Rex is far more accomplished and not provocative for the sake of being provocative, there’s no denying that the shock factor of the opening is high. Unless, unlike me, you’re one of those people who absolutely live for the most challenging parts of a perfume, like the Listerine mouthwash of Serge Lutens’ Tubéreuse Criminelle’s topnotes or the putrid cherry cough syrup first half of Diptyque’s Kimonanthe, in which case, the ‘burning rubber plantation’ portion of Tyrannosaurus Rex will be the highlight.

For me, though, the latter parts of the scent are the most enjoyable because that’s when everything relaxes and the warning system in my solar plexus stops ringing. This is where things get seriously sensual. Only two components of the drydown are identifiable to me, or at least familiar. First, a minty-camphoraceous balsam note, like a solid cube of Carmex set to melt gently on a hot plate, mixed with the gritty brown sugar crystals of benzoin or some other ambery material. At times, it smells like fir balsam and old leather mixed with vanilla ice-cream (soft and almost creamy), and at others, it is bitter and metallic, thanks to rose oxide, a material that smells like nail polish mixed with mint leaves and rose.

The second component in the drydown, for me, is the sandalwood. Although I don’t know whether sandalwood synthetics or natural sandalwood oil was used, the note reminds me very much of Dabur Chandan Ka Tail (Oil of Sandalwood), a santalum album from India that’s sold as an ayurvedic medicine rather than as something to be used as perfume. Dabur comes in a small glass container with a rubber cap to allow penetration by a syringe, which you’re supposed to remove, but that I (not being a meticulous person in general) do not. Accordingly, the topnotes carry a bitter, smoky rubber and fuel exhaust overtone that’s curiously addictive. Tyrannosaurus Rex’s sandalwood component is roughly similar: it is creamy and aromatic, but tainted by all these weird little wafts of rubber and car exhaust that add character to the usual pale milk of sandalwood. It’s sexy as hell. Damn, give me a big, rich sandalwood base any day and you’ve got me. It’s like nuzzling into the chest of a biker who’s ridden through 50 miles of Mysore forest.

A friend (and fellow blogger) often teases me for not being clear in my review about whether I like the scent or not, and that’s fair: I tend to get bogged down in analysis and forget to tell you whether or not a scent connected with me at a personal level. So, let me be clear – I absolutely loved Tyrannosaurus Rex. The opening is too powerful for my taste, but for the most part, I loved the warmth and ‘bigness’ of this perfume. It’s smoky, it’s complex, and it keeps you guessing without taxing your brain cells to oblivion. In other words, although there’s a certain amount of head-scratching and puzzling over notes to be done here (which will please bored fragheads), it’s also very easy to step away from the analysis and simply enjoy wearing the thing itself. And you know, apart from the over-fueled opening, I do.

Aromatic Fougere Gourmand Lavender Leather Masculine Review Suede Tonka

Tom Ford Fucking Fabulous: A Review

9th February 2018

I’d love to get all worked up about the name, but as someone who says “fuck” rather a lot, I really can’t. I’m not proud of it, but in my defense, I’m Irish. In Ireland, people are so foul-mouthed that English shows such as Come Dine with Me film one season over here and then skedaddle back to the UK, their pearls clutched to their throats in shock at the ease with which everyone – everyone – from the tony middle class housewives in Howth to 4-year-old kindergarteners turn the air blue.

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