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Sakura by Ormonde Jayne: A Review

29th March 2023

 

Sakura by Ormonde Jayne is a Venetian sunset in a bottle, a serene blue sky streaked with pink, apricot, and gold.  It gives me the curious sensation of being relaxed and invigorated at the same time.  With its crisp but milky florals, that first spray feels like a white-gloved waiter handing you a Bellini – fridge-cold Champagne poured over a puree of white peach – with a drop of cream added to aid digestion.  It arrived on a morning so cold that the bottle itself felt like handing ice.  It was only later that I noticed that the colour of the bottle matches the emotional hue of its contents – at the bottom, a bright, clear layer of peachy osmanthus jelly, volatile citrus ethers, and muddled green leaves, at the top, a cloudy tint that might be almond milk blushed pink with cherry blossom. 

 

Sakura borrows heavily from the Ormonde Jayne library, with clear reference to the bright, sunshiny osmanthus of Osmanthus, the tango between the lime peel and buttery gardenia cream of Frangipani, and even some of that green-tinged milkiness of the brown rice in Champaca.  But it never once feels like a re-do.  I feel the self-assured touch of an experienced perfumer here, one that knows that the difference between referencing a house DNA just enough to give the wearer a sense of familiarity and recycling old tropes because all the new ideas have run out.   

 

I used to live in a city where apartment buildings were ringed with cherry trees, and to me, cherry blossom smells very light, fresh, and indeterminate.  Their scent is delicate, with some nuances similar to lilacs, by which I mean they smell honeyed, green, pollen-y, and very slightly bitter or woody.  But real cherry blossom doesn’t smell anything like its representation in commercial perfumery, where, being entirely a fantasy note and not a real material for perfumery, it is invariably interpreted in a heavily fruited, cherry-like, syrupy, and almondy fashion.

 

Sakura by Ormonde Jayne avoids this trap.   It captures the sharp, fresh brightness of cherry blossom live from the tree, thanks mostly to a clever clustering of greenish, pollen-laden floral notes (cyclamen, freesia, water lily) and the woody, ionone-rich twang of violets.  But make no mistake – the freshness does co-exist with sweetness.  Someone, somewhere along the line decided that cherry blossom is predominantly sweet, so Sakura is amply cushioned with enough rose, sandalwood, tonka, and creamy white musks to align it with the collective idea of what cherry blossom smells like, i.e., soft, feminine, a bit powdery, and so on.

 

But never mind that.  The real magic of this scent is at its melting point, where the fresh, sueded florals sink into the milk and pollen below.  The combination of sharp and milky achieves the same sort of milk-over-ice, endorphin-releasing effect as Hongkong Oolong for Nez Magazine (bitter tea against milky floral musks) and Remember Me by Jovoy (fresh green leaves against steamy condensed milk).  Alas, the glory of this moment passes quickly and the rest of the experience is more humdrum.  That is to be expected, I suppose – some beautiful things are meant to flare brightly and then die out.  But while its sillage is not immense, Sakura has impressive longevity on my skin, wafting subtle hints of sharp but milky floral essences for a good twelve hours or more.  I highly recommend Sakura as a transitional spring fragrance, as it is crisp and invigorating enough to make you yearn for the new plant growth due any day now, but warm enough to brace you against the chill of March wind. 

 

Source of sample: Sent to me by the brand for review. However, this is a perfume that I would have certainly purchased for myself after sampling it.

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Great Cocktails on Unsplash  

Honey Maurice Roucel Milk Musk Review Spice Tea

Hongkong Oolong by Maurice Roucel for Nez, the Olfactory Magazine

14th September 2020

What a beautiful and refreshingly to-the-point fragrance. In the tinderbox of nowtimes where the fuse is short and the flashpoint just a meter downwind of someone having a bad day on Twitter, Hongkong Oolong by Maurice Roucel for the autumn/winter 2019 issue of Nez, the Olfactory Magazine is a welcome respite – a meditation room off the main thoroughfare, filled with soothing white noise.  

Hongkong Oolong is a very clean, almost simple scent, which of course means that it’s a bit abstract and therefore not so straightforward to describe. It is almost easier to say what it is not than what it is.

So, let’s start there. Though it is a musk in the hands of Maurice Roucel, it doesn’t smell like anything in the delightfully slutty doughnut musk triptych of Musc RavageurLabdanum 18Helmut Lang EDP. Though it is gently spiced with powdered ginger and cardamom, and in the latter stages, there is a savory note that reads as cumin, it doesn’t smell particularly like chai.

Stripping it back even further, though a minimally fermented-smoky nuance develops midway through, and the composition focuses on a variety of tea (oolang) reputed to be milkier and more floral in tone than other teas, Hongkong Oolang doesn’t even really smell like tea. I mean, it does if you’re highly suggestible to the official description. But otherwise? Not so much.

Think instead of Roucel’s lighter, more playful work centred around his signature magnolia and magnolia leaf – honey, cream, and lemon, sliced through with a flash of metal and tart greenery – like the entire midsection of L’Instant Pour Femme (Guerlain) or the teeny tiny part of Tocade (Rochas) that is not rose lokhoum or really loud butter cookies.

Hongkong Oolong is therefore really just a dense but silky cloud of honeyed, milky musk molecules pierced by the succulent greenery of a Hosta or Monstera and the green apple peel nuance of magnolia. There is something lightly leathery, tannic almost in the lower registers, which, again, I’d describe as a nuance of tea rather than a courtroom sketch. A Bvlgari tea fragrance this ain’t.

Indeed, as a floral musk with the oblique suggestion of tea, rice milk, and greenish white floral notes, I suggest that Hongkong Oolang forms the third point of a triangle stretching between Champaca (Ormonde Jayne), with which it shares a nutty-toasty note that splits the difference between basmati and wheat, and Remember Me (Jovoy), for that cardamom-steeped milk note that comes on hot n’ heavy in the basenotes. They also all three have a light floral presence that is noticeable but not dominant (jasmine and magnolia in Hongkong Oolang, frangipani in Remember Me, and champaca in Champaca), though Hongkong Oolang is far milkier than Champaca and much fresher than Remember Me.   

But still, it’s the milkiness and their milkiness that’s the point here. I love the milkiness in these fragrances because it feels almost wholesomely natural, as if hand-cranked out of brown rice or sandalwood or those huge, waxy-leaved tropical plants that cry plant sap tears when you snap them in half. Though admittedly quite plain, this kind of milkiness is infinitely preferable to the claggy popcorn butter/moist socks stink of off-the-shelf milk aromachemicals used tiresomely often in the indie perfume oil sector.

And so, I love Hongkong Oolong. Though far cleaner than I usually like my musks, I find peace in the scent’s unshakeable center of balance between freshness and that milky sandal-rice-plant-milk undertone. At a time when nothing seems stable or constant, its restful simplicity is a cure.

Source of Sample: Hongkong Oolong was sent to me free of charge with the Addictive Substances edition of Nez Magazine (autumn/winter 2019) by the charming Jeanne Doré of Nez, the Olfactory Magazine, the first entry in the 1+1 series. Though this was kindly provided at no cost to me for review, I loved the perfume so much that I have re-ordered this edition of the magazine to get a second little bottle of Hongkong Oolong.  

   

Cover Image: Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

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Dusita Le Pavillon d’Or

6th December 2019

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

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

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

Gosh, it’s so pretty. Mint, iris, and honeysuckle combine to form a fresh, green opening that sometimes reminds me of Chanel. No. 19 and sometimes of Diorella (and sometimes of neither). There is an illusion of galbanum minus the bitterness, or of vetiver without its dankness. The main note here is fig leaf, which would explain the faintly milky quality to the greenness, but there’s none of the urinous quality that often sullies the vibrant smell of fig leaf. There is also a whisper of fruit, but one so phantasmagoric that it might all be in my head.

These opening notes are quickly coated with an overlay of what smells to me like the sweet, musty alfalfa grass notes (half hay, half Quaker’s oats) borrowed from one of my favorite Dusita perfumes, Erawan, but minus that scent’s dusky cocoa. There is also, here and there, a touch of Chanel’s Poudre Universelle Libre – a discreetly-perfumey, buff-colored skein of powder dusted over the scent’s cheekbones.

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

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

Photo by Linh Ha on Unsplash

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DSH Perfumes Series: Japanese Haiku

25th September 2018

 

Welcome to Part 4 (Japanese Haiku ) of my series on DSH Perfumes, the American indie perfume brand helmed by the talented and prolific Dawn Spencer Hurwitz. For those of you joining me just now, let me recap a little.

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DSH Perfumes Series: Gourmand

21st September 2018

 

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

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