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Sticky Fingers by Francesca Bianchi

19th August 2020

The more I wear Sticky Fingers by Francesca Bianchi, the more I’m convinced it is the Bengale Rouge of the Bianchi line, by which I mean a deliciously thicc n’ fuzzy oriental that’s characterful without being challenging – the much-loved woolly sweater your hand reaches for over the stark, uncompromising Ann Demeulemeester gilet you bought in a factory sale but could never figure out where the arm holes were. The thing these perfumes have in common is their sense of familiarity – they remind you (vaguely) of scents you already know and love. They wear like old friends even if you’ve just been introduced.

Just like Bengale Rouge is a more ‘people-pleasing’ option for people who would never wear Salome, Sticky Fingers is the perfect ‘out’ for people who want to own a Bianchi but find Sex and The Sea or The Lover’s Tale too heavy on the harsh orris-leather accord that has become the Bianchi calling card. That’s not to say that there’s none of Francesca in this perfume, because women with strong personalities always spill over into their art. You’d know, for example, that Sticky Fingers is a Bianchi creation as surely as you can tell Bengale Rouge is a Liz Moores one.

But Sticky Fingers is not going to ruffle any feathers. It is a cosy, feel-good diorama of Francesca Bianchi’s back catalogue with most of the hard edges sanded down and its already duvet-thick volume fluffed up by a mille-feuille of chocolatey patchouli, resins, amber, tonka bean, and vanilla.  

My own sticky fingers hover over the ‘buy’ button on Sticky Fingers mostly for the last two thirds of its life, which is when it turns into that combination of smells perfume lovers know as ‘sweater mélange’ – that sweet, lived-in aroma of a fabric like wool or coat collar or seatbelt exhaling, like a sigh, the breath of multiple perfumes last worn God knows when. Or that lovely and as-individual-as-a-fingerprint nuclear cloud that rushes up at you when you open a box of your favorite perfumes or cosmetics.

To wit, Sticky Fingers smells like the heady, third-day fug imprinted on my bathrobe after several days of wearing some of Francesca Bianchi’s other perfumes; especially The Dark Side with its honeyed resins, The Lover’s Tale with its sharp leather, and Lost in Heaven for its simultaneously urinous and sherbety civet-iris accord that is practically the Bianchi DNA. Yet Sticky Fingers is much softer and gauzier than any of these. It’s like all of these perfumes mingling together and blown in at you through an air vent from another room.  

Digging down into the detail, there are muffled echoes of something of the choco-wheat-cereal notes from indie perfumes of the last few years (like Ummagumma by Bruno Fazzolari, Café Cacao by En Voyage, or Amber Chocolate by Abdes Salaam Attar), but also a spicy tobacco gingerbread (Tan d’Epices), and a thick ‘white’ note like sandalwood creamed with benzoin (Santal Blush perhaps). I sprayed some Ta’if (Ormonde Jayne) over the tail end of Sticky Fingers once and could have sworn to the presence of smoky, caramelized marshmallow (Amber Absolute by Tom Ford). To be clear, Sticky Fingers doesn’t smell like any one of these perfumes. It’s just a delicious, jumbled up funk of rich woody or resinous orientals that have been worn at some point in the past two or three weeks, and have left an indelible, if undefined, impression.

In essence, Sticky Fingers is a patchouli perfume. But through a glass darkly. Think of the patchouli as the soloist leading the charge in a huge orchestra, drawing in supporting riffs from the strings and the bass until the music swells up from a hundred different sources, creating an incredibly rich, harmonious sound that fills all the air pockets in the room. The patchouli starts out solo, a musty, stale, and fruity rendition of pure earth. But almost immediately it calls in the high notes of the string section, in the form of those acidulated orris-leather tones of the Bianchi DNA, and to counter that, the bass tones of grainy tobacco leaf, shredded into tiny pieces and soaked in a glass of cold, floral-anisic Chinese tea. This combination of notes and ‘sounds’ has the effect of roughing up the patchouli, turning it into a hessian cloth accord of earth, stewed tea, and tobacco, back-lit by the yellow streak of ureic civet-iris that runs through Bianchi’s work like battery acid.  

This opening act is attention-catching but, focused on two or three accords that ride bullishly over everything else, it feels like we are all waiting this part out until the quieter, richer sound of the rest of the orchestra can spot an opening and rise to fill it. Eventually this happens, a whole chorus of dusty spices and sandblasted resins and micas ‘blooming’ in unison, softening the sharp edges of the Bianchi iris and blurring the outline of the patchouli. If I like the scent thus far, then I start to love it now, just as the central accord thickens up like a custard with the addition of tonka, sandalwood, vanilla, and tons of sparkly resin. This is when the perfume becomes a comforting ‘sweater mélange’.

The older the get, the more I enjoy scents that envelop me in a billowing cloud of warm, toasty goodness powered by the natural expansiveness of their resins, flowers, or sandalwood, as opposed to the fake radiance of Ambroxan or the forced volume achieved by over-spraying.  The most naturally ‘wafty’ fragrances in my arsenal are the big balsamic orientals like L’Heure Bleue parfum (Guerlain), Opus 1144 (UNUM), Bengale Rouge (Papillon), Coromandel (Chanel), Farnesiana (Caron), and Taklamakan (777 SHL), which wear like a delicious ‘gold-brown’ scent cloud that moves with me, like Pig-Pen from Peanuts. Sticky Fingers – welcome to the fold.

Source of Sample: Free with my purchase of Under My Skin from the Francesca Bianchi website.

Photo by Dmitriy Frantsev on Unsplash

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Incense Masculine Resins Review Smoke Spice The Discard Pile

Serge Noire by Serge Lutens

20th May 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Amber Floral Incense Independent Perfumery Review Spicy Floral

Hiram Green Voyage 2019: A Review

8th November 2019

Hiram Green Voyage 2019, huh. I remember little of the original Voyage other than (a) I liked it a lot – or at least enough to spend €25 on obtaining a precious 5ml decant, which I promptly misplaced, and (b) I spent a lot of time agonizing over it, trying to dissect what made the perfume tick.

And apparently, I got it all wrong. Hiram’s description of swapping out the suede of the original Voyage for lotus in the 2019 version was the first time I realized that the original Voyage was supposed to be suede. My review did pick out a slight peach skin note, similar to that of Hiram Green’s own Shangri La or Guerlain Mitsouko. But it never jumped out at me so strongly that I felt obliged to point at it and call it suedey, suedey McSuederton.

Re-reading my review of the original now, it appears I thought Voyage was structured around that familiar Guerlainesque clash between a bright, aromatic side (lavender, bergamot, cloves, cinnamon) and a dark, velvety side ( vanilla, indolic flowers). The dry down was a warm, luscious vanilla-amber, heavily laced with heliotrope and perhaps jasmine or orange blossom. I recall finding it pleasantly spicy and resinous, that prickly contrast between bright, aromatic citrus notes and warm amber never quite fading. Very loosely, it called to (my) mind the spiced pastry notes of L’Heure Bleue, the aromatic-vanilla of Jicky, and the slightly civety jasmine-tonka-amber of Ciel de Gum (Maison Francis Kurkdjian) and Musc Ravageur (Frederic Malle). No suede, though.  

But even when I get things completely arse-ways, Hiram Green is a true gentleman. He wrote to me after another review to say, in that mild-mannered way of his, that he was always surprised about how his fragrances were interpreted by writers and bloggers. From this I take that he’s bemused by, but accepts, the wildly differing takes on his work and the lack of causal relationship between our perception of what’s in the fragrance and what’s actually in the fragrance.

I’m conscious of how odd and discomfiting it must be for a perfumer to send their work to people like me in full knowledge that we are either going to smell stuff that isn’t there or miss big, important parts of the perfume that they might have labored and agonized over for months on end. This is surely is not a game for control freaks or for people who like to ‘explain’ their work constantly until people get it ‘right’ (hey, I’m sure we all know people like that, right?).  

Anyway, Hiram is probably going to read this and raise an impeccably well-groomed eyebrow, because, despite his assertion that Voyage 2019 is a lighter, fresher, slightly more tropical take on the original, with lotus taking the place of suede, I find it to be neither fresh nor tropical. And it’s about as light as a brick. Although I’ve mislaid my decant of the original and my memories of it are entirely re-built from my review, I’d still say that the overall ‘feel’ of Voyage 2019 is quite different from the original, despite both being structured around a warm amber and vanilla base.

First off, there’s an exuberantly fruity (berried) bubblegum note up top, not present in the original, that reminds me of various BPAL and Arcana ‘red’ musk accords. After that, Voyage 2019 mostly heads straight for the comfort of a deliciously fudgy amber-vanilla accord common to both but skips over the overtly floral or aromatic ‘spiky’ notes from the original completely; as such, Voyage 2019 does not have the same contrast between citrusy-aromatic and vanilla-amber of the original.  The ‘lotus’ note is interesting to me, because rather than smelling particularly floral (think: crisp, fresh, botanical, juicy, etc.), it smells golden, honeyed, soft, powdery, and somewhat resinous. Dusted over the vanilla-amber accord, the lotus doesn’t give Voyage freshness or lightness but instead creates a medicinal ‘nag champa’ character.  

Lotus flowers are revered in Buddhist and Hindi culture, because they are considered to be a direct route to spirituality, so the Indian nag champa reference seems appropriate. This smells like an Indian-style amber to me, with a doughy-powdery joss stick heart. In the far drydown, I’d swear to a bit of benzoin, its spicy ‘Communion wafer’ dustiness dovetailing with the powdery sweetness of the nag champa.  

I like Voyage 2019 more than the original, mostly because it feels simpler and more direct – a big down comforter of Indian incense and amber to keep me going in winter. Its appeal is immediate and, despite smelling briefly exotic, devoid of the twisty-turny mysteriousness of the original that taxed my analytical bandwidth.

But I am also super impressed that Hiram was able to capture the more unfloral parts of lotus, the sacred flower of India. Both the pink and white lotus varieties (from the true lotus family of Nelumbo nucifera) are ruinously expensive to produce, requiring 250,000 flowers to make just 1 kilogram of lotus concrete, which in turn yields only 250 grams of absolute after washing. I mention this to emphasize just how costly lotus absolute is, and how rarely seen on today’s market, especially outside of India itself (I have smelled a white lotus absolute but cannot attest as to its authenticity).

Because of its cost and doubts over authenticity, very few people outside attar makers and artisans working with small quantities of exquisite raw materials – like Hiram Green – will have smelled white or pink lotus absolute. You’ll probably hear talk about the lotus note in Voyage 2019 smelling aquatic, light, and crisp, because that’s what the definition on Fragrantica says. But a better source of information is Chris McMahon of White Lotus Aromatics. He describes pink lotus absolute as a “rich, sweet, floral, fruity-leathery aroma with a powdery-spicy undertone” and white lotus absolute as a “sweet, powdery, spicy,  delicate floral bouquet with an animalic, dry fruity undertone”[1]. Both those descriptions match up better with how the lotus comes across in Voyage 2019 – rich, sweet, powdery – than the Fragrantica description of aqueous or Hiram’s own description of it giving Voyage a “lighter and more tropical feel.” And honestly, I like Voyage 2019 better for how it actually smells (to me! disclaimer!) than how I’m told it’s supposed to smell.  

Photo by Maxime Bhm on Unsplash

[1] https://www.whitelotusaromatics.com/product/lotus-white-absolute

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Papillon Artisan Perfumes Bengale Rouge

8th July 2019

 

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

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

15th November 2018

 

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

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Small But Perfectly Formed: Building a Capsule Perfume Wardrobe with Travel Sizes

9th March 2018

Building a Capsule Perfume Wardrobe: If you had to build, or rebuild, your perfume wardrobe using only travel sizes and minis, could you do it? What would be on your list? 

 

A couple of questions have been dogging me lately. First, how much perfume do I actually use in a year? And second, if my collection of full bottles was lost or stolen, would it be possible to build a small capsule wardrobe that covers all possible scenarios using only minis and travel sizes, and sticking to a putative budget of +/- $30 per bottle?

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January Scent Project: Selperniku, Smolderose, Eiderantler – Reviews (Sort Of)

26th January 2018

 

In October 2004, a man called Chris Anderson wrote a very influential article for Wired magazine called “The Long Tail”[1]. In it, he explained how a little-known statistics term, called the long tail, actually explained a lot about success in the business world. The basic premise is that the market for products not widely available in bricks n’ mortar stores is as big, if not bigger, than the market for products that are carried in stores.

 

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Bruno Fazzolari Ummagumma: A Review

1st December 2017

This review has taken me many attempts to get right. I’ve written and re-written it more times than I like to admit. I think the reason for my hesitation is that I am bowled over by Bruno Fazzolari’s Ummagumma but not sure whether it’s because it’s really that good or because I am just genetically programmed to find sweet things irresistible (Irish women like me lay down fat automatically on the first signs of cold weather, like a sheep preparing for winter).

 

Oh hell, enough with the equivocating – Ummagumma smells amazing. It is so palpably delicious and soul-warming that the first time I smelled it, I had to fight myself from tipping the rest of the vial down my throat.

 

The topnotes are all about that bitter hit of pure chocolate one gets when drink a mug of 80% single plantation cocoa: molten, dark and almost iron-rich. There’s a generous pour of cream, courtesy of sandalwood, and a smattering of barky spice for grit – saffron, cinnamon, and what smells to me like clove but is just as likely to be carnation. The sultriness of the dark chocolate accord is quite similar to that of Slumberhouse Ore, albeit much sweeter thanks to the eventual star of the show, which is amber.

 

Yes, it’s not the spicy chocolate accord that takes top billing here: it’s the caramelized whisky amber that sits just beneath the cocoa and quickly burrows its way to the top, from where it dominates proceedings. Compared to the bittersweet cocoa top, the amber is honey-sweet, with a boozy edge that makes me think of the Irish whiskey notes in both Tobacco Oud and Amber Absolute. As a result, the amber sports a burned sugar char at the edges that makes me salivate

 

The amber booms on with its incensey sparkle, but neither the cocoa nor the spice disappears entirely; they lurk in the background, lending a fudgy, bittersweet depth to the main chassis. The scent is quite sweet, let’s be clear, but I find the same sort of balance here as in Ambre Narguile, where the syrup of amber and dried fruit is tempered by tobacco leaf. In Ummagumma, the tonka bean shows off its prickly, herbal coumarin side more than its lush cherry or almond facet, resulting in faint curlicues of smoky tobacco leaf and leather wafting through the amber, lifting and airing it out a little.

 

Foodie? Yes, most definitely. But don’t infer too much from my mention of Ambre Narguile above, as the scents are really nothing alike, with Ummagumma lacking, in particular, the cinnamon-apple fruitiness of the Hermessence. If anything, Ummagumma’s smooth amber makes me think more of Tobacco Oud with its whiskey-ish, honeyed, and leathery undertones, or a sweeter Ore by Slumberhouse. And although it’s a gourmand-leaning fragrance, there’s enough dry tobacco in Ummagumma to tilt it ever so slightly in the direction of Bond-T. The cedar in the base is faintly sweaty and smoky, with a vegetal edge that helps to cut through the richness as effectively as an Alka Seltzer after a rich meal.

 

Every artisan perfumer has a signature. But Ummagumma doesn’t really smell like a Bruno Fazzolari fragrance, apart from a certain groovy 1970’s aesthetic that runs through his other scents and also makes an appearance here (the Pink Floyd-related name, the chocolate incense, the textural “mood” feel of brown corduroy jeans, etc). On balance, though, Ummagumma is not as overtly retro in feel as either Au Delà or Seyrig. Neither is it futuristic or stark, as in Lampblack.

 

Most of my surprise, I guess, stems from seeing such a straightforwardly delicious gourmand coming out of the Bruno Fazzolari stable. Because “straightforward”and “delicious” didn’t seem to be words in Fazzolari’s vocabulary in 2016 when he collaborated with Antonio Gardoni of Bogue to make the “Frankenstein” gourmand, Cadavre Exquis, a fragrance that is as stomach-churning as it is intriguing. Cadavre Exquis smells like a bar of dark chocolate that’s been dragged through fir trees, fruit rot, the ashes of a campfire, and road kill. It smells like camphor and ass (curry-immortelle). Definitely not something anyone would want to eat, even if it smells like food.

 

I actually like Cadavre Exquis quite a bit, mainly because it nails the essentially animalic characteristics of a bar of evilly-dark chocolate, which, if anyone has ever melted one down will know, smells like warm blood, iron filings, raisins, and something like dried sweat. Cadavre Exquis has the unique quality of making me want to smell it, over and over again, despite the fact that it nauseates me. Which I think makes it at the very least a very interesting fragrance, if not a masterpiece (depending on the definition one uses). But while it’s addictive to smell, I’d never wear it.

 

Readers may be either disappointed or relieved to know that Ummagumma is nothing like Cadavre Exquis. On the one hand, Ummagumma is not as memorable or as progressive as Cadavre Exquis, but neither is it as divisive. Its gourmandise is sophisticated rather than off-kilter.

How you judge Ummagumma will depend greatly on where you come down on the split between wearability and art. Yet more people will evaluate it purely based on their knowledge of Bruno Fazzolari’s back catalog, including Cadavre Exquis, and find it lacking in edge.  But if I were to smell Ummagumma blind, although I wouldn’t peg it as coming from the hands of Bruno Fazzolari, I’d still want to own it and wear it because it’s one of the most straightforwardly delicious things I’ve smelled all year. And I mean those words as a compliment.

 

Notes: saffron, carnation, chocolate, tobacco, leather, labdanum, sandalwood, cedar, incense, tonka, vanilla

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Areej Le Doré Flux de Fleurs: A Review

6th November 2017

One of four in their most recent round of perfume releases, Areej Le Doré Flux de Fleurs is an interesting experiment in what happens when you blend Indian attars with Arabian raw materials in a classically French manner, thus confusing the heck of someone used only to the Western style of fragrance. For the sake of brevity, I would define the differences between these three styles as follows:

 

  1. Western floral perfumery is predominantly abstract and mostly composed of synthetics, or synthetics mixed with some naturals
  2. Indian attar perfumery focuses is ayurvedic, focused on the exalting the naturalness of plants, flowers, and herbs of India and Mother Earth
  3. Middle-Eastern attar perfumery is less focused on nature and more on a “perfumey-ness”, mixing natural oud, musk, and ambergris with already distilled attars and ruhs for a result that is richer and more complex than Indian attars, but not abstract in the Western manner

 

Flux de Fleurs pushes boundaries because it borrows a little from each category. It uses traditional Indian attar ingredients, including an Indian co-distilled jasmine and frangipani ruh, a very expensive blue lotus absolute, and a complex, distilled shamama (hina) attar, but then takes those materials in an Arabian direction by mixing them with materials more associated with the Gulf region, such as deer musk and aged Cambodi and Sumatran oud. To add to the confusion, there is obviously a very French, almost classical feel to the finished perfume – it boasts not only a French name but also a Gallic smoothness in the way the materials are blended.

 

So, the question then becomes: which style does Flux de Fleurs end up typifying? Because, to be fair, despite the complexity of any particular perfume, the finished result is always likely to end up more in one camp than the other. My answer would be that Flux de Fleurs smells predominantly like a blend of traditional Indian ruhs and attars, but with an abstract floral polish that glosses the whole thing in a classically French aura. Despite the presence of oud and musk, in other words, Flux de Fleurs does not smell Arabian or Middle-Eastern.

 

Flux de Fleurs is not a challenging scent per se, but I can see why people might struggle with it: it is familiar enough to make you feel comfortable but contains odd elements that are difficult for a Westerner to place. The general style – floral oriental – is old hat to us by now. But the strangeness of the raw materials casts us adrift. It’s like hearing a tune you think you know re-mixed on the radio to the point where you wonder if you remember the original at all.

 

There’s a logic to why some parts of Flux de Fleurs appear strange to us. Natural raw materials and attars smell quite different to their (often) synthetic reproductions in Western perfumery. For example, in French perfumery, the use of natural jasmine oil has been almost completely replaced by jasmine synthetics because of the prohibitive cost, and now appears to us in one of several forms – sweet, syrupy, and “purple”-smelling (the Grandiflora variant) or leathery, indolic, or minty (the sambac variant).

 

But a jasmine ruh, which is what’s been used in Flux de Fleurs, is a different kettle of fish. A ruh is an essential oil of jasmine flowers obtained through gentle hydro-distillation in India, using the ancient deg and bhapka system. And being entirely natural, a jasmine ruh smells more like earth and fruit than floral. We can recognize it as jasmine, sure, but there are some weird bits to the smell that we don’t immediately recognize, like the smell of spilled fuel, roots, metal, porridge, or gassy bananas.

 

I know that sounds weird, but some naturals bear little resemblance to the idea of it that we hold in our heads. Osmanthus absolute smells incredibly pungent and cheesy, for example – more like a barnyardy oud than a flower. I remember being shocked at how little these pungent Indian naturals smelled like, compared to their standardized Western form. Indian ambers smell rather harsh and spicy, reading as vegetal and austere to the nose rather than the sweet, vanillic “souk” style ambers to which we’ve all grown accustomed. Natural jasmine is quite a bit danker, spicier, and “muddier” than the bright, fruity, creamy, or even indolic tones of the jasmine aroma most commonly presented in niche or even classic perfumes. Likewise with the nose-clearing camphoraceous slap of Indian patchouli or the pungency of Indian saffron. Not bad different, you understand, just… different different. Smelling Indian attars and ruhs – the pure, natural ones, that is – is like being on a clean food diet and cleansing your blood stream of all the unnatural sugars in processed food.

 

So, while the florals in Flux de Fleurs are easily identifiable as semi-tropical white ones – jasmine and frangipani – their shape does not emerge in the usual form. In other words, not in the form of sweet creaminess, indoles, syrupy texture, tropical headiness, and so on.  Instead, I sense odd bits and pieces of their character coming through, like the faintly peachy rubber undertone of frangipani and the smoky phenols of jasmine, its benzyl acetate character giving the florals a grapey, fuel-like savor. Later on, when the white florals filter through the dry, woody oud and the frankincense, there is even an austere sootiness to the way the flowers present.

 

In general, I do not find Flux de Fleurs to be as fruity or as spicy or as sweet or as heavy as most others seem to. To my nose, it is full of these little Indian touches that aligns it with my experience of these natural ruhs and attars out of the traditional Indian canon of perfume making. There is a spicy, vegetal saffron-amber topnote that, when melded with the citrus (my nose says orange, not grapefruit), smells quite close to the traditional shamama or hina attar scent profile, but creamier and with a licorice-like nuance that makes me think of myrrh. There’s also a fuzzy nag champa or stick incense note that appears midway through, likely due to the combination of sooty frankincense, dusty benzoin, and the sweet florals, and although this never comes off as headshoppy, it does have a distinctly Indian tone.

 

But still, these exotic Indian touches are not enough to make me think that it’s entirely unique. There are parallels with Western niche fragrances such as Le Maroc Pour Elle by Tauer Parfums and Manoumalia by Les Nez, which gives rise to that sense of familiarity I mentioned earlier. This is mostly through the common use of tropical, rubbery white florals combined with stick incense or earthy, vegetal notes. So I wore all three perfumes together, to see if I could pin down that nagging sense of familiarity.

 

Side by side, Flux de Fleurs lacks the fecund earthiness and wet, savory, coconutty feel of the ylang in Manoumalia; but interestingly, returning the nose to Flux de Fleurs after Manoumalia reveals a fizzy, powdered incense note that is strikingly similar to Tauer’s effervescent Incense Rose (specifically, that Pez note that people either love or loathe in his work). Conclusion: although the rubbery, earthy nuances of the ylang are quite similar, Flux de Fleurs is far brighter, drier, and smokier/fizzier than Manoumalia. When compared directly with Le Maroc Pour Elle, Flux de Fleurs reveals a much lighter nag champa note than the Tauer, which is all round far richer and heavier than the Areej Le Doré. Conclusion: despite similar themes and approaches, Flux de Fleurs is far less headshoppy than Le Maroc Pour Elle.

 

I don’t find Flux de Fleurs to be very tropical, or creamy, or (overly) sweet in feel – nor do I find it spicy or dense. It is simply an unfamiliar but very Indian treatment of white flowers: earthy vegetal jasmine and peachy, rubbery frangipani  filtered through a semi-pungent haze of dry, fizzy incense, powder, rubber, fuel, milk, scented erasers, Chandrika soap, and an array of other interesting, non-perfumey accords, glossed to a 3D shine in the French floral oriental style of blending. I say “simply”but of course, that’s no small feat to pull off, especially for an indie perfumer who seems to be bootstrapping everything himself from the sourcing to the distilling and bottling out in the steamy jungles of Thailand.