Confession: I am not fond of cedar as a note in perfumery. Perhaps because these days it is so often paired with vetiver and Iso E Super to produce that piercing sucker punch of ‘woody-fresh’ masculines that it has become tainted in my mind, or perhaps because the essential oil itself can be pungent. I can count on two fingers the cedar-heavy fragrances I love – Feminité du Bois by Serge Lutens and Cèdre Sambac by Hermès – but now, perhaps, I can tentatively add Kashmir as a third.
Un Bel Amour d’Été by Parfum d’Empire has been described – by the perfumer himself – as a suntan oil and flip flops kind of beach scent, while Luca Turin thinks it is a midway point between Jicky and Fracas. Going out on a limb here, neither of those are particularly accurate. To the first point, this is no suntan oil bit of fluff. It is a serious piece of floral perfumery – big, classical, sensuous. To the second, the dirtiness that Turin identifies as Jicky-esque is more the moist, body odor-ish roundness of cumin than the sharp, herbal (and dare I say masculine) civet that is the secret to the Guerlain. In truth, Un Bel Amour d’Été comes shockingly close to vintage Songes by Annick Goutal, specifically the eau de parfum version, with a side swipe of the spicy-milky tuberose bread pudding that is Alamut (Lorenzo Villoresi).
But there are key differences. The first bright, creamy explosion of tuberose and gardenia (for a few minutes, this is clearly a stunning gardenia recreation) is far more savory – saline almost – with a bready nuance that smells like the apricot-jam-slathered sandalwood of Jeux de Peau, a clear departure from the grapier nuances of Songes’ jasmine and ylang notes. Further differentiating it are a greenish ‘snapped leaf’ note, something that smells like red modelling clay, and a coarse apricot note so resinous it feels like the last, thick dregs of a carton of peach juice that burn your throat as they go down. The cumin and turmeric notes are also more audaciously spicy.
But in all honesty, it is more like vintage Songes than not. The opening is as momentously floral, powerful to the point of being pungent, and it is also similarly intensely cuminy. Both are extremely sensual – beads of glossy lady-sweat popping out and then drying on the surface of Carmen Miranda’s skin under that Bahia style dress. Though Un Bel Amour d’Été does finally swap out Songes’ creamy sandalwood for a lactonic (but also strangely dry) vanilla, there is always the overriding impression of a densely savory floral bread pudding soaked in second day lady sweat and wood.
As a Songes devotee, I am bowled over by this, but even I am sensible enough to know that there really is no justification in me owning more than a sample of something that, while not note-for-note derivative, is similar enough to an older model. Objectively-speaking, however, Un Bel Amour d’Été is more modern, richer, and honestly, probably better constructed than Songes, and it may be an option when my vintage bottle (with real sandalwood) runs out. I am impressed that there are perfumers like Marc-Antoine Corticchiato who are unafraid to play in waters so crowded by monsters like Fracas and Songes. It must be like trying to create a spicy floriental just after Coco and Opium came out.
Source of Sample: I purchased a manufacturer’s sample of Un Bel Amour d’Été from Fragrance & Art in Sweden.
Cover Image: Photo by Vicko Mozara on Unsplash
Oud Taiwan by Areej Le Dore smells great, but not the ‘perfume’ kind of great. It smells great in the way that certain spaces – a carpenter’s workshop, a fuel court, a supplies closet – smell great because of what they hold. After a brief sinus-clearing Listerine topnote, I smell the inner workings of a car repair shop. There is the smell of metal pistons sliding into cold hollows, cans of gasoline soaking into the porous concrete slab, a two-bar electric heater heating up, and the splutters of a dirty exhaust pipe being cranked up. A furry indole note adds to the chemical – or inorganic – feel of the scent with its rubbery ‘Magic Marker’ twang.
This makes me understand two things. First, that natural materials like indole or camphor can smell like chemicals. Second, that some chemicals just smell incredible. Think of the smell of school glue, the binding of a book, the pages of a magazine, or nail polish.
Oud Taiwan doesn’t smell entirely inorganic, though. The third spike of the wheel – counting the wintergreen mouthwash/Dettol accord and the car shop miasma as the first and second respectively – is an oud oil that smells initially like a funky wolf pelt smeared with toothpaste but increasingly like a stack of horse blankets, pleasantly damp with dander, horse sweat, and once-pissed-upon hay. This adds a mammalian warmth and roundness to the cold, hard steel of the more industrial-smelling accords of the car shop. I say ‘adds’ but in truth, the two accords – one cold and chemical, the other warm and animal – gnash their teeth against each other rather than merge smoothly, which makes for an unsettling effect.
The oud oil that went into Oud Taiwan is warmer and sweeter than the oud accord in the scent, with its nuances of caramelized wood and woodsy-horsey finish. It smells like wool, leather, and skin – not clean per se but not filthy either. Just a lightly exercised animal steaming post-trot with all the other animals in a heated barn in winter.
Where Oud Taiwan differs from its constituent oil is in its hardcore myrrh finish. Fans of myrrh’s bitter, latexy gloom will love the drydown of Oud Taiwan. It smells like Scandinavian licorice rolled in cathedral dust. There is no sparkle to this incense resin. It is severe and moody, the Snapes of the resin world. What’s more, myrrh opens up a hollow space in the scent that throws me for a loop.
It also tires my nose. The myrrh note, coupled with the persistent industrial chemical miasma, which one always finds intoxicating at first but then almost nauseating after sustained exposure to it, begins to wear me down. Something here is overdosed. It drones on, seemingly interminably, which is never good, because the longer an accord goes on, the more time I have to find bones to pick with it.
In short, I think Oud Taiwan smells great, in the way that some places smell great. But while I admire how it was constructed, I did not want to wear it past the testing phase. It doesn’t wear like a perfume, which, um, forgive me for being basic, is how I want to experience a scent.
But in my house, the testing of Oud Taiwan over the course of a week became a family affair, with every member weighing in on it. My husband loved Oud Taiwan because whenever he smells real oud – and there is a significant amount of it here – his jaw tightens and he paws the ground. He says it takes him back to being in a leather store with his father when he was young.
My sense of Oud Taiwan being the scent of a place rather than a perfume is borne out by his comment on the second day of testing, when he noted that it also smells like walking into the family’s old village house near Skadar Lake and breathing in the smells of the salamis hung up to cure from the roof, the smoke from the neighbors clearing the land of scrub, and the soot and dust snaking up every surface – smells that, over time, ingrain themselves into the fabric of a house and turn it into ‘home’.
My teenage son said that, for an oud, it smelled really great and not too animalic, but rather like an old, clean house or stables somewhere desolate. I think what both of them were trying to say was that Oud Taiwan is a whole atmosphere, not just a perfume.
Source of sample: Sent to me free of charge by Russian Adam for review. My opinions are my own.
Cover Image: Photo by Francisco Gonzalez on Unsplash
Epona is pure gorgeousness. Though I do have an equestrian background myself, horsey perfumes can be a little bit too on the nose with the mane accord – Arabian Horse by Pierre Guillaume, Corpus Equus by Naomi Goodsir, for example – for people sans horsey background to really enjoy. Epona sidesteps the trap of literalness by being a fully-fledged perfume built around an agrestic scene rather than a hammer hitting the pony button over and over again. Let me put it another way – this is a horsey perfume for someone whose idea of horse heaven is more Chanel’s genteelly-saddle-soapy Cuir de Russie or a horse seen through the soft glow of a Tiffany lamp than the actual animal itself.
The opening, for example. With its rush of astringent violet and iris ionones, you are plunged into a forest glade with spring flowers and roots pushing up through the frozen soil. Rather than sweet, it smells chalky, like stamens and roots split open, diffused in a cloud of wood or floral esters that make my head swim as effectively as waving a newly opened bottle of grappa under my nose. Emotionally remote flowers in cold storage, plus the beginnings of something mossy and brown-ish that makes me think of Jolie Madame or Miss Balmain (Balmain). On reflection, this makes sense to me because there is something about Balmain perfumes, especially in extrait form, that smells modern and old at the same time.
Past the chilled ionone rush of the topnotes, there develops a sweet, slightly smoky-grassy note that I first felt was hay, but am confident now is incense, and specifically an unlit stick of nag champa. This dusty-powdery accord comes in so closely behind the chalky violet-iris opening that it momentarily confuses the direction of the perfume – you begin to wonder, is this an austere Miss Balmain-ish thing or are we going in the direction of a New Age momma? I got my son to smell my arm, and he said immediately, old church.
And for a while there, Epona does smell ‘old’ in a really good way, like the wood in an old church, dusty old clothes in a trunk to explore, and so on. What I appreciate about Epona, though, is that this is just one stage in its development, because just when I begin to wonder where the horse in this picture is, the perfume begins its slow slide into the outdoors, all sun-warned hay, narcissus, alfalfa, woodruff, a light starchy leather, and the softly ‘rude’ aromas suggestive of, first, a pasture, and then, finally, a horse. But only the vaguest suggestion of a horse.
The trajectory from cool to warm is so smooth, you barely register what’s happening. Though mostly a pastoralist aroma-scope, the warm, boozy aura makes me think of a childhood spent walking into rooms where the adults are or were drinking glasses of a slightly smoky Irish whiskey. Perhaps it is the ionones creating a familiar sweet, newspaper-whiskey tonality (subliminally Dzongkha-ish in my memory palace), but either way, it is extremely pleasant.
So extremely pleasant, in fact, that I can’t stop imagining that Epona – in this phase at least – smells like the Caronade the way I remember it, fully loaded with Mousse de Saxe and those complex, brandy-ish De Laire amber bases. Now, it is no small feat to pull off an approximation of an older Caron extrait (En Avion and Nuit de Noel are the ones that jump to mind here), and I have no idea if that’s even something Liz Moores was aiming for, but that is exactly what I feel I am smelling here – a complex, mossy-smoky-sweet leathery floral that is half spice and half face power.
Of course, nothing this beautiful lasts forever, but I enjoy the hell out of this Caronade phase until it trails off into a persistent honey note that smells like a pissy narcissus material to me, not a million miles from the drydown of Tabac Tabou (Parfums d’Empire).
This is by far my favourite of the Papillon perfumes.
Source of Sample: Gratis sample sent to me for review by Liz Moores.
Cover Image: Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash
The only possible reason why Annette Neuffer is not discussed in the same breadth as other talented, self-made European perfumers (Andy Tauer, Vero Kern, Antonio Gardoni, etc.) is because, unlike these, she has been unable to professionalize her operations or achieve economies of scale in her production so that her perfumes are priced at a point where regular perfume wearers can buy them.
In Europe, at least, there is great respect for Annette’s style, and a rather robust grey market in swapping samples and full bottles of her work. But not even a glowing review from Luca Turin in the Guide 2018 wasn’t enough to shoot the brand into the indie stratosphere currently occupied by Teone Reinthal, Manuel Cross, Clandestine Laboratories, Zoologist, Tauer, and so on.
Which is a shame because it proves that a certain measure of market exposure and self-promotion is what gets some perfumes talked about, therefore keeping them ‘alive’ in the mind’s eye, while others, none the less important or beautiful a creation, risk trailing off into the darkness of the void. This is why it’s important for people to write about Annette and people like Annette. I don’t claim that my words have any impact – blogs have been dying for years now, and this one is no exception. But as the lights start to go out on this ship, there is a certain sense of freedom in realizing that I can write about anything that strikes my fancy, with no regard for what might be current or ‘hot’, because nobody is watching.
And what I want to write about today is Annette Neuffer, because unless she suddenly starts sending free bottles of perfumes out to YouTube and Instagram perfume ‘influencers’, her work will remain largely unknown to all but those who deliberately seek her out. Her perfumes are as worthy of the intense fandom discussions that swirl around around Teone Reinthal or Zoologist. A jazz musician living in Freising, Germany, she works completely in naturals, but with a deftness of touch that made even Luca Turin – famously a critic of all natural perfumers – marvel.
I don’t like everything she makes, but even those I don’t like, I find myself thinking about and trying to understand how they work. Enter clumsy yet obligatory metaphor about jazz; though I don’t understand jazz and its weird, cacophonic ‘non-structure’, I enjoy it at a subliminal level once I stop trying to analyze it. I think that’s probably the key to Annette Neuffer’s work too.
First up, three roses.
Honeysuckle Rose is a fat but wilting white flower, a vine of jasmine or tuberose curling in on itself, buried in swathes of beeswax and furniture polish. It smells like sweet tea and nectar and female skin putrefying in a Southern heat so intense that you can almost see the beads of moisture popping up. I smelled a honeysuckle bush once in the South of France and was shocked by how fleshy and sultry it actually is, in contrast to its rather innocent reputation.
This perfume smells like honeysuckle in the air – heady, rudely floral, honeyed – but powdery and slightly dank on the skin, like a cup of over-stewed tea. The oily cedar-like notes of a dank rosewood add to the impression of a flower floating in a gong bath, a flash of something white and delicate in the Vantablack gloom.
It is only later, once the bitterness of the tea and woods has subsided, that Honeysuckle Rose reveals its final, true form – a sunny orange blossom busily licking the sticky grunge of beeswax and rosewood off its fur. The contrast between light and dark is startling, like a bar of the whitest goat’s milk soap carved from a block of resin. A trace of warm, dark honey lingers underneath this, like licked skin, recalling some of Vero Kern’s perfumes (Rozy in particular, with its attractively stale, louche rose breath).
Rosa Alba is based around a rare, white Bulgarian rose varietal named, well, Rosa Alba (rose of the dawn). It has simple but powerful beauty of a freshly picked rose from a wet garden, with its alluring mixture of lemon zest, geranium leaf, and finally, a trembling, jellied, pink rosewater loukhoum nuance tucked deep into the tightest folds near the heart.
A resinous, powdery (slightly sour) sandalwood is the only other element here, lending the fragrance the feel of a traditional Indian attar. This is the immense, timeless beauty of a flower stuffed inside the flimsiest of shells. And though arguably a direct copy of nature, you’d have to be a marble statue not to be moved by a smell like this.
Avicenna White Rose & Oud is my personal favorite of Annette Neuffer’s takes on rose, perhaps because it turns such a (by now) familiar paradigm on its head. The marriage of rose and oud is a natural one, the gentle, bright sweetness of rose tempering the sour, moody darkness of oud, and as such is a popular trope in perfumery. But even a template this good gets old after a while.
What I love about White Rose & Oud is that it reimagines the rose-oud pairing in the context of a witch’s apothecary in the Middle Ages, giving it new angles I hadn’t considered before. The opening is a pungent herbal lemonade that has dried to crystals on a mantelpiece somewhere, before being swept into a pestle and mortar with a bunch of dusty culinary herbs and ground to a fine powder. But before you think, wow, this is super sour and harsh and I don’t like it, in rolls an intoxicating lush, Turkish delight rose that softens all the sharp edges. The interplay of that rosy loukhoum against the tart, almost brackish oud – which you realize is what the deeply sour herbaciousness in the topnotes was camouflaging – is brilliant.
The umami, wheaten sandalwood in the basenotes interacts with the oud and other woody notes to create an accord so dry and 3D and aromatic that it feels like watching plumes of barkhoor smoke hanging heavy in the air or hot benzine shimmering in the thick air at the fuel court.
But while recognizably (finally) a rose-oud scent, White Rose & Oud never feels exotic in a tokenistic manner, perhaps due to its persistent streak of antiseptic sourness – that medieval apothecary vibe – that runs through it from top to bottom. I like to think that Bernard Chant would have liked the witchy 1970s feel of this, even if he didn’t quite get the whole rose-oud reference the way modern perfume wearers do.
Source of sample: I bought a sample set directly from Annette Neuffer’s website back in (I think) 2017 or 2018.
Cover Image: Photo by Christina Deravedisian on Unsplash
Vanille des Afriques is essentially a reformulation of Vanille d’Iris to adhere to IFRA regulations but with the addition of a bourbon and a Madagascan vanilla absolute to replace the Tahitian vanilla of the original. In other words, if you liked Vanille d’Iris, then chances are you will like this too. Personally, though I liked the original Vanille d’Iris well enough, it came at a time when I was searching for more drama in my vanilla. This time around, I can better appreciate its gently monochromatic beauty. With its starched orris against the clean, rubbery magnolia and oceans of musky vanilla cream, it is perhaps the whitest thing in Africa right now other than me.
White doesn’t mean boring, though. There is a creamy-sour lime or bergamot tinge to the pop of orris in the topnotes that lends the perfume a pleasant bitterness, similar to the topnotes of Infusion d’Iris Absolue (Prada). Carrot seed adds a bright, almost savory muskiness that reminds me somewhat of the creamy vegetal vibe of Evernia (soft-stemmed greens cooked for hours in Irish butter into a gray-green sludge). The florals that move underneath are, in typical Ormonde Jayne style, sheer but strangely robust – the rubbery, apricot-skin tartness of osmanthus makes itself known first, but the lemony ‘cold cream’ aspect of magnolia is also evident.
Just don’t come to Vanille des Afriques looking for drama. Despite the double dose of vanilla, it is neither ‘delicious’ nor indeed particularly vanilla-ish. Despite the listed jasmine and the ‘Afrique’ in the name, this is no bold, exotic creation in the manner of L’Elephant (Kenzo), African Leather (Memo), or Afrika Olifant (Nishane). It is not florid or tropical or spicy. Rather, it is as luxuriantly bland and soothing as a wodge of ugali, the thick white maize meal used as a spongey foil to goat stews and steamed kales here in East Africa. And therein lies its beauty – sometimes life itself is so spicy that you just want a cooling starch upon which to rest your weary head. And Vanille des Afriques is a beautiful example of this olfactory pillow.
Source of sample: PR sample provided courtesy of Ormonde Jayne, with no obligation to provide a review.
I can’t help feeling sad that ‘regular’ people who just love a good, well-constructed perfume rather than obsessing on one or two of their constituent raw materials will likely never get to smell the Musk series from Areej Le Doré. Except for one, none of the perfumes in this collection are terribly animalic, all of them use exquisite materials like real sandalwood, oud, and jasmine, and most of them smell like whole, actualized perfumes rather than the sum of their parts. But then, the people who love perfumes for the entirety of their composition or for the personalized soundtrack they provide to the mundanity of the everyday are upset enough that the 2014 Dior Addict or the 2009 Hermes Hiris are no longer available, so can you imagine their feelings about perfumes that sell out and become unobtanium in the space of a weeks, if not days?
Perhaps it is best that only the oud heads and sandalwood obsessives that lurk in dark corners of the Internet get to smell these. Most Areej Le Doré perfumes smell like proper perfumery bases bought in from somewhere, dressed in a careful arrangement of natural oils and essences that the perfumer has sourced or distilled himself – incredibly silky-funky ouds that smell of wood rot but also of hay and mint, the powdered goodness of well-resinated sandalwood, buttery white flowers, or the citric, briny spackle of white ambergris. Sounds amazing, right? And it is. But what the perfume-wearing GenPop want is for a beloved perfume to smell reliably the same from one day to the next, and ideally, from one bottle to the next. The naturals used in Areej Le Dore perfumes are too mercurial and unreproducible to guarantee that level of security.
Take Crème de la Crème, for example. My favorite of this series and the easiest to wear, it has nonetheless never smelled the same way on me the three times I have donned it. The first wear induced rare feelings of euphoria, because it reminded me of a soft, vintage floral perfume – L’Air du Temps perhaps – worn down to a barely-there skin scent clinging to the baby hairs at a woman’s neck. Soft yet strong, like a photo I recently saw of Jean Harlow one day before her death from kidney failure, her delicate yet bloated frame held firmly in place by her co-stars Clark Gable and Walter Pidgeon, who seemed to sense she was near collapse.
This version of Crème de la Crème was sweet, clove-ish, dried-rose-petalish, shot through with the citrusy brightness of ambergris and bathed in the dusty but resinous sweetness of sandalwood. There was a absinthe-like note floating around in there too, reminding me of the cloudy, bittersweet herbaciousness of Douce Amère (Serge Lutens). The final aftertaste, however, was of the delicate Indian attar-like floral sandalwood of Alamut by Lorenzo Villoresi, only airy and astringent where the Villoresi is sodden with sweet milk.
The second and third wearing immediately revealed the minty-camphoric sting of a clean island oud – like a Borneo, but in reality, an oud from the Philippines – sweeping in the medicinal radiance of hospital-grade antiseptic fluid. How had I missed this the first time around? Now I could smell the sharpness of lime leaf as well as the familiar richness of the sandalwood, which in its second outing smelled like a century old sandalwood elephant ground down into dust for zukoh incense. Reddish wood, all powder on the surface but with globules of calcified amber rolling around like a bag of marbles underneath. This is immediately recognizable as real-deal Indian sandalwood, its tart, yoghurty nuances darting in and out of the sweet richness, coating your tongue with the kind of roundness and balance you really don’t get with sandalwood synthetics.
Roundness doesn’t mean sweet or feminine, though. The slightly mossy bitterness at the center of ambergris gives the sandalwood a fern-like character, making me think of those big, old fashioned fougères, redolent of shaving soap, oil of cloves, and bay rhum. The sweet-sour-soapy finish of the sandalwood reminds me a lot of Jicky, but also by extension, Musk Lave, except that in Crème de la Crème, there is a faint spicy-floral breeze that nudges it into the realm of the Caron carnation (Bellodgia or Poivre).
Third time around, like the second time, but with more pronounced soapy-leathery-amber notes that made me think of the floral, oiled galoshes of Knize Ten Golden Edition, the plasticky ylang of Chanel No. 5 eau de parfum, and of Pears soap. This is not unpleasant, just surprising. Perhaps it is the creamy, dusty airiness of Crème de la Crème that makes it so quixotic and mutable. Like one of those shifting sand pictures that changes every time you shake the frame, it softly accommodates whatever fantasy or feeling you project onto it.
Cuirtis opens with the most divine, almost mouthwatering accord of sweet, cuminy bread, a fruity dill, aromatics, and a peach-skin osmanthus. This may sound odd, but I love the effect. I think the word I’m looking for here is hawthorn. There is a familiar chord here that stirs up some good scent memories for me, one I can only really identify as being broadly ‘peak L’Artisan Parfumeur’ in tone – a touch of the dry, smoky (but also fruity) nagamortha of Timbuktu, some of the complicated whiskey-vetiver-old orris soap of Dzongkha, and even a touch of the sweet, armpitty doughnut of Al Oudh, perfumes that have fallen slightly out of fashion or have been discontinued but still remain part of my personal perfume hall of greats.
The dry, smoky birch tar, when it bursts through this almost watery-fruity-aromatic dillweed layer, does indeed smell like a fine cuir, but not one produced by Chanel or Dior. Rather, I smell a lot of Ambre Fétiche (Annick Goutal) here, with its parched, leathery benzoin simplicity – also characterized by a strong birch tar note, by the way – as well as a sliver of the melony smoke of Breath of God by Lush and some of the watery, metallic violet leaf and hay dandiness of the late, great Cuir Pleine Fleur (Heeley).
Thus far, this review has been one long run-on sentence of other perfume references, but I am not suggesting that Cuirtis is overly referential. Indeed, it is very much its own animal. But whenever I bump into a smell that jolts me back in time to 2014 when I was happily discovering the perfume greats on my own, I scramble to triangulate the references in my perfume mind palace so that I can settle on the source of the big feelings I am feeling. Though ultimately I can’t identify what single element is triggering me in Cuirtis, I rather love for its own good self. It is incredibly aromatic, herbal tincture-like, but also sweet, smoky, and dry, all at once.
Royal Barn is clearly named as a sop to Russian Adam’s die-hard animalics fans who egg him on to dirtier and dirtier things with each collection. I suspect they would prefer for him not only to edge up to the great, steaming piles of horse shit in this putative barn but to plunge his hands in and start smearing it all over the stalls. But the name’s a con. This is the animalic floral oriental-chypre of the collection, and as such, is only dirty in the way Bal a Versailles (Jean Desprez) is dirty, meaning that underpinning the morass of rich, creamy florals, fungal oud, greenish rose, and spiky woods is a lascivious schmear of honeyed civet, there to add that unmistakably ‘French’ je ne sais quoi of soiled panties.
At first, everything is as dense as a brick of floral absolutes and waxes mashed together, and it feels rather wet and slurry-like in texture. Then two things happen simultaneously. First, the perfume dries up, with a leathery tone that reminds me of castoreum, but may just be the hay absolute sucking all the moisture out of the barn. Second, the fruitiness of the champaca-rose tandem and the crisp, green-white juiciness of palmarosa somehow make a break for it, peeking out from behind the barn wall. The contrast between the leathery, dry (austere) civet and hay layer and the fruity, creamy, almost girlish pop of peach and egg yolk yellow florals is amazing.
Now, real talk – does this really smell like a barn? Well, civet – the real stuff, as used here – can be terribly sharp, honey-ish in its high-toned shriek, and foul even when its floral nuances are detected. However, when used judiciously in a perfume, it just adds this hot, whorish glow to the florals that magnifies their impact. Royal Barn is much drier, muskier, and ten times more pungent than Civet de Nuit but they share a similarly fuzzy, under-panted warmth. If this is a barn, then it’s a clean one, ripe with animal but not fetid with neglect.
Regular perfume-wearing folk will want to know where it falls on the skank-o-meter. It is less animalic than La Nuit (Paco Rabanne) and Salome (Papillon), but more animalic than Bal a Versailles (Jean Deprez) and vintage Gold Man (Amouage). I would put this on par with Kouros (Yves Saint Laurent), but this is far more floral, so imagine Ubar (Amouage) with a drop of Kouros mixed in.
Paradise Soil reminds me very much of a certain era in perfume making – not so long ago – when everyone was flipping out about these huge, dirty florid fragrances that were slightly crazy in their construction, smashing together untrammeled Big White (or Yellow) Florals with thick musks and enough nag champa and patchouli to stop a hippie in their tracks. I’m talking stuff like Manoumalia (Le Nez), Daphne (Comme des Garcons), Tubéreuse III (Animale) by Histoires de Parfum, Le Maroc Pour Elle (Tauer), Mauboussin, etc. If you love that style of fragrance, then you’ll love this too. Paradise Soil smells like if tuberose was a dog and that dog rolled around in muck and is begging with his eyes to get back in the house but you just cannot be mad at him.
Huge armfuls of damp jasmine, ylang, and tuberose are mashed into the humid black earth of a tropical jungle onto which all the petals drop, decaying over time to make a rich mass of soil organic content, except that half the soil is made up of pulverized Pan di Stelle cookies. So, florals and chocolate, yes, but not truffled, and despite the saffron, not vegetal. More dry chocolate biscuit in the Montale Chocolate Greedy manner than the melted dark chocolate of Noir de Noir.
My only complaint about Paradise Soil is that the florals – especially the tuberose, which I feel is the pushiest flower in this particular bouquet – become too sharp and insistent in their sweetness, the sort that is so intense that it almost tastes bitter on the back of your tongue. There is a distinct bubblegum tone as well, which when added into all the muddy sweetness going on here tips it into what I call Nights in White Satin territory. Skirting uncomfortably close to the overall sledgehammer effect of Giorgio and Amarige, I can’t really love it past this point. It feels like wearing fur and two inches of panstick foundation on a hot day.
And unfortunately, the underlying oud notes are not strong or woody enough to claw this back into neutral for me. Paradise Soil is somewhat in the vein of Ambre de Coco or the other chocolate-oud explorations of the house (Russian Oud possibly being the most famous), but this is a far sharper, more white floral-forward version. Still – I think fans of the big, satiny floral-incense extravaganzas of the late 1990s would absolutely love this.
Forbidden Flower is not a flower and ‘forbidden’ is all wrong too because that is a word that promises something naughty but nice. This is not nice. Vibe: Industrial waste but make it grape-flavored.
I have worn Forbidden Flower on the skin exactly one time and that was still once too many. I am smelling it now again from a paper strip in the hope that I can figure out – in a more rational manner – what exactly it is about this thing that makes it so traumatizing. I mean, technically, I know it must be the skunk. But why. Why, Adam.
This is a deeply disturbing scent. In the opening notes, the aroma of fruity green leaves and milkweed mixes with the inorganic fumes of acetone, mouthwash, mercury, and what I can only describe as the liquid from a leaky battery. The fumes are so potent that I feel light-headed and more than a bit high. It smells both like the school supplies closet (solvents, paper, magic markers) and a long-abandoned farmstead with metal farm machinery rusting away between the weeds and ditches that a family of wild cats or indeed skunks have marked repeatedly as their personal pissing patch.
This mix of organic and inorganic stinks is deeply original but unpleasant, in a similar vein to M/Mink by Byredo (which Forbidden Flower does not resemble at all except in its metallic weirdness). It eventually dries down to a rubbery, latexy accord technically assembled by a doughy benzoin, patchouli, and cedar but the blackest myrrh in all but name. This sort of thing – vaguely similar to Narcotico (Meo Fusciuni), But Not Today (Filippo Sorcinelli) and Vierges et Toreros (Etat Libre d’Orange) in that they are all dark, bloody-metallic takes on the cedar/patchouli leather theme – is just stomach turning to me, even if at an intellectual level I admit that it is original and high concept.
I started this collection review by saying how sorry I was that normal frag heads never get to sample these perfumes, but in the case of Forbidden Flower, I think it is for the best.
Source of samples: Samples sent to me free of charge for review by Russian Adam.
Cover Image: Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash
Five O’ Clock Au Gingembre, I love ya, even if you are a B side in the Lutensian catalogue. Christopher Sheldrake and Serge Lutens were probably going for zest rather than realism when they placed that piercing bergamot note over the candied ginger, but for a moment, it smells like freshly peeled ginger root. Intentional or not, this gives the scent a fresh, sporty masculine start quite at odds with the biscuit-like powderiness of the drydown. Get past the initial whomp of aftershave, though, and this is as soft and inviting as one of those squishy modular couches.
Five O’ Clock Au Gingembre is remarkably free of the dried fruit ambers and incense Serge Lutens perfumes are known for. You half go into it expecting fruitcake, but it is nothing more than a fug of powdered spice lingering in the air after pulling a fresh batch of Speculoos biscuits from the oven. It is slightly edible but not really what I’d call a gourmand, being more wood and dust and spice than dessert. I don’t miss the lack of Lutensian sturm-und-drang here, either. Sometimes, life calls for a scent that avoids pushing any of your buttons, and this is as reassuringly, blandly nice as baby rusks or Jennifer Garner.
The tea note is, as always, a figment of our collective imagination, placed there by the interaction between the acerbic citrus, the mild heat of the ginger, and the milk powder heart. Five O’ Clock Au Gingembre is often compared to Tea for Two, but interestingly, it is the L’Artisan Parfumeur that is bigger, bolder, and more pungently spiced. Sometimes I wonder if Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake simply turned up at the lab that day, said ‘Christ, I don’t feel like anything too weird or heavy right now, do you?’ and then churned out a gingerbread tea scent that is delightfully non-descript and yet just happens to cure all manner of evil.
Source of Sample: I bought my bottle five years ago from Les Galleries Lafayette in Orleans.
Cover Image: Photo by Dominik Martin on Unsplash
I always thought of Onda by Vero Profumo as a difficult perfume, but now, at a distance of a decade, I understand that I was just not grown enough for it. Though I first smelled – and liked – the parfum in Campo Marzio 70 in Rome, my mistake was ordering a sample of the eau de parfum, not knowing that the formulations were very different. The putrid-smelling passion fruit note, the pissiness, and the fungal brown wetness of it all repulsed me. I couldn’t imagine anyone wearing let alone loving it.
When I referenced its urinous aspects, laterally, in a review of Maai (Bogue Profumo) for a now-defunct blog, Vero herself took offense and, as the kids say, put me on blast publicly for having a scat fetish. (Yes, I had to look that up too. No, I don’t recommend doing a Google image search.)
Wearing the Voile de Parfum, an extenuation of the original parfum, now, I still think that the dark, mealy honey-vetiver dankness of Onda gives a little freshly cleaned bathroom stall, but in an unctuous way that also makes me think of brown velvet and the dull, chocolate-y glow of Tiffany lamps. There is no repulsion. It turns out that it was me all along that was the problem, not Onda. And when I was ready to grow the F up, Onda was there, waiting for me.
Still, Onda is by no means for the uninitiated. Salty, wet, and a bit furry, it is a perfume that smells of feral cats in a den hidden in the undergrowth, albeit a world removed from the agrestic ‘smells’ turned out by indie perfumers to simulate an environment or an animal that lives there. Onda is a wild-reared, 100% grass-fed, organic experience that just happens to be chypre-shaped. There is no sense of it having been born, just of it arriving in the world fully formed – a creature with native intelligence.
There are no perfumes that smell like Onda, but the medicinal (and medieval) dustiness of the mace note remind me of other ‘brown-grey’, shadowy, and sepulchral things like Djedi (Guerlain) and Marescialla (Santa Maria Novella). The ‘artisanal’ apothecary vibe reminds me a lot of both Maai and MEM (Bogue Profumo), as well as the turgid funk of several O’Driu perfumes, including Ladamo. Still, even in this company, Onda stands out as being impenetrable and a little disturbing.
But then, the greatest perfumes in the world all have something impenetrable or disturbing about them, don’t they? Mitsouko is a prickly creature, sometimes smelling of peaches and wood, sometimes of formaldehyde. The clove and honey notes in Comme des Garcons Parfum are sharp and unlovely at first, reminiscent of a sweaty crotch. L’Air de Rien carries with it the distinct whiff of unwashed scalp. Yet these are perfumes worth spending time with and trying to unlock, because behind that door lies greatness. Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to only smell amazing. For most people, perfume is an extension of their grooming ritual. You can enjoy beauty without worrying about whether or not it has a dark side. But if you believe that perfume is art, then it stands to reason that your perfume should transmit a message that goes above and beyond a good ‘smell’. And love it or hate it, Onda is a great example of perfume as art.
Source of sample: I have owned the parfum and the Voile de Parfum of Onda since 2015.
Cover image: Photo by Bram Azink on Unsplash
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