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A Week’s Worth of Italian Dessert Fragrances

5th February 2024

I was back in Rome recently for a strategic retreat and thought it might be interesting to wear an Italian dessert fragrance every day to mark the occasion. Caveat: I have incredibly narrow parameters for the gourmand category in general (I have no desire to smell like food) but I get even more exacting when it comes to Italian dessert fragrances. I have a serious weakness for Italian desserts and cookies – the pasticche di mandorle, the lemony torta della nonna, the apricot crostate, pistachio gelato, the unctuous crema gialla spilling out of fat cornetti, the teeny tiny cups of espresso made for fairies, even those powdery little pan di stelle – but am rarely if ever convinced by the perfume form.

But I like to think of this pernickety-ness as quintessentially Italian itself, as anyone who has ever tried to order a cappuccino after 12 noon or ask for their carbonara to be made with cream in Italy will tell you. The fact that standards exist for food in Italy and are enforced by everyone up and down the food chain from the farmer to the waiter and the old guys at the next table is one of the biggest joys of my life. We should all care more about what the quality and ‘rightness’ of goes in our gullet, and correspondingly, on our skin.

La Danza delle Libellule by Nobile 1942

Crisp red apple whisked into the fluffiest of white musks. I can see why people love this. It renders apple pie in an admirably light, fresh form. My only problems with this are two. First, the apple note never smells less than a synthetic recreation of apple, in the same way that apple-scented shampoo or body lotion does. The accord is undeniably pleasant but you are never less than aware that this is not a smell derived from nature. And this awareness is what breaks the fourth wall.

Second, I am of the opinion that if you are going to render apple pie in perfume form, then at least some of that vanilla and cinnamon had better show their face. Here, though I do understand the brief was for the perfume to be as airy as a dance of butterflies, it is the foamy ocean of white musk molecules that dominates, making it feel a little like that first chug from a glass of water into which you’ve just dropped an Alka-Seltzer tablet, i.e., somehow both powdery and wet. Again, it is pleasant and eminently wearable, but there are no real points of interest. Possibly the worst thing one can say about a perfume is that it is not memorable, and La Danza delle Libellule just hits that line for me.

Lira by Xerjoff

Lira is quite similar to Indult’s Tihota in the double eiderdown thickness of its vanilla-musk, but with the lovely bright zestiness of blood orange up top and an intense caramel accord threaded through the basenotes. Normally, I find this sort of thing overwhelming, but the hint of licorice and flash of orange give the vanilla and caramel a much needed twang. It’s like crema gialla and Campari! Delightfully lush and enveloping, sweet but not syrupy, no jarring synthetic bits to annoy me – this is Italian gourmandise done right. I would buy the biggest bottle if I knew I’d wear it regularly, but because I suspect Lira would be an occasional treat only and not a true workhorse in my collection, I am content to keep on buying samples of it. (Think I am on sample number five at this point.)

Noir Tropical by Maria Candida Gentile

Every time I wear Noir Tropical, my husband remarks – rather unkindly, I must say – that I am wearing ‘that keks i mleko’ perfume again, referring to the mush of baby rusks (disturbingly called Plasma) dissolved into hot milk that is the cure to all ills in the Balkans. I made the mistake of buying a mini bottle of this blind with my birthday voucher from the Maria Candida Gentile site simply because a perfume friend of mine with impeccable taste adores Noir Tropical, so I decided to take the risk.

Unfortunately, there is nothing noir or tropical or even particularly special about Noir Tropical. It smells like high quality vanilla paste, with its woody, cocoa-ish and even slightly boozy aspects. But the perfume is never more than a background note in its own composition. Wearing it is like sitting in the theatre, waiting for the curtains to open and reveal the main act, but all you hear or see is the dim rustle of activity somewhere behind the curtain. Incredibly disappointing, especially for an indie perfume, where you pay (usually a lot) extra for something that deviates from the same old, same old.

I keep spraying this on myself, soaking my skin, mostly to get rid of it, but also because I want to understand if I can suddenly unlock the secret door in the perfume that will lead me through to the promised land of my original expectations. But I am down to the last drops in my mini bottle and am none the wiser. A plain, dull-ish vanilla milk n’ cookies scent is all Noir Tropical ever gives me and has ever given me.

Vanagloria by Laboratorio Olfattive

Front-loaded with enough iodine (saffron) and pineapple to cripple an elephant, Vanagloria makes a weird first impression – metallic, fruity, acid, and terpenic, like a burning tire onto which someone’s lobbed some opened cans of Del Monte pineapple pieces. And just under that, a ripe banana custard-like vanilla, like something you’d make out of a packet, but also really thick and expensive-smelling. Ribbons of smoke from just-lit frankincense add a slightly ashy-woody darkness, deepening the chiaroscuro effect.

It takes some time for all of this to settle, but when it does, what you get is a luxuriously creamy vanilla-incense accord that accurately reflects the aromas gathered in a dried vanilla bean pod – the slightly burnt-smelling woodiness, the booziness, the leathery dryness, the faint thick sweetness of it that floats in the distance. I smelled it first in Romastore, in Trastevere, in January 2022, and was appalled at its ‘crude oil’ start. But later, when it dried down, it became an obsession for me, far more compelling to me than any of the other more popular perfumes I’d gone there to try, like Gris Charnel by BDK Parfums. I bought a bottle the next day and it’s become one of my favourite vanilla perfumes, a group that by itself is very, very small.

Devotion by Dolce & Gabbana

Devotion is a happy, greasy little monger clearly riffing off the Lira model but lacking the budget (or perhaps ambition) to smell anywhere near as luxe. Featuring a bright, harsh citrus top strewn over a humongous, popcorny vanilla, it smells admirably cheerful and Italian – big, BIG flavors and maxi pad thickness galore. It smells a little like a girl’s first holiday to the sun with her girlfriends, all suntan oiled-legs and vanilla deo. Pretty irresistible actually.

That is, however, until a stale ‘fry oil’ note creeps into the rich, buttery mass of vanilla. I can live with popcorny vanillas if they don’t develop a smell too much like that burnt butter aromachemical everyone seems to use for lactonic notes. But this almost savory, fried foods element is not in the least bit appealing. It smells like the end of the girls’ holiday, where they’ve gone to a chipper straight from the airport, the scent of their vanilla body sprays and monoi mixing with the greasy smells pouring out of the vents and rising up from their hot sausage rolls. And boy, does this perfume linger.

Dambrosia by Profumum

The opening of Dambrosia is wince-making: strident pear-scented Windex. I never would have bought a travel size of this perfume had I not smelled it on a colleague every Thursday at our pre-pandemic coffee and cornetto mornings, when the perfume, applied early that morning, was just now hitting its warm, figgy sandalwood stage. You could always identify her position in the room from the ribbons of expansive, voluptuous sandalwood that trailed after her like streaks of buttercup yellow.

I bought a travel bottle but was dismayed at the harsh detergent opening when I got it onto my own skin. And to this day, that opening is something I simply endure until the perfume finally hits its stride. But when Dambrosia finally turns into that winter-weight fig and oily, peanutty sandalwood that radiates ten meters in each direction, I invariably forgive it its ugly start. It is never less than edible at this point, never less than slightly artificial either, but I love its vulgar loudness. It suits the pushy but gritty glamour you see on Via del Corso, with its furred-up baby strollers, small dogs dressed in designer clothes, and flashy cars weaving around the gaggles of excited tourists and tired-looking Romans just trying to make it home.

Bianco Latte by Giardini di Toscana

Bianco Latte has whipped up one of those Internet-based hype storms that never last but still manage to pull an extraordinary number of people into its wake while it’s happening. So, of course, I was curious to smell it. Having smelled it, I can only ask why are some y’all so basic? Why train your taste up – and possibly stop there – on sugary vanilla bombs like this that are only 1.5 steps removed from Pink Sugar or a vanilla candle you can pick up at Aldi?

Adding to the meh-ness of it all is a sour lactonic note that smells like curdled milk to me but may possibly smell like caramel to others. It is also offensively sweet and devoid of nuance. I can never really distinguish between stuff like this, Pink Sugar, and Billy Eilish No. 1 – milky-sweet, monotone, full of simple sugar molecules, a bit burnt or artificial-smelling at times – but Bianco Latte comes with a price tag to match its hype, so I am even less willing to go easy on it.

None of us should be spending $150 for perfume that smells like it cost 50 cents to produce. Bianco Latte is built on synthetic vanilla and lactonic notes that you buy off the shelf in bulk from the fragrance and flavour factories, and not some super expensive vanilla extract squeezed from freshly picked vanilla pods on a Madagascan plantation. It’s built cheap and it smells cheap. If Bianco Latte were turned into an actual dessert, 10 out of 10 Italians would send it right back to the kitchen. Think about that for a second. Let’s have higher standards for what we spray on our skin.

Milano Caffe by Abdes Salaam Attar

I once lived half an hour outside Milan and spent many a happy afternoon wiling away the time in a café with a doppio or five. Drink enough espresso and there comes a point at which it acts upon your organism like a drug, speeding up your heart rate, and giving you an intense ‘high’. Nowadays, I edge towards that point via the pathetic wateriness of cafetière coffee. But Milano Caffe whips me right back to the intoxicating smell of the Milan coffee shop when I was still woman enough to take my coffee in concentrate.

Forget the rosy-cream-amber version of coffee presented in Café Rose (Tom Ford) or Intense Café (Montale). Milano Caffe is all about the dark, dusty bitterness of coffee beans, with the ferrous, animalic twang common to both coffee and chocolate. The smell is woody-barky rather than creamy, and rather austere.

In keeping with the authenticity of its coffee accord, Milano Caffe is shorn of extraneous detail. Those raised on the generosity of mugs of coffee might be a little dismayed at Milano Caffe’s lack of lushness or its refusal to tilt towards even a drop of cream or sugar. Rather, it packs an ocean of flavor into a tea-spoonful of liquid. The espresso expression itself is quite brief, but the mirage of coffee-ness is carried over and extended through the scent by linking the woodiness of espresso to the woodiness of the iris, opoponax, and cedar basenotes. Caffe Milano is an interesting scent, and not nearly as gourmand as it sounds. I find it elegant, dark, and a tiny bit fierce.

Ruby by Bruno Acampora

As if chocolate wasn’t sexy enough, Barry Callebaut decided to develop and patent a naturally pink-colored chocolate in 2014, and I was in Rome when it finally hit the market in 2018-2019. Suddenly pink chocolate (named ‘Ruby’) was everywhere, from flowy fountains of gloopy pink chocolate in Eataly to special edition Japanese KitKats. And in 2019, Bruno Acampora was the first fragrance brand was the first to translate pink chocolate’s unique flavor profile – tart-sweet berries, a yoghurty aftertaste – into perfume form.

God, how I wish they hadn’t. Ruby by Bruno Acampora smells fruity-sour, which would be somewhat bearable had they not tagged on a milk powder element that smells as foul as baby powder or, indeed, how Hershey’s Kisses taste to Europeans. That slightly vomitous aspect, a flavor profile that is nostalgic to American tastes, due to milk powder being subbed in for milk during World War II and never being subbed back out again, is deeply disturbing to me in a perfume. Ruby chocolate itself doesn’t taste that great, but the perfume is infinitely worse.

Madeleine by Masque Milano Fragranze

Madeline is an interesting take on the classic Mont Blanc dessert – a domed mound of pureed, sweetened chestnut paste topped with whipped cream. It pairs the intense sugariness of marrons glacés with the solar milkiness of tuberose, and then rounds it off with a very bready cumin to suggest the savory mealiness of the unsweetened chestnut flesh fresh out of its cooked shell. The cumin also creates a peanutty, floury, almost wheaten aspect that is really quite appealing – similar to the ‘crunchy granola’ raw foods store vibe of Bois Farine by L’Artisan Parfumeur.

The result is much airier and fresher than a Mont Blanc, and even though the white flowers and cumin lend the perfume a pinch of ripe, human-smelling sultriness, it is all somewhat hazy and milky, like a celestial bread pudding. I would place Madeline somewhere in an axis connecting Bois Farine with Amaranthine by Penhaligon’s, another fresh but sultry, slightly BO-ish floral gourmand, and even Castaña by Cloon Keen Atelier, which is not even a gourmand (it’s a dusty, earthy vetiver) but still manages to conjure up the smell of chestnuts roasting on those perforated metal drums in Rome. Given that I own those perfumes, I think that Madeline might be a redundancy in my collection. But it is lovely.

Sources of Samples: I either bought samples, bottles, or travel sizes of the perfumes featured in this article, or sampled them at niche and department stores in Rome. I do not do paid reviews and all opinions are my own.

Cover Image: Photo by Sarah Elizabeth on Unsplash

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Aromatic Citrus Designer Gourmand Green Review

A Tale of Two Pistachios: Un Jardin à Cythère and Yum Pistachio Gelato | 33

16th October 2023

Un Jardin à Cythère by Christine Nagel for Hermes is two thirds of a good fragrance. The burst of citrus up top is a tonic for the soul, full of the rinsing sourness of a French-style eau de cologne. The notes don’t tell you which citrus notes are included in the mix, but I smell a zesty bergamot, piercing lime, and the rosy urinousness of pink grapefruit, though far more rind and pith than juice. It is the dryness of this citrus medley that makes it smell so specifically French.

Zipping forward to the drydown, there is an extraordinarily good ‘olive oil’, or what the brand refers to as ‘olive wood’, note, which smells less like wood and more like the peppery bite of a very young, tart Umbrian olive oil, mixed with the evocative smell of trampled grass and upturned earth. Notes of grass, soil, and olive are used so rarely – or rarely so well – that it is a pleasure to see their full power coaxed out of them by a perfumer who knows what she’s doing.

Sadly, it is the third and final element – the pistachio note – that sabotages this perfume’s grab for greatness. After years of trawling through the indie perfume soil sector, I have learned that even a hint of the aromachemicals used to approximate the scent of freshly baked, pastry, or toasty nuts is enough to ruin an entire composition.

Let me be clear – it is entirely possible for a perfumer to give a composition a nutty feel or texture by drawing on the naturally nutty aspects of naturals, such as vetiver oil (which smells like crushed hazelnuts) or heliotrope (which smells like almonds). Hermes itself used a specific type of vetiver, and a more broadly nutty tonka bean, to create Vetiver Tonka, so it’s not as if the house doesn’t have form in this area. Castaña by Cloon Keen Atelier and L’Amandière by Heeley Parfums do similarly excellent work with naturals to create the mouthfeel of real nuts.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that Nagel instead plumps for one of those off-the-shelf aromachemicals that smell as fake as fuck, like the butter croissant aroma they pump around supermarkets, and even worse, moistly claggy, like a businessman taking his shoes off on a plane, the yeasty aroma of his warm, damp (but clean) socks permeating the cabin. Jeux de Peau by Serge Lutens plays around with the same pyrazine-rich molecule, but does so with skill and humor, burying the lede so deep in the thick swaddling cloths of an incredibly rich sandalwood and delicately apricotty osmanthus that you are forced to forgive the movie butter popcorn-ness of its main hook. The fakeness of the buttery, nutty note is the inside joke you either get or you don’t. It’s like wearing a lab experiment knocked up by a group of lab geeks close to midnight, high on something, after someone slurs, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be kind of cool if we recreated the scent of a slice of toast with butter and jam in a petri dish?’

There is no such skill or humor on display here. The three parts of the composition are so disjointed – it runs from sharp citrus to fake nuts to gloriously earthy grass in three staccato leaps – that you never smell the whole thing at once and, so, even if there was an overarching design vision for this on paper, it fails to materialize on the skin. Word of warning: the same mediocrity of a molecule seems to have been used to create the sesame note in L’Eau de Papier by Diptyque, though that perfume also has the further disadvantage of a foghorn’s worth of Ambroxan in the base, so really does not have any redeeming qualities at all, unless your aspiration is genuinely to smell like the inside tray of a Xerox machine.

Yum Pistachio Gelato | 33 by Kayali Fragrances comes in a unbearably gorgeous pale mint bottle, which makes me immediately suspicious, because anybody’s who eaten as much gelato al pistacchio as I have will know that the color of true pistachio gelato is more baby poop green than it is pale mint. Still, I am surprised by how true to life the opening is – fresh, floral, and savory all at once, just like that first lick at the cone. If only it stayed like this, I could have declared it the winner against the venerable Hermes (which, incidentally, I was wearing on the other wrist the first time I tried either fragrance, in my own little pistachio-off).

However, this fresh-floral-grassy piquancy faded all too quickly, leaving in its wake a sticky, white-musky-Maltol cloud of something that might be called ‘marshmallowy’ by someone more charitable than me. To me, though, these spacey, candied drydowns are like The Nothing that rolls over Fantasia, destroying it and pulling it into the darkness – they represent the absolute death of imagination and richness of inner life. I fear for the young women who smell this drydown and think it smells like a scoop of gelato or fluffy marshmallows or whatever. Please, ladies, go out, touch some grass, eat some Goddamn real pistachio gelato if you dare, and then go smell something like L’Heure Bleue to recalibrate your standards. Because you deserve better.

Source of Sample: I smelled both perfumes multiple times in Galleries Lafayette and Sephora France in May this year while on holiday in Bordeaux.

Cover Image: Photo by blackieshoot on Unsplash

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Aromatic Chocolate Chypre Fruity Chypre Gourmand Immortelle Patchouli Rose Single note exploration Smoke Spice Woods

Personal Pantheon of Patchouli Perfumes: PART II (The Deviations)

6th March 2023

Fragrances in this group – the patchouli deviations – tend to be more perfumey, abstract, and therefore more individual in character. Some of these deviations treat the patchouli as a fixed point on a map, others as a jumping off point into unknown avenues of discovery. Though some clear sub-categories can still be discerned (patchouli chypre, rose-patch, fruitchouli, etc.), even the patchouli perfumes that may be said to fit a ‘type’ surprise you by sliding instead into tight slots intended, in retrospect, for them alone. For example, though Noir de Noir (Tom Ford) and Rose Nacrée (Guerlain) both play with the rose-patch template, the first smells like French chocolate truffles and the second smells like the inside of a Mosque.

Stepping away from the more straightforwardly patchouli patchouli group (earth, cocoa, amber) discussed in Part I opens the door to a diverse group of potential new entrants. Because once you start cross-pollinating patchouli with jasmine, oakmoss, immortelle, black pepper, vanilla, and tonka bean, the results vary as infinitely as the combinations to a bank vault safe.

On the one hand, this makes it easier to identify and avoid redundancies. On the other, the temptation to add these fragrances to your collection is strong, precisely because each of them is special in their own unique way. My approach to curation of this second group, therefore, is less structured than the first. I will have to feel my way intuitively through it, being completely honest about the specialness or ‘essential-ness’ of each choice to my personal collection.

Remember, this is by no means a comprehensive analysis of every single patchouli-esque perfume I have ever smelled or reviewed, but rather a good hard look at my personal collection and collecting habits.

Phenolic Patchouli

Photo by Tobias Rademacher on Unsplash

Patchouli 24 by Le Labo. Yes, yes, I know that 80% of the patchouli in Patchouli 24 is in its name. And yes, if you were to argue that Patchouli 24 smells more like smoking tar pits and the aftermath of a chemical fire in a tire factory than it does patchouli, you’d certainly have a point. But are you writing this blog, or am I?

Something about the way the burned, smoky ‘electrical fire’ facet mingles with the thin, poisonously sweet slick of vanillin and the faint whiff of runner’s sweat (vetiver) pooled at the base makes me feel like Lisbeth from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, chasing a bad guy down on her motorcycle. The salty-sweet ‘glazed ham’ quality to the smoke is also something that feels weirdly sexy to me. I would wear this more often, but for the fact that when I do, my husband stops the car to check for an electrical shortage or fire of some sort.

Immortelle Patchouli

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Saying goodbye to:

PARFUMS Luxe: Patchouli by Comme des Garçons. Luxe: Patchouli’s opening salvo of wet teak, hickory smoke, syrupy immortelle, anisic fenugreek, and herbal patchouli is both impressive and challenging. I swooned when I first smelled this in a niche perfumery store in Belgium but should have remembered that scents that are characterful enough to push past the thick fuzz of hundreds of other perfumes being sprayed into the air are often too big for me when I get them home.

There are parts of this fragrance that I love. It is a genius idea, for example, for the perfumer to flank the patchouli with the syrupy warmth of the immortelle, the burning white pepper, the dried alfalfa sweetgrass, and the bold smokiness of the opoponax, because these notes render all the soil out of the patchouli like fat from a sausage, leaving only its vegetal facets on display. On the other hand, vegetal in patchouli speak always translates to a stewed celery-like tonality, which is not ideal, because, you know, walking around smelling like a vegetable stock cube is not something I aspire to.

And unfortunately, this is the aspect that gets further accentuated by the curryish fenugreek note, which smells like crushed celery seeds mixed with pine and mint. I can take fenugreek in spicy sandalwood settings (like Santal de Mysore by Serge Lutens) but my tolerance level plummets when it is shoved up against an already vegetal-smelling patchouli. There is nothing like this in my collection, let alone my patchouli collection, but Luxe: Patchouli gets worn too infrequently to earn a permanent place.

Dreaming about:

Le Mat by Mendittorosa. A dry-yet-syrupy exposition on the same immortelle-patchouli idea as Luxe: Patchouli, but far less confrontational and saturnine than the Comme des Garcons. I find it beautiful. However, at €250 a bottle, it is one of those small, precious things that I am content to file away in my memory palace and think about every now and then.

Rose-and-Patchouli

Photo by Salman Khan on Unsplash

Rose-patchouli fragrances work in much the same way as rose-oud fragrances do, in that they pair something lush, floral, sweet and stereotypically feminine (the rose) with something rougher, darker, woodier and more stereotypically masculine (patchouli, oud). The fragrance works because the contrast works. For some reason, rose-patchouli fragrances all have a slightly Victorian, gothic feel to them – stormy, dramatic, morose (serious Morrissey vibes) – while rose-oud fragrances read as dry and exotic. I must be in the mood to wear a rose-patchouli fragrance, as they tend to feel quite rich and over-bearing on my skin, and I am not always ready for their sturm-und-drang. However, I have found two that both suit me and fill very different mood slots in my collection.

Eau de Protection by Etat Libre d’Orange, aka Rossy de Palma. This is the Gothic darkness I’d been hoping for from Voleur de Roses. The opening is bright and scratchy feeling, teeming with enough ginger, pepper, and geranium to make you wince. This is soon somewhat softened by a cocoa-ish musk that feels slightly funky in a cat’s paws kind of way, which in turn sets the stage for a dramatic smackdown between the drawing-blood-on-metal sharpness of geranium, wine, a pulp fiction rose, and an earthy patchouli. Towards the end, the scent seems to lurch between dried earth, roses, musk, amber, and cocoa, shunting you from the high-toned and pitchy to the dusky and velvety, and then back again. The whole ride, which takes place over ten hours on my skin, never once feels comfortable or predictable. Bravo you weird, wonderful people at Etat Libre d’Orange! This is as jolie-laide as Signora Rossy de Palma herself.

Rose Nacrée du Desert by Guerlain. By rights, Rose Nacrée du Desert is a balsamic rose-oud – exotic and Eastern in character – rather than a rose-patchouli. Yet, for me, the role played by the patchouli is so central to its character that I personally classify it as part of the rose-and-patchouli sub-genre. It is dry, rich, and as hefty as a hippo. A bright, jammy Taif rose is set down to smolder in a pit of smoking resins, medicinal saffron, and the sour, incensey greenness of oud wood, and this accord is what dominates the scene at first. But then, in the drydown, in rolls that tremendously gloomy, soil-like patchouli, trampling all over a powdery, sweet benzoin to give it a dirty, lived-in edge. Rose Nacrée means pearlized rose, which implies something delicate or femme. But nope. This is the darkly beautiful oil anointing the beard and robes of Emirati men, wafting evocatively in their trail as they head into the Mosque for evening prayer.

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

Voleur de Roses by L’Artisan Parfumeur. Voleur de Roses is a relatively simple scent based on three notes – rose, patchouli, and stone fruit – but it is the interplay between these notes that makes it fascinating. The opening is that of plums on the turn, the sweet smell of fruit slowly rotting in the sun. Since this is so quickly joined by wet young rose and an earthy patchouli, you are never quite sure whether the fruity decay belongs to the rose or to the freshly upturned earth, so the rotting plums effectively form a bridge between the rose and patchouli.

The feel of the perfume is wet, lush, and botanical. It is certainly not as dark or as brooding as reviews paint it. The patchouli dominates the rose, yes, but it is not a sinister, raw, or aggressive sort of patchouli. In fact, the whole thing comes off as delicate and transparent, like a Japanese silk screen print. With notes as lusty as patchouli and rose these, you want the scent to be deep, bloody, resonant and almost pounding in their intensity. Or at least I do. But Voleur de Roses never delivers the intensity I crave, and to add insult to injury, it seems to dissipate from my skin in under two hours. And I refuse to pay L’Artisan Parfumeur prices for what amounts to a patchouli-rose splash.

Sexy Baby Powder Patchouli (Yes, it’s a category, deal with it)

Photo by Miguel Salgado on Unsplash

Patchouli Bohème by LM Parfums. Immediately, this recalls the smeary aroma of the ladies’ communal changing room where my mother would bring me into as a little child to wait while she tried on clothes. The closed air swollen with the collective unsnapping of bras and unpeeling of pantyhose, the yeasty aroma of cooped-up underboob and flesh rolls suddenly released from their whalebone prisons, and the clouds of deodorizing talcum powders moistened by the day’s wear and tear.

At the center of all this is a balmy-greasy accord like clay or playdough spiked with the rosy-minty spikes of geranium leaf. There is an ungodly amount of tonka bean in this, its slightly roasted almond butter facet roughed up by an oily patchouli masquerading as a black leather jacket. Thanks to the strong role played by the tolu balsam, the texture of the perfume oscillates between sticky (turgid, airless, and ‘brown’) but and dusty (baby powder spliced with glints of metal). Tolu balsam is similar to benzoin (woody, vanillic, spicy) but deeper, waxier, and more medicinal, with a pronounced leathery or tobacco like effect. In Patchouly Bohème, it is as essential as the patchouli. This is a scent that catches me off guard every time I wear it, because I never anticipate the way its soft, balmy, nutty-powdery skin is just a front – a wee baby Shalimar – hiding this massively earthy, roasted leather. It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Peppery Patchouli

Photo by Pratiksha Mohanty on Unsplash

Lord of Misrule by Lush. The opening smells like black pepper but only if you imagine a handful of black pepper powder being blown at you through the sweet, glittery miasma of mica and minerals that hovers around the bath bomb wall at Lush. If you told me this is what Outer Space smells like, I’d believe you.

Straight away, there are two layers. The first, that minty-mineralic ‘bath bomb’ dust that impregnates every available air particle to the point you feel a little ‘choked out’. The second, a wet, syrupy-sweet accord that smells a little like the Coca Cola syrup you mix with seltzer in a Soda Stream. In this regard, it feels like Lush is recycling a few ideas from previous perfumes in Lord of Misrule, most notably the bright, Coca Cola-ish marmalade-myrrh accord from 1000 Kisses Deep and the burnt sugar notes from All Good Things. The patchouli is hiding out in the heart, but it is so heavily bookended by the sharp pepper and the syrupy amber that, for the first hour or two, it is easy to miss.

But the greyish fuzz of minerals and space dust eventually burns off, revealing a sumptuous patchouli amber so rich you can almost feel it as a weight on your skin. Essentially, in marrying a sexy ice-creamy amber-vanilla tandem to a headshoppy patchouli (think more the incensey sweetness of patchouli nag champa than the essential oil), Lush has recreated the more expensive feel of niche vanillambers, like Ani (Nishane) or Ambre Extrême (L’Artisan Parfumeur) but charges you a mere €35 for the pleasure. As long as Lush makes Lord of Misrule, I will be buying it.

Green Patchouli

Photo by Rebecca Orlov | Epic Playdate on Unsplash

One herbal and dusty, one creamy and playdough-y. Both greenish. Both essential (to me).

Cozé 02 by Parfumerie Generale. Coze smells like someone picked up the nicest smelling things in the world – coffee, pepper, dark chocolate, hash resin, patchouli – and shoved them into a perfume. For something that references both hash and the chocolate we eat when we get the munchies, this is as far away from the druggy atmosphere of a teenage boy’s bedroom as can be. The sativa note has been cleverly married to a host of other green, herbal, and woody elements, thus yanking the whole thing outdoors. Whenever I wear this, I feel like I am in the company of friendly lumberjacks, sitting down in a forest opening to coffee, brownies, and a funny cigarette or two after a morning of cutting down trees. It is the type of perfume that makes you feel happy in an uncomplicated way.

The opening is rather dry and dark – a brief boozy patch followed by ashy tobacco and a fine dusting of something that can only be cocoa powder. It is delicious and slightly spicy, with hot pepper and cloves. This ashen layer is fitted closely over a sticky green hemp base, and then finally set to smolder on a base of mahogany wood chips. There is a near perfect balance between edible and inedible, dry and balmy, and smoke and cold, clean air. Technically, it would probably be correct to call Coze a quasi-gourmand, but its genius lies in dotting the foody notes so evenly around a dark, woodsy, smoky base that it would never occur to anyone to call it yummy.

Arbolé Arbolé by Hiram Green. Full review here. There is a wonderfully soft, smeary quality to the patchouli used here – it is clearly patchouli, but not at all headshoppy. Rather, backlit with a greenish, rosy tint that makes me think of exotic liqueurs, it takes on a pleasantly stale, waxy chocolate softness that recalls vintage make-up, heavy silks taken out of storage in cedar trunks, and huge beeswax candles dripping over everything. There is a sort of cosmetic, floral wax tonality that smudges the corners of the other notes and gives the perfumes a touch of vintage glamour. Hiram Green perfumes wear as if lit from within and this is no exception.

All the individual characteristics of the raw materials – the cedar, patchouli, sandalwood – have been sanded down until only a smooth, integrated woodiness remains. There is none of the normal bitter muskiness of cedar, none of the raw, earthy, or leafy facets of patchouli, and the sandalwood registers only as a unifying texture of creamy butter. There is a smutty quality to this perfume that appeals enormously to me. It shares the same soft ‘musky cocoa powder’ sexiness with Mazzolari Lei and Parfumerie Generale L’Ombre Fauve, both of which also blur the lines between patchouli, musk, and ambery-vanilla aromas so smoothly that the nose doesn’t immediately recognize one or the other.

Patchouli Nu-Chypres (Sans Moss)

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I have two favorites in this category. Stellar job at curation, Claire! Both use the earthy-minty ‘emotional remoteness’ of patchouli as a replacement for oakmoss in the chypre equation. But they are so different to one another, as well as criminally discontinued and therefore unobtanium, that I have no choice (no choice, I tell you!) but to keep both in my collection.

Bottega Veneta eau de parfum (For Her) by Bottega Veneta. Like the famous intrecciato handbag upon which it is based, Bottega Veneta weaves together tonally-greige strands of plum, jasmine, and patchouli for a dusky, hoarse-throated take on suede. It has the same milky bitterness you get in other light suede fragrances such as Daim Blond (Serge Lutens), which it resembles slightly. But it is the addition of the gruff, stone-washed patchouli that makes Bottega Veneta the more robust and sexier scent. Sadly, Bottega Veneta has discontinued this perfume, along with all its original ‘department store’ perfumes, choosing instead to throw the brand’s entire marketing budget at its soulless, couldn’t-strike-upon-an-idea-if-it-tried luxury segment (Le Gemme). Well, fuck you very much, Bottega Veneta.

31 Rue Cambon by Chanel. This is a fragrance that proves that a fragrance doesn’t need oakmoss for it to smell like a proper chypre. Though I didn’t love it at first, it has slowly taken hold in my life, occupying roughly the same general space in my head as Mitsouko (Guerlain) and Profumo (Acqua di Parma). But because Rue Cambon draws on a dry patchouli to provide that bitter mossiness essential to the drydown of a chypre, it is more modern, i.e., more streamlined in structure and far less powdery.

31 Rue Cambon is essentially a jostling together of ice and earth – the bitter, stinging purity of that bergamot, the Grappa-like chill of orris root, a touch of milky peach skin and jasmine in the heart to fool you into thinking that there is something akin to human warmth in here (there isn’t) – all grounded by a patchouli material that smells more like dried rose petals crumbled into dried earth than the chocolatey version used in Coromandel. It makes me smell like someone who has her shit together. The version I wear – the original eau de toilette – was discontinued in autumn of 2016, a sacrificial lamb slaughtered on the altar to modern consumer demand for beauty to last more than five hours (the fucking heathens). Unfortunately, the post-2016 eau de parfum version suffers from an overload of thick, swampy ylang or vetiver that suffocates the lacy delicacy of the bergamot-iris-jasmine-patchouli structure.

In other words, when both my Bottega Veneta and 31 Rue Cambon are gone, I will be nu-chypre-less.

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

Mon Parfum Chéri, par Camille by Annick Goutal. A throwback chypre, all sharp elbows and no curves – and yet Mon Parfum Chéri, par Camille is a modern construction, launched in 2011. The plum note is tart and sour, the iris starchy, and the patchouli as dry as a bone. It manages to be rich and dark without being earthy, and light and powdery without being sweet. For me, it immediately formed a memory bridge between the mossy plum of Guerlain’s discontinued chypre, Parure, the woody violets of Bois de Violette (Serge Lutens) – without the candied sweetness – and the dirty patchouli drydowns of grungy drugstore rose chypre classics such as La Perla Classic. Its bitter, dusty grandeur suggests a perfume with a long and storied past, like Mitsouko. I respect the hell out of Mon Parfum Chéri, par Camille (to the extent that I bought and sold it twice in two years) but found it difficult to wear comfortably. I struggled to bend it to my will, make it sink properly into my skin. Its noli-me-tangere air made it a forbidding and standoffish experience.

Oakmossy Pagan Patchouli

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Aromatics Elixir by Clinique. We all know what Aromatics Elixir smells like. Or do we? It initially smelled murky and old-fashioned to me, until I leaned into it and realized that it is one of the great perfume anachronisms of the last century. Created by Barnard Chant in 1975, Aromatics Elixir blazed a trail of agrestic patchouli, bitter herbs, rose, resins, and moss through what was a very different perfume world, setting itself in opposition to the clean, sporty fragrances that followed soon after but also breaking ties with the mannered formality of the green floral chypres of the fifties and sixties. Aromatics Elixir’s groovy, loose-hipped manner is the kind of messy that earns you a lifetime of therapy later. Sometimes it smells less like a perfume and more like a collection of elements a pagan goddess might summon from the undergrowth. It lives exclusively in the small, private space between my clavicle and my sweater where it can do the least damage. I apply the potent urine-yellow juice delicately – sprayed lightly onto my fingertips and then pressed gently onto my flesh – but in the end, the submission is all mine.

Saying goodbye to:

Beloved Woman by Amouage. Beloved is beautifully done. But was it necessary for me to invest in a whole bottle of it when it is clearly Amouage’s homage to Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir? No, Claire, it most certainly was not. Example number 202 of spectacularly poor judgement. Beloved opens with a bitter, powdered clove, lavender, and sage combination that smells as aromatic and talc-like as Histoires de Parfums’ 1876. But really, the rose, the hay-like chamomile, and the sage all combine to sing an Aromatics Elixir-shaped song. Beloved is a fine lady, and Aromatics a hippy mom. But the essential bone structure is there. One might have been the other had different choices been made, and all that.

Now, of course, there are differences. Aromatics Elixir is earthier, its airways gunked up with patchouli. And the rose note in Beloved is arguably more remarkable. Hidden behind the aromatic powder of the opening, you might miss it at first, but then it swells in intensity, rising from a crumble of dusty potpourri rose petals to become a big, juicy rose fluffed out by moisture. The rose lingers for a while in a pool of boozy, hay-like immortelle, for a combination that is simultaneously syrupy and dry, sweet and savory.

But again, did these small differences provide adequate justification for slapping down a cool €300-and-something down on the table for a bottle of Beloved when Aromatics Elixir performs the same basic trick of making you feel womanly, powerful, and in control of your own fate, but at a cost that is almost ten times less? No, Claire, they did not.

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

Noir Patchouli by Histoires de Parfum. A very refined take on the Bernard Chant canon of patchouli classics from Aramis 900 to Aromatics Elixir, retrofitted for modern tastes with a soft leather bag accent, every inch of its lining thickly dusted with green floral cosmetic powders. But the earthy, almost metallic bitterness comes from the tree moss rather than from the patchouli, so while it is dark, it is also fresher and livelier (mintier) than expected. I liked it, but liking is not a strong enough emotion for me to keep anything. And once I’d spotted the familial Aromatics Elixir DNA, it was time for it to go.

Tramp by Lush. Tramp was my Lush favorite body wash for a full decade, so when I got the chance to order a bottle of Tramp perfume from the Lush Kitchen in 2016 or 2017, I didn’t hesitate. A simple blend of two especially dank forest-floor materials – patchouli and oakmoss – I can understand why they were forced to discontinue it in this post-IFRA world (my last remaining bottle of the body wash still lists Evernia prunastri on the label). What I don’t understand is why I loved the shower gel so much and the perfume not at all. In one of those ‘be careful what you wish for’ scenarios, it turns out that a straight-up, one-two punch of patchouli and oakmoss smells like an unfinished sketch of Polo or Brut. Bitter, aftershavey, pungent, and unrelenting – gah!

Patchouli Truffles

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Unlike the cocoa aspect of the more patchouli-forward fragrances in Part I, which appear only as a facet of the patchouli material itself, this category refers to a more explicitly gourmand treatment, i.e., melted chocolate, dark chocolate truffles, Nutella, etc. Where patchouli becomes transubstantiated into something purely edible.

Noir de Noir by Tom Ford. The recipe in Nigella Lawson’s ‘Feast’ for Chocolate Guinness Cake makes an enormous wodge of damp, dense (yet springy) chocolate cake of the deepest black imaginable, topped with a thick single layer of white cream cheese frosting meant to resemble the head on a pint. The beauty of this cake is the way what Nigella calls ‘the ferrous twang’ of Guinness holds its own against the chocolatey sweetness of the crumb and the tartness of the cream cheese. If you think about it, the pairing makes sense – there is something almost animalic, or at least iron-rich, like blood, that connects the loamy darkness of stout (and soil) with the aroma of a 90% cocoa bar of chocolate being melted in a bain marie.

Noir de Noir uses the iodine-like sting of saffron to perform the same trick. The slightly garbagey, vegetal iron-filling aspect of the spice acts upon the patchouli and roses to create an extraordinarily dark truffle accord that feels like a cross-section of that Chocolate Guinness Cake. It’s worth noting that the rose note here is slightly rosewater-ish, providing a chippy Turkish Delight brightness that countermands the black velvet lushness of the chocolate-oud. Probably the most romantic perfume in my collection, though, like dark chocolate and Turkish Delight, a strictly once-in-a-blue-moon kind of craving.

Angel Muse by Thierry Mugler. Full review here. Muse is an improvement on the original Angel because (a) it manages to drown out the high-octane Maltol shriek of its predecessor with a velvety blanket of hazelnut cream, and (b) the treatment of the patchouli in Muse tacks towards gianduja rather than the sour, wet dishrag left to molder overnight in a sink of the original Angel. Muse smells both edible and inedible, like a posh chocolate truffle mashed underfoot into the warm, sweet grass of a polo pitch, which makes it a successful perfume rather than just a successful gourmand perfume. The addition of vetiver is critical. Vetiver often smells like ground hazelnuts (see Vetiver Tonka, Sycomore, Onda) but adds a savory, mealy element that restrains the sugar. That effect is noticeable here, and matched to the soft chocolate of the patchouli, the inevitable result is that of a creamy, nutty chocolate truffle (gianduja). Naturally, because I like it so much, Angel Muse has been discontinued.

Fruitchouli

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The marriage of inedible (patchouli) and edible (fruit). Note that the patchouli in this style of fragrance is usually very clean and ‘pink’, i.e., a prettied-up version of the material, stripped of all its brown, grungy earth tones, instead bulked out by tons of white musks and sweet, syrupy Maltol. This style of fragrance is not my kind of thing, but I have managed to find two examples that I can not only bear but truly love.

Visa by Robert Piguet. In a slightly similar vein to Mauboussin, Angel, and Chinatown, it would probably be more accurate to call Visa a complex, fruited ‘oriental’ with a distinct patchouli character, however since we are no longer saying the O word and since this attempt at curation is focused on patchouli, I am going to place Visa in the fruitchouli category and invite anyone with a problem with that to write me an angry letter. The fruit notes in Visa are remarkable – white peaches, plums, and pears that smell true to life without smelling the slightest bit loud or fake. Darkened at the edges by the burnt sugar of immortelle and wrapped up tenderly in a powdery benzoin and patchouli blanket, Visa’s peaches and plums come bathed in autumnal dusk compared to the strobe-lit glare of other fruity-floral fragrances. There’s a certain winey, ‘stained-glass’ glow to the stone fruit here that makes me ridiculously happy.

Everything in Visa feels hushed. Even the leather note is gentle – a buffed grey suede rather than a twangy new shoe. The suede and the slight drinking chocolate powder feel in the base offers a gentle cushion for the fruit notes. Half the pleasure I derive from wearing Visa lies in trying to guess what category it falls into. It straddles several at once – the fruity-floral, leather chypre, fruit leather, gourmand, and yes, definitely the dreaded fruitchouli. But far being a brainless fruity, sweet thing that you use to stun the opposite sex into submission, Visa smells poised and a little bit mysterious.

1969 Parfum de Révolte by Histoires de Parfums. It’s a fruitchouli, but not as we know it, Jim. The perfume’s name refers to the sexual revolution occurring in San Francisco in the late 1960s, but by 1969 the once idyllic hippy kingdom that was Haight-Ashbury had already started to be corrupted by hard drugs, homelessness, and unsavory criminal elements. And in a way, 1969 Parfum de Révolte pays homage to this shift, by grafting an exuberantly sexy, brash fruit top onto a darkly spiced patchouli base. At first glance, 1969 is all about playtime. It opens with the biggest, trashiest peach note ever – as crude and as effective as a child’s painting of a peach, smeared with Day-Glo pink and orange paint. The green cardamom note squirts a gob of Fairy washing up liquid into the pot. Joined by a dizzying swirl of rose, chocolate, and vanilla, the peach vibrates and expands at an alarming rate until you feel like you are literally walking around in your own personal fantasy ice-cream sundae (one that features liberal helpings of vinyl and boiled sweets).

Once the shock and awe of the fruit-vanilla assault dies down, spicier elements enter the picture and quietly anchor the whole thing. The mid-section is a fruity rose and vanilla spiced with the gentle green heat of cardamom pods and the woody warmth of coffee beans. The fruity, creamy roundness is still there, but now with depth and presence. I like 1969 Parfum de Révolte because it gives me both the low-rent pleasure of a Tocade-style plastic rose-vanilla and a darker, more adult finish that rescues it from tipping too far into the gourmand category. When all analysis is folded up and put away, what’s left is a sexy catcall of a fruitchouli with just the right balance of vulgarity and wit.

Saying goodbye to:

Coco Mademoiselle Eau de Parfum Intense by Chanel. I remember something in the original Guide (Perfumes: The Guide, 2009) about Chanel doing their version of Angel and being surprised (and embarrassed, it is implied) that it was such a success. But really, what is surprising in people craving a softer, posher, Chanel-ized take on a fragrance so famously jarring? The essential idea of Angel – sugared fruit clashing with a hoary, masculine patchouli – is a clever one but not that easy to pull off. Coco Mademoiselle took the basic template and cleaned it all up, turning the dial from heavy, sour and syrupy to luminous, pretty, and girly.

The Eau de Parfum Intense version plays it very close to the model for original eau de toilette, i.e., the pinkish, perfumey fruit pop of lychee set alight with a shower of metallic aldehydes, all underlaid with a cleaned-up, fractionated version of patchouli and a shit ton of those bouncy, expensive-smelling white musks that Chanel stuffs into its fragrances. The only innovation in the Eau de Parfum Intense is the additional warmth and depth of tonka bean, but the differences between this and the original Eau de Toilette are not as significant as, say, the differences between Mon Guerlain and Mon Guerlain Intense, or YSL Libre and YSL Libre Intense.

I am letting Coco Mademoiselle Eau de Parfum Intense go because I bought it for all the wrong reasons. On my way to live in Rome in late 2018 and leaving my (very young) family behind, I saw the pinkish juice in that reassuringly square Chanel bottle in the airport duty free, and between my tears (and copious amounts of snot), I thought, why not make myself disappear by wearing something that will make me smell like practically everyone else. It was an act of self-effacement and of sorrow. And it worked. Coco Mademoiselle became my urban camouflage – the skin I slipped into every morning when I felt most like a freshly peeled egg turned out into the city. Wearing it, I instantly became one with the faceless mass of women sleepwalking their way through the metro and train systems in the mornings.

I stopped wearing it for two reasons. First, Helen, a tall and lovely but rather intimidating English colleague spun me around at the train station one morning, bellowing in my ear, Oi! Who’s been wearing my perfume then? (Sigh. The inevitable downside of wearing a perfume this popular). Second, more importantly, since I no longer live in Rome and no longer suffer the absence of my children or husband, I no longer feel the need to punish myself by making myself anonymous. Wearing Coco Mademoiselle now feels as not-me as it always was.

Conclusion

Out of the 22 patchouli fragrances discussed as part this second group, I am keeping 14, or roughly two thirds. Sigh. You see? This is why you should never curate in public. Now normal people will find this blog – maybe, if my SEO is working – and wonder why on earth someone would need this many fragrances, let alone a grand total of 18 of them dedicated to patchouli. The answer is, of course, that I’m not normal. And if you’ve made it this far down the page, then maybe – just maybe – you aren’t so normal yourself.

Source of samples: All the bottles reviewed or, ahem, curated here were bought or swapped for by me. (Using the word curated is supposed to fool both you and me into thinking that this is an artistic endeavour rather than the pitiful result of unrestrained consumption that it really is).

Cover Image: Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash

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Anamcara by Parfums Dusita

6th October 2021

The fact that something as weird and borderline confrontational as Anamcara by Parfums Dusita was workshopped in a Facebook group known for its strict ‘say something nice or don’t say anything at all’ policy is hilarious to me. This is a humongous, syrupy fruity-floral that lurches at you with a pina colada in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. Though striking, it is more feral than pretty. Think less Juliette Binoche and more Béatrice Dalle.

If you are familiar with the pungency of some floral absolutes in the raw, like jasmine, with its grapey nail solvent highnotes, or ylang, with its banana fuel-spill aspect, then you’re going to love Anamcara, because it features a massive overload of natural orange blossom. If you’re unfamiliar with just how jolie laide naturals can smell or are new to the more artistic corners of niche-dom in general, however, Anamcara could be something of a shibboleth.

Because this is not the polite orange blossom of, say, Orange Blossom (Jo Malone) or Eau des Sens (Diptyque). Rather, this is the weirdly medicinal gunk of cough syrups, hard-boiled orange throat lozenges, and vitamin C gummy bears sold in rickety little apothecaries all throughout Provence. It reminds me very much of a holiday in Uzès, where everything from the ice-cream, honey, and chocolate to the bread (gibassier) seemed to be expensively infused with orange blossom or lavender essences and hyrosols. I think of this perfumey oddness as distinctly French.

In Anamcara’s opening notes, I smell a dense ‘brown’ floral syrup diluted with a pour of carbonated water for an uplift that reminds me of the orangey Coca Cola fizz of Incense Rosé (Tauer). This is shot through with the fresh, lime-green bite of petitgrain, which also smells very French to me, recalling the openings to both Eau Sauvage and Diorella (Dior) as well as the later Mito (Vero Kern). I can’t think of anything that smells quite like Anamcara in its totality, though. I suppose that Rubj (Vero Kern again) in eau de parfum format is the fragrance that comes the closest, in terms of a shared focus on the medicinal ‘boiled sweet’ aspect of orange blossom. But where Rubj piles on the sensuality with a shocking cumin seed note, Anamcara focuses on the weirdness of orange blossom alone. There is also a savory or umami element to Anamcara, possibly from the sandalwood, that reads as more Asian than European.

If I had a criticism, it would be that Anamcara is overdosed (on something) to the point of being oppressive, a monolith of floral muck so densely muscled that it’s hard to make out the shape of any of the tendons or veins. This will be somebody’s idea of floral bliss, no doubt, just not mine. I can’t wear fragrances like this – they wear me down, defying my attempt to parse them out. I do, however, respect the hell out of Pissara Umavijani’s refusal to color inside the lines on this one. Despite the ‘rainbows and unicorns’ vibe of its origin story, Anamcara will push buttons as well as boundaries.

Note: As widely reported, Anamcara translates roughly to ‘soul friend’ in Irish (and Scots Gaelic, which is similar), though ‘soul mate’ is probably closer in modern parlance. As an Irish person (and Irish speaker) myself, I can tell you that the vocative form of ‘cara’ is used very often in day to day speech, i.e., ‘mo chara’ to say ‘yo my fine friend’ and ‘a chara’ to mean Dear Sir/Modom when writing a letter to the Irish Times complaining that last week’s crossword puzzle was wrong or that the banks are running this country into the ground, etc. So it’s funny to see these words appear on a fancy French perfume.

Source of sample: Sent to me free of charge by the brand. My review and thoughts are my own.

Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash

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Three by Frassaï: Tian Di, A Fuego Lento, and Teisenddu

16th March 2021

Based on my sampling of three perfumes from the Argentinian brand Frassaï, I can say that this is exactly the kind of thing that one hopes to see from modern niche perfumery but rarely does, i.e., perfumes that are unusual but not too much, and rendered in a soft, lovely manner that gives them wearability and ease.

Consider two points on that scale, for reference – the earlier perfumes of Serge Lutens, which offered bold new ideas but presented them in often luridly syrupy forms that made them challenging to wear as a personal scent outside of a grand occasion, and the perfumes of Parfums de Marly or XerJoff, which are mostly recycled ideas and tired old tropes rendered loud and muscular with über-radiant woody ambers that smash their way through more delicate accords like a bull in a china shop.

The Frassaï perfumes, on the other hand, appear to have been carefully and sensitively art-directed (by Natalia Outeda, a designer who had previously art-directed perfumes in NY for companies such as Bond No. 9, Proctor and Gamble, and Kiehl’s). Though the perfume reviewed here are all in different styles – one essentially a soliflore, one a spicy fruity scent, another a woody gourmand – and some of perfumers who composed them have usually easily-identifiable signature ‘moves’ (Rodrigo Flores-Roux, for example), there is a common thread of harmony and softness that links them all. Is it possible that the female gaze in art directorship for fragrance is just as much a thing as it is in literature, or essays, or film?

Tian Di (by perfumer Olivier Gillotin) is the most original of the three perfumes I sampled, and my outright favorite. It is really quite odd – a smoked-out peach skin nestled in a dusty ‘brown’ accord that remind me alternately of loose (peach-flavored) tea in those triangular nets sold by Dammann Frères, coffee grounds, or even cocoa – but also unexpectedly lovely. I am particularly charmed by the marvelous effect it produces on the skin, where it is all burnt peach licorice on the inhale (similar to the burnt anise-iris at the base of Guerlain’s Attrape-Coeur, albeit in dust form rather than apricot jam) and spearmint gum on the exhale. It is as gingery and as cooling as a tisane drink, yet as granular and coarsely-textured as the dry material before the hot water hits it.

Tian Di eventually deepens – or perhaps ‘spreads out’ – into a smudgy, smeary mint butterscotch and floor wax accord, with a hint of trampled grass and even beer, but never loses the malted, almost smoky graininess of the incense and tea. There is something about this that tugs a memory chord for me, making it difficult for me to evaluate objectively beyond the rather gormless ‘It’s odd but I love it’ review I’ve given it here. I think there’s either a loose connection to the peach of Trèsor (Lancôme) or to the sandalwoody, salty-minty, peony-esque weirdness of Dune (Dior), both of which I wore as a teenager, but again, this is all probably a Pavlovian response playing out in my mind and my mind only. Tian Di is special and unique. I’d buy this one in a heartbeat because I don’t have anything like it in my collection.

A Fuego Lento (by perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux) is a soft jasmine soliflore that smells like a wall covered in jasmine whose petals have started to dry a little in the late June sunshine, giving it a sweet hay or alfalfa dimension. There’s a tangy orange blossom note at the start that reads a little rubbery, like hot tarmacadam, so for a brief time, the scent gives off a pleasant sensation of being in a hot Southern city where the exhaust fumes of cars and hot pavement mingle with the sudden wafts of white flowers tucked away behind tall, patrician walls. But really, A Fuego Lento is all about that jasmine. A nutty, milky amber holds it all in place without interfering with the purity of the flowers.

I’m always moved by the simple but awe-inspiring beauty of a flower whose smell has been so faithfully recreated in scent form. This is, I recognize, no small feat in and of itself, unless you are willing to rely on the floral absolutes to do all the heavy lifting, in which case you have to deal with the more pungent, less pleasing aspects of the absolute – but Rodrigo Flores-Roux certainly knows his way around jasmine. That said, I’m a little surprised at the lack of accoutrements from a perfumer who produced both the complex, salty jasmine that is Ella (Arquiste) and the plummy jasmine chypre that is L’Âme Perdue (Le Galion), but I’m guessing that Outeda asked specifically for a pure, lush jasmine soliflore, and that is precisely what she got.

Personally, I don’t wear soliflores (preferring to smell flowers in nature than in the bottle) but if I were on the hunt for a great jasmine-dominant perfume, this would be a prime contender. The only other jasmine soliflore that matches the quality of A Fuego Lento is, in my opinion, the limited edition Diptyque Essences Insensées 2015, which is however far more syrupy and intense a smell.

Teisenddu (by perfumer Roxanne Kirkpatrick) is, in many ways, the most familiar-smelling perfume in the bunch, in that it mines a vein that many indie and niche perfumes before it have tapped into, i.e., that toasty-dry, caramelized scent of a working sauna, complete with all its spicy-fresh facets (juniper, conifer) and its dried fruit ones (cumin, caramel, prune, brandy). I quite like this toasty wood smell, even though it doesn’t really deviate from the pattern cut by scents such as Woodcut by Olympic Orchids or Bourbon by Hans Hendley.

Where it does innovate, however, is by pairing it with a full-blown movie butter popcorn accord with which I am only too familiar (unfortunately) thanks to my year-long exploration of the American indie oil sector. Every single perfume oil with the words ‘cake’ or ‘freshly baked bread’ or indeed ‘caramel’ featured precisely this note. Due to overexposure to this awful pyrazine-y aromachemical – whatever moniker it actually goes by – whenever I smell it, I think not of caramel or bread but instead of that awful fake butter popcorn flavoring they put in jellybeans. Because of its proximity to the hot, dry wood accord, the note emits a claggy ‘moistness’ that reads like warm, sweaty socks.

Now, it’s entirely possible that everyone else who smells this will smell what the perfumer intended, i.e., caramel, and that it is my particular sensitivity or over-exposure to this material that’s skewing the picture. I hope so. In any case, I hate this particular material with a passion and always wonder how Pierre Guillaume managed to pull off the toasted nuts and caramel in Aomassaï without resorting to it. (Part of me always thinks, well, if he can do it, why can’t everyone else?)

Mercifully, this note burns off quickly enough, and my patience is rewarded by a remarkable (and really quite unusual for a toasty, spicy wood scent like this) plant milk accord that smells like coconut milk, lotion, and something green and crunchy, like agave, fig leaves, or aloe vera. What this does is add a cooling, lactonic finish to the scent that effectively rehydrates the wood, balancing it so that it never tips over into outright aridity – typically the natural end of spicy indie wood scents. I really love this surprising element, and it’s enough to compensate me for any butter popcorn trauma I might have suffered previously.

It’s worth mentioning that, even when this milky lotion component fades away, we are left with a gently-spiced, gently-resinated, and gently-ambery wood accord that never pushes the envelope too far in any one direction. It’s all quite gentle. Which suits me just fine. In this last stretch, Teisenddu reminds me a lot of Gaiac by Micallef (and its twin, Dark Horse by Dame Perfumery), as well as Wenge by Donna Karan – all scents I’d describe as soft takes on the amber-incense-wood category, a popular and rather densely-populated intersection in niche perfumery. Scents like this are the fuzzy blanket of the perfume world (or ‘woody puddings’, as NST calls them), and while not entirely a novel form, Teisenddu innovates just far enough with that green, juicy plant milk accord to carve out a space for itself.

Source of Samples: I purchased samples of these Frassaï fragrances from Neroli Hungary, a Budapest-based niche perfume store here. I have purchased samples from Neroli multiple times since 2014 and am very happy to recommend them to my fellow European fumeheads.

Cover Image: Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash

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Ormonde Jayne La Route de la Soie Collection

19th June 2020

As you might have guessed from my recent series of posts, I am a big fan of the house of Ormonde Jayne. After having invested in several full bottles and having worked my way through samples of most of the brand’s collection, I feel like I have a good handle on the house DNA. Indeed, one of the things that I admire most about the brand is its strong creative control; most of the perfumes feature a signature move or note that definitively identifies them as members of the same genus. I’ve defined this signature elsewhere as a polished abstraction that gives you more than you were expecting.

But if the Ormonde Jayne DNA could be defined as ‘an original idea, softly stated’, the new La Route de la Soie Collection strikes me more as ‘a soft idea, softly stated.’ For me, the first four perfumes in the La Route de la Soie Collection are a disappointing deviation from the house DNA, sitting closer to the mainstream than to either niche or masstige (however you want to define it). The perfumes, although all as high quality as you’d expect from a brand like Ormonde Jayne, feature neither the exoticism promised by the Silk Road connection nor the quiet complexity we’ve been weaned on by years of Ormonde Jayne output. These perfumes are nice, competent, and pleasant – and one is even a little trashy (in a good way) – but not one of them sparks the fierce joy that has me saving up my pennies.

My point of reference is Nawab of Oudh from the Four Corners, because it features the house sleight of hand of making my mouth water and pucker at the same time. Perfumes like these remind me of the tart, peppery Vietnamese ouds, with their perfect balance of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter – addicting at first sniff, with a world of depth hiding behind the initial pop of flavor. Compared to something like this, the perfumes from the La Route de la Soie Collection are like those plastic-wrapped sponge cake snacks and Pocky you get from Japanese stores or a dispenser – cute as hell, but disappointingly bland on the tongue. Still, it’s probable that I’m not the target market here, and that’s fine. There’s plenty for me to love in the rest of the Ormonde Jayne stable.

Damask

I like that there’s no standard ‘house rose’ note used by Ormonde Jayne – their roses cover the broad sweep from the peach-shampoo-and-date juiciness of Ta’if to the jellied rosewater of Nawab al Oudh, to the smoky-fresh green rose in Rose Gold. With a name like Damask, I was expecting a purebred rosa damascena note up top, and right enough, this is promptly delivered in the form of a velvet carpet of soft, purple-red rose petals. A smell deep and pure enough to make you weep.

But just as my nose is burrowing into the tightly furled core of the rose, it disappears. Just…poof! It is substituted by a warm, waxy apple-rhubarb-amber accord that reminds me a bit of Sexy Amber by Michael Kors or Burberry Woman, i.e., amorphous, barely defined fruits, berries, and flowers dipped into a vat of fudgy amber and sticky white musk.

This all smells good, of course – it’s rhubarb and custard in scent form, after all – but I am surprised at just how conventional and safe-smelling Damask turns out to be. You see the name Damask and even if your brain knows that Damascus has been reduced to a pile of smoking rubble, you not only expect the famous rosa damascena to show up, but you expect it to be flanked by all sorts of mysterious accents like cardamom, coffee, and resins. But Damask is about as exotic as the Dublin.

I’m scratching my head here. Usually, if Ormonde Jayne is using innocuous fruity floral notes such as peony or pear or blackcurrant, then the perfumer twists them into new forms with pepper and citrus, teasing both your brain and nose until you work out what’s been done to them. Damask is a missed opportunity. I want to see what Geza Schoen would do if allowed to play around with a truly urinous, leafy blackcurrant or an acetone pear note paired to a chocolate truffle rose, for example. But Damask smells like he’s been kept on a tight leash this time around.

Without any of that Ormonde Jayne pepper or citrus – or even oud or carnation, other more occasional Ormonde Jayne star players – there’s nothing left in Damask to carve out the more exciting shapes of the rose or the fruit. It smells silky, waxy, and rounded, but not distinct. I don’t dislike Damask per se because (a) I can’t resist a bowl of stewed rhubarb and custard, and (b) my signature perfume for many years – Burberry Woman – features the same creamy fruit-amber core, so obviously I’m conditioned to find that kind of blurry, conventionally feminine warmth inviting. It’s just that it’s not exciting in the way we’ve come to expect Ormonde Jayne perfumes to be.

Levant

Interestingly, while Levant is billed as a fresh, citrusy floral bouquet, it doesn’t smell that floral to me, at least not at first. If I hadn’t seen the notes list, I would have pegged the fuzzy, mineralic opening as a mixture of vetiver, cashmeran, and citrus à la Terre d’Hermès. It smells like rain on hot pavement. This apparition might have something to do with the rubbery-peppery nuances of the materials used to build the peony accord used in perfumery (and also often by Ormonde Jayne). Or perhaps there is a bit of unlisted vetiver or cashmeran in the mix.

After a few minutes of this, the grey, quasi-industrial fog shifts to reveal a bittersweet orange blossom note that smells remarkably like those simple orange blossom waters the French buy by the liter to pour liberally into their babies’ bathwater. This tender floral note is sharpened by pepper and a curl of citrus peel, which, although billed as bergamot, smells more like rosy-leafy pink grapefruit to me. The notes I’d previously pegged as rubber or hot pavement now come across as a pleasant, low-key smokiness, almost as if there were such thing as an orange blossom water-flavored cigarette.

Levant doesn’t evolve much beyond this point, but maybe I’m laboring for meaning in a deliberately simple plot. In its bringing together of a simple, natural-smelling orange blossom water note with the clean twang of rubber-soled sneakers and a barely-there smudge of cigarette ash, Levant could be the haute luxe analog to Freeway (4061 Tuesdays), or the orange blossom version of Jasmin et Cigarette (État Libre d’Orange). All three perfumes perform the same trick of cutting white florals with soft-rubbery-ashy notes that provide just enough grit to render the scent fresh and urban rather than romantic or traditionally ‘femme’. But to be perfectly honest, not only do the 4061 Tuesdays and the État Libre d’Orange fragrances do it better, they do it for less money.

Byzance

Byzance is the scent I probably liked the most out of the La Route de la Soie collection, which is strange, because out of all these not-very-Ormonde-Jayne-smelling scents, Byzance is the least Ormonde Jayne of all. Perhaps the fact that Byzance is so far outside of the Ormonde Jayne envelope that I stop expecting to find all the signature OJ tropes and enjoy it for what it is.

A plush, dove-grey suede accord underpins everything here. Byzance is big, luscious, and unusually for Ormonde Jayne, exuberant to the point of loudness. It smells like a fizzy, cherry-flavored milkshake or sherbet that’s been dumped all over a new suede couch, causing the suede to hiss and effervesce like a Mentos popped into a bottle of Coca Cola and shaken hard.

I honestly can’t think of anything else that smells like Byzance, except for, perhaps, a few key portions of Diptyque’s Kimonanthe (intense apricot syrup over Japanese incense) and État Libre d’Orange’s Bendelirious (cherries over champagne and face powder). It smells so outlandish that I start to wonder if Ormonde Jayne really meant to make a perfume that smelled of pink antibiotic syrup spilled over the inside of a luxury car, or if it was an accident that got bottled up.

Either way, it’s fun. For Ormonde Jayne, this is punchy, hyper-gourmand stuff with a smile on its face. For those of us still trying to find that line between class and sass, this could be it.

Tanger

Tanger smells French in a way that’s hard to define exactly, only to say that French men and women tend to favor neroli-scented eaux de cologne and soaps, and that, somehow, I associate this particular floral note with them. Neroli is a material that smells at first fresh (orange-scented), then green (waxy leaves), and finally soapy-musky (freshly-scrubbed hands, white laundered cotton towels straight from the dryer). I tend to tire easily of neroli’s insistently soapy drydown, so a perfume so single-mindedly focused on neroli would normally be an easy pass for me.

But Tanger makes me reconsider my blanket ban. Though I’m still not sure I like neroli enough to wear and use a whole bottle of this, I have to give credit to the perfumer for somehow managing to keep the white soapiness of the material at bay for 90% of the ride, allowing me to enjoy the parts of neroli that I love but are usually zipped through too quickly, like the dark green freshness of crushed leaves and twigs. The brief flashes of fleshy, orangey sweetness make me think that a handful of errant orange blossom petals have made it into the distilling pot. A soft, waxy amber cusps the neroli, making me nod my head when I look at the copy, which for once is completely accurate when it describes Tanger as a “sunny, golden perfume, joyful and entirely lovable”. I’d rank this as the flanker to Hermes Eau de Néroli Doré, which means that, although nice, it is a little too simple and straight forward for an Ormonde Jayne fragrance.

Source of Samples: Press samples from Ormonde Jayne PR, provided with no pressure or expectation of a review. My opinions are my own.

Cover image: Photo by Peyman Farmani 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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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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Amber Gourmand Honey Independent Perfumery Review

Zoologist Bee

12th November 2019

Have you ever been walking along the street and suddenly feel so good that you burst into a run? Zoologist Bee is that for me – a burst of positivity that settles on you like a blessing you don’t remember asking for. The perfume doesn’t seem to be particularly complicated, but the trick it performs is by no means simple; effortlessness, or at least the impression of it, always requires an invisible-to-the-naked-nose system of levers and pulleys operating under the surface. Perfumes exuding this sense of almost child-like glee are rare. I can count on one hand the number of fragrances so exuberantly good-smelling that you feel you’re the world’s Secret Santa. Kalemat is one; so is Shaal Nur. Now Zoologist Bee joins their ranks.

I’m torn as to how best describe the pleasantness of the balance between bitter and sweet achieved in the opening – it’s the smoky, brown sugar-tinged bitterness of molten honeycomb (cinder toffee) just before the baking powder is added, but at the same time, there’s a jellied, clear coldness that calms the roil before it reaches burning point. This note, or rather texture, could be the royal jelly that appears in the notes. But the way I perceive the royal jelly note in Bee changes with each wearing. Sometimes, it feels as gelatinous as the cubes of grass jelly you get in bubble tea, at others, it smells more like rooibos tea that’s been boiled with a spoon of honey and allowed to cool on a window sill, i.e., a mixture of something tannic and something coldly sweet.

Whether it’s jelly or cold tea, the important thing is that this accord lends an impression of clarity, or transparency to the perfume. The rundown of notes doesn’t matter here because, as with any honey perfume, it’s as important to state what Bee is not as what it is. So, Bee is not treacly or syrupy or heavy. It’s not so sweet that it smells pungent or sharp. It is hugely radiant, but not unpleasantly scratchy or ‘fake’, by which I mean that it doesn’t smell like it’s been overloaded with those annoying woody ambers stuffed into most perfumes laying claim to the word ‘radiant’.

Bee is not – crucially, for me at least – animalic. I adore pissy honey perfumes like Absolue Pour Le Soir, but I have to be mentally ready for them. I don’t like when the saliva-ish staleness of honey reveals itself only in the far drydown, because it’s like an uninvited guest who, no matter how charming or brilliant they turn out to be, grate purely because their presence was unsolicited. I’d describe Bee a clear, radiantly ambery floral honey, tilting more towards amber than floral. There’s a doughy, fluffy sweetness in its underskirts that I take to be heliotrope, but the floral notes are largely indistinguishable, muffled as they are by the thick, white-ish beeswax note. There’s orange in the notes list, but I don’t smell any citrus at all, and if there’s anything green or fresh in the bitterness of the opening, then I’ve missed it entirely.

Bee is clearly honey from the start. No mistaking it for anything else. My children absolutely loved the scent and keep sticking their noses into my arm; my husband sniffed it and said, rather grimly, ‘yes, that’s honey alright.’ So, make no mistake – you need to like the essential honey-ness of honey to like Bee. Zoologist Bee is not the perfume for you, for example, if you like your honey notes abstract or folded into the weft where, as one note among many, it can do the least damage.

For me, honey is as problematic a note as coffee, chocolate, and caramel notes. In the context of a perfume, these solinotes almost always present more as a series of problems to be resolved (too bitter, too burnt, too urinous, too pungent, etc.) than the purer sensory pleasure they are capable of giving in the mouth. So, it’s really something for me to say that Bee is probably the only honey or beeswax-centric fragrance that I can see myself committing to without having to make a series of unhappy compromises with my own self.

For example, I like Honey Oud by Floris but am in two minds over that vaguely synthy wood in the basenotes that only I seem to be able to smell. I enjoy the grapey, musty honey of Botrytis by Ginestet, but only when I can smell the rot – about 70% of the time I wear it, it reads as a slightly dull, fruity amber. With its smoky-sweet cinder toffee amber, my memory of Immortelle de Corse by L’Occitane comes closest of all to Bee, but of course, it’s been discontinued so my memory might be serving me up false positives. But what anybody reading this review really wants to know is this: how does Bee compare to the last honey-focused runaway success on the niche/indie scene, namely Hiram Green’s Slowdive?

Slowdive is much richer, thicker, and more complex than Bee, with the herbs, florals, and tobacco almost as important to the whole smell as the honey and beeswax. On the other hand, Slowdive is far too heavy and syrupy for me to wear casually. I can’t just throw it on – I’d have to suit up for it. Compared to Slowdive, Zoologist Bee is simpler, more user-friendly in a big-boned, good-natured, ambery way. Bee and Slowdive are connected by way of their indie or smaller niche ‘feel’ (both have more in common with those rustic, ‘honest’ indie honeys such as Golden Cattleya by Olympic Orchids than with, say, Oajan by Parfums de Marly or Honey by Kim Kardashian West). But while Slowdive has that unmistakably hand-crafted, all-natural feel to it, Bee has the more polished, high-spec finish you get with mixed media perfumes, positioning it as slightly more niche than artisanal.

With its expansive ambery radiance, Bee moves one step closer to what most people outside the tight inner circle of perfume nerds would consider ‘yummy’ and gorgeous and easy to wear. And I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing – Zoologist Bee made it to my ‘to buy’ list the minute I smelled it. Anything that smells this good just begs to be bought and worn, not endlessly agonized over.

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Floral Fruity Scents Gourmand Green Independent Perfumery Review Saffron Sandalwood Spice Spicy Floral Thoughts Vetiver Woods

Concept versus Execution: I Am Trash, But Not Today, & Vetiverissimo

8th November 2018

It might seem to regular readers of this blog (all 23 of you) that, for a fragrance writer, I write very infrequently about perfume. In fact, I write about perfume every day. But since it’s either copy for big fragrance retailers or work on a book that I’m not sure will ever see the light of day, most people will just never come across it.

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