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Iris Review

Prada Infusion d’Iris & Absolue

7th March 2016

Prada Infusion d’Iris

Robert James Smith
miuenski via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

I have a bottle of Infusion d’Iris and although I’m not 100% in love with it, I can’t quite bring myself to sell it because it plays a very useful part in my fragrance wardrobe.

Specifically, I use it after a cold shower on a hot day, when its chilly, citrusy scent provides a most welcome cooling sensation on my skin.

Then again, since moving from Montenegro to Ireland, I’m not entirely sure I will ever be hot ever again. Or indeed, warm.

Infusion d’Iris opens with tart citrus and thin, almost austere woods, reminding me more of a cup of chilled green tea than a true iris fragrance. Then the iris shows up midway through, a pale grey root infusion, like the water in which iris roots have been soaking. It smells clean and slightly soapy, like the scented air in the bathroom after a good soak in the bath with Epsom salts.

Later on, there is a hint of leather – a thin, discreet leather note – and a vetiver that shows off its cool, minty side. Gossamer-fine in texture, there is a pleasing bitterness to it that reminds me of similarly chilly and crisp colognes, like Cologne Blanche by Dior, which I also like very much. Both display a cooling, “white” character, like a metallic white wine quaffed straight from the fridge and so cold it makes your teeth chatter.

Infusion d’Iris is just effortlessly classy, and it will never be out of my summer wardrobe. Function over form on this one, for me.

 

Prada Infusion d’Iris Absolue

And her kind eyes shall lead me to the end.
Nick Kenrick. via Foter.com / CC BY

Where the original is watery, cool, and crisp/bitter, the Absolue is rich, sweet, and warm. The iris is much more evident to my nose in the Absolue version than in the original – it is rooty, thick, and almost bready.

If you can imagine a braided Easter bread stuffed with butter, eggs, and sugar, fresh out of the oven and cut open, then the iris here has a similar sweet doughiness.

I can think of only two other iris-centric fragrances where the iris gives off a sweet, yeasty/bready aroma, one being the current Mitsouko EDP and the other being Chanel No. 18. It is an enchanting, addictive aroma, and one that draws me further into the fragrance.

There is nothing fresh, green, or watery about the Absolue version. The sweet oriental base – vanillic-ambery resins (benzoin, oppoponax), a nicely “aged” vanilla, and some tonka bean – wafts up at you throughout the life of the scent, turning the iris note into a silky, buttery thing of sheer luxury. If the original is a wisp of chiffon, then the Absolue is a warm cashmere wrap. Yes, I did it – I just invoked The Great Big Cliche of perfume writing. But it applies here, so I’m going to be lazy and just leave it there.

This is my new “professional” scent for those days when I know I have meetings with clients. I like to try and strike a compromise on my fragrance choice while meeting a client – it has to be demure and classy enough not to distract the client, but also beautiful enough to keep me happy and relaxed. This does the job very well, and so it joins my usual line-up of 31 Rue Cambon by Chanel and Cuir Pleine Fleur by James Heeley.

Neither the original Infusion nor the Absolue last very long on me, but since I favor rich, oriental perfumes over fresh, citrusy ones (as a rule), I much prefer the Absolue. The quality of that iris is just outstanding, as is that warm, sweet resin base. I would wear the Absolue on cooler days and the original Infusion d’Iris on hot, summer days, or after hot showers.

4 Comments
Chypre Oriental Review Rose Sandalwood Smoke Spicy Floral Vanilla Woods

Caron Nuit de Noel

3rd March 2016

Modern niche perfumery makes it easy for us. It must be like playing charades with the world’s slowest child. They supply us with all the visual and background cues and then sit back and do a slow clap when we get it. Ambre Russe? Mention vodka in the press materials and in one sniff we are mentally whisked away to boozy Cossacks, samovars, fur, and gold-gilded palaces. De Profundis? Give an essentially cheery floral perfume a gloomy name and a depressive back-story, and suddenly everyone makes the connection to death and funerals.

If we weren’t supplied so readily with these cues, would we make those connections? Probably not. But let’s admit that the back-story is half the fun of it. We are only human after all – we want everything we do to have meaning. Even if it’s only our perfume.

Smell Caron Nuit de Noel in vintage parfum form, though, and everything you know about narrative is upended. It is a Wagnerian opera-sized perfume and we not handed so much as a leaflet. Oh yes, I forgot, they did give us that name – Nuit de Noel. But it doesn’t smell like Christmas, so that doesn’t help.

But this – this – this is what perfume smelled like once upon a time. A dense, powdered thing of mystery that doesn’t really give a shit if you manage to unlock its layers or not. It’s so analog in a digital world that it makes me laugh.

Nuit de Noel doesn’t really have traditional topnotes. In fact, it’s a fragrance best worn for its basenotes, and is therefore the complete opposite to how perfumes are made these days – stuffed with amazing topnotes that last just long enough to get you over to the till to pay your money and petering out into one big fat nothing three hours later. Nuit de Noel, on the other hand, plunges you right into the second cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen and just trusts that you know enough German to get by. In a way, I appreciate that approach – by giving me very few cues, it expects me to have enough intelligence to figure it out on my own.

I’m still not sure I’ve figured Nuit de Noel out, though. I ain’t that smart. But I like the challenge. The top notes are intense, like a wall of sound coming straight at you. Dense and unwieldy, it smells like bitter powder and polished old woods with a streak of green moss running through it. There is also a huge dose of the typically Caron carnation/clove accord, which I find bitter-leathery and spicy in equal measure. The overall impression I get is of being wrapped in an old fur coat – it’s both old-fashioned and luxurious.

I don’t get any of the Christmas associations, but there is a stage of its development where I sense both the mealy, fluffy meat of roasted chestnuts and a sweet, liquor-like rose. Perhaps it’s that hint of rich fruited breads and baked goods that lead some to make the connection to Christmas. The green, mossy chypre notes also create a crisp, cold-air feeling, placing this perfume in the context of snow. Aside from the notes, there is a certain glow to this perfume – a radiant warmth like candlelight.

As time goes on, a licorice-like note creeps in, cloaking the fragrance in a velvety, sweet darkness. Think soft black licorice, not the challenging Danish stuff that tastes like salt. This note is a feature of the famous Mousse de Saxe, said to contain a heavy mixture of anise (or fennel seed), vanillin, geranium, and isobutyl quinoline (smoky, tough leather notes).

The Mousse de Saxe makes up a huge proportion of Nuit de Noel, and lends it its decisively dark green, mossy, smoky, and sweet flavor profile. A pre-packaged base, Mousse de Saxe is no longer made by Caron to the original recipe, although to their credit, they try to recreate it in order to keep their current parfums rich and full-bodied. But to my nose, there is a rich, dark, and melting softness to vintage Nuit de Noel (reminiscent of marrons glaces, as some have pointed out) that is just not there in the modern Carons.

The leather, powder, and geranium facets of the base connect Nuit de Noel to other hard-to-categorize fragrances like Habanita and Vol de Nuit. Part chypre, part oriental, all three of these fragrances are soft, boneless straddlers of several categories at once and contain a mystery of their very own that is difficult to unpack, to analyze. Mysterious and cool-toned, they leave behind a lingering impression of green moss, face powder, leather, and half-smoked cigarettes. The most slatternly women you could imagine, and the ones I most want to know.

Smelling Nuit de Noel parfum now a melancholic experience, though. Vol de Nuit and Habanita are still in good shape. But with oakmoss being severely restricted these days, the Caron bases can never smell as complex as they once did, and so when I smell my sample of vintage Nuit de Noel parfum, I realize that I’m essentially smelling the air from a time capsule.

 

 

2 Comments
Floral Oriental Hay Incense Review Violet

Amouage Opus III

1st March 2016

One day, I was coming out of the Book Centre and he was coming out – both of us with our respective friends, and both of us in our Catholic school uniforms. As we passed each other, our eyes met, and I swear to God, we both turned full circle to take a good long look at each other.

I had never before done anything so brazen in my life. We both walked backwards to keep staring at each other as our respective groups pulled apart, and if a movie crew had been there to catch the moment, it would have gone down in history as the most romantic moment in my shabby little life. I was 16. Back at our respective schools after lunch – boys and girls attend separate schools in Ireland – we both busied ourselves with the business of asking around. Who is this person? What do we know of their people? Their pedigree?

The intelligence on him came quickly back – nobody to bother about. I had a certain amount of capital to expend, being reasonably attractive, popular, and brainy, whereas he was an unknown quantity, and certainly not popular.

Didn’t matter – I had to have him. It also didn’t matter that it ended badly, two years down the line. I will never forget the romance of that moment. The first and only time I’ve ever fallen in love on the spot.

Amouage Opus III gives me a similar feeling. I don’t know how it happened, but there’s been a coup de foudre. Our eyes met and I did a full twirl on my heels. So I now send out feelers into the community – is this a worthy one? The early reports are not encouraging. Nice, they say, but save your money. You can do better.

If I were to distill a whole Internet’s worth of reviews of Opus III into two phrases, it would be “overly complex” and “nothing special or notice worthy.” I don’t argue those points – in many ways, Opus III is both overly complex and not at all groundbreaking or original. But – and it’s a big but – it has a lilting, slow-moving beauty to it that spins my heart off like a leaf on an eddy. It’s like being at a crazy party and discovering at the last minute that it’s really the big, silent farmer in the corner that you want to go home with. Opus III has a solid heft that makes me want to curl up inside it.

Reducing it to a category, I’d say that Opus III is a massive violet floriental. But as others have pointed out, the combination of notes is so complex that it’s hard to pick out individual notes. The best I can do is point to the various phases that the fragrance moves through, managed through a series of small, barely perceptible shifts and transitions.

Violet is the moving force here and is present in each permutation. First, we have the violet-hay-earth opening, where the bitter, dirt-covered hay of broom is balanced out by a wet, candied violet accord that comes off like Apres L’Ondee on steroids.

Welling up behind this dewy, bittersweet opening is a bank of mimosa flowers with their fluffy yellow, bitter almond scent. When the mimosa meets the violet, the fragrance shifts from wet hay-violets to a dusty pollen note that makes one think of the yellow dust that covers your fingers when you crumple a buttercup or some other cheerful yellow wildflower.

There is also a dusty heliotrope note here that makes me think of Farnesiana or L’Heure Bleue, but this lacks almost completely the fruity and pastry-like tones of those fragrances. There is a similar weight here, though, like a piece of blue velvet folded over many times.

A tiny accord is hidden here and I catch glimpses of it only sometimes – a dove-grey iris note that colludes with the violets to produce a faint (very faint!) cosmetic undertone. Not exactly lipstick, not exactly powder, but something a little bit frilly.

Under the earth-hay violets and the meadow-pollen violets and the iris-violets, there is another violet combination brewing, and it turns out to be the definitive one – violets and ylang. Ylang introduces a fruity, plasticky edge with a banana-like note to the mix, and when it merges with the violet note, its creamy banana custard voluptuousness becomes corrupted with a strange boot polish note. Could be tar, could be nail polish remover like some reviews mention – I don’t know. But it is a little strange, and more than a little addicting. It’s what draws me back to my sample time and time again, like a druggie.

The spicy orange blossom and jasmine are secondary players here, but they too form their own little pairing with the violets, and add a slight indolic languor to the violets’ dewy, childlike presentation.

Opus III winds up in familiar Amouage territory – a daub of frankincense, dry woods, amber – and while the base is not wildly new or exciting, what it does do is provide a dry, un-sweet landing for the rich floral combinations swirling around the violets. The base is what makes Opus III perfectly unisex, and takes it further away from the two fragrances to which Opus III is most commonly compared, namely L’Heure Bleue and Insolence EDP, which are far more obviously feminine.

Having mentioned the Guerlains, I must mention that I find Opus III to be far more satisfying than either of those fragrances, and more beautiful. I love the rich, earthy hay of the broom, the yellow pollen feel from the mimosa, and the unctuous creamy ylang. It combines – to my nose – the best of L’Heure Bleue, Samsara, and Insolence, and cuts away the fat and the excess fruitiness of those scents.

Opus III smells wholly natural and of this earth – and although it lasts a long time, is longevity is due to a certain richness and heft of fragrance oils rather than muscular woody synthetics. It wears on the skin like a rich, comfortable old velvet cloak.

I rather love it – can you tell? This fragrance moves me. But like any coup de foudre, I’m suspicious of the strength of my feelings. Practically everyone notes that Opus III is not an unusual or extraordinary fragrance in any way. Does that mean that my tastes are pedestrian? Am I a bit of a pleb? Well, probably, and more than just a bit. I can’t quite bring myself to care, though. I want to wear this, and so by God I will.

Hey Opus III! Yeah, you, the hefty farmer with the big red face in the corner! Get your coat – you’ve pulled! Let’s hope this doesn’t end too badly. My judgment in these matters is famously terrible.

5 Comments
Floral Oriental Review The Discard Pile

Maison Francis Kurkdijan Baccarat Rouge 540

21st February 2016

Oh dear. This is rather unfortunate.

I have huge respect for Francis Kurkdijan as a man and as a perfumer. I own quite a few of his perfumes (Absolue pour le Soir, Eau Noire, Cologne Pour Le Soir), and greedily covet others that I don’t (his original Oud, Oud Cashmere Mood, Lumiere Noire Pour Homme, Enlevement au Serail). I’m hard pressed to think of a composition of his that I can’t at least appreciate, even if I don’t want to own it myself.

Baccarat Rouge 540 is an exception. Unfortunately, it manages to be the perfect storm of all the notes I hate, all of them converging at once to screw with my head. And it sticks to my skin like glue (ain’t that the way it goes).

The top notes are pleasant, barely – a brief succulence in the form of oranges, saffron, and marigold that combines in such a way as to suggest a ripe red berry. For a moment, I am also reminded of the radiant freshness of his original Oud, a metallic brightness of spilled orange juice and yellow saffron powder. The jasmine here smells fresh, like a green-scent breeze moving through a line of cottons hung out to dry, and is reminiscent in its crispness of both Eau Sauvage and  Kurkdijan’s own Aqua Vitae – safe to say that rather than jasmine sambac or grandiflorum, this note is probably Hedione, a wonderful aromachemical that expands the lungs with a radiant, green jasmine sensation.

Unfortunately, the fruity floral top notes get swallowed up almost immediately by the powerful basenotes – and when I say powerful, I mean overwhelming. There is a potent cedar here that reads as wet, pungent, almost musky with that sour edge I dislike in the note, and when it buts up against the sweet, juicy top notes, the result is like throwing a thick pear juice onto a bed of ashes. This unsettling accord (fruit juice thrown into dirty ashes) is also what I experience from Soleil de Jeddeh by Stephane Humbert Lucas 777, another fragrance I’m struggling to get my head around.

The musky, sour cedar is quickly joined by one of the most obnoxious notes in all perfumery (for me personally), fir balsam. This note might make others think of Christmas, but to me, it always makes me think of sweat. Each of the five times I tried Baccarat Rouge 540, it dried down to this thin but obnoxious smell of dried runner’s sweat – I know it’s the fir balsam because I’ve experienced this once before, with Annick Goutal’s otherwise very lovely Encens Flamboyant. Pure sweat. It’s a hard association to shake.

The saltiness from the Ambroxan or ambergris note (whatever it is) doesn’t help much either. Its salty mineral smell brings a pleasant outsdoorsiness, yes, but it also brings forward that sensation of feeling your skin crackle with dried sea salt, sweat, and sun tightness after falling asleep on the beach after a swim. Pleasant in perfumes such as Eau des Merveilles, but joined with the wet, musky cedar and the sweaty fir balsam of Baccarat Rouge 540, it’s simply one drop of sweat too much. Some will find this salt-sweat note very sensual, sexy even – but it just makes me want to go take a shower.

3 Comments
Myrrh Oriental Review The Discard Pile

Mona di Orio Myrrh Casati

19th February 2016

Mona di Orio Myrrh Casati is somewhat of a disappointment. Mona’s style was always rich, thick, dirty, lush, and as dense as a brick wall – it’s what her fans loved about her. I don’t see her style in this perfume. Myrrh Casati is the first Mona di Orio fragrance to be composed by someone other than Mona herself, following her tragic death in 2011. And you can tell.

Myrrh Casati, while very nice and wearable, does not have any of the special Mona di Orio signatures that could be traced from one perfume to another like a vein on a lover’s arm. It lacks the almost overbearingly rich, dirty, creamy woodiness of Vanille and Oud, the dry-ice, almond-like musks from Ambre, Violette Fumee, and Musc, and the harsh animalism of Nuit Noire and Cuir. Without these little olfactory clues that she tucked so deftly into the sleeves of her work, I am lost. Myrrh Casati could be the work of anyone.

If her other perfumes are rich tapestries, then Myrrh Casati is a silk gauze. It is beautiful but simple to the point of being spare. The opening is particularly striking. A dark, dry spice note fuses with a warm, cinnamon-tinted Siam benzoin and sharp black pepper to form a gorgeous aroma of tarry coca-cola. There is also an arresting black rubber feel to the opening, arising from the use of saffron, or perhaps plain old saffraleine, and it is a smooth complement to the licorice.

But any opening richness or darkness quickly attenuates. Within minutes, I am left with a rather bare bones resin scent with a faint but noticeable minty smoke note from either the myrrh or the licorice. I’m a myrrh lover and a big Mona di Orio fan, but this one leaves me wanting more.

1 Comments
Aromatic Fougere Lavender Review Tonka

Guerlain Jicky

15th February 2016

Oh, Jicky! I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to come around to your charms, but here I am. As androgynous and timeless as a pair of blue jeans, Guerlain Jicky was born in 1889 which makes it the oldest perfume in the world that’s still in production today. At its heart, it’s an aromatic fougere – that classic (and masculine) marriage of lavender, tonka, and oakmoss. But Jicky doesn’t contain oakmoss, so it’s a two-legged fougere, and all the more charming for it.

What Jicky does have, instead, is a big dollop of civet, which gives it its very naughty character. There is shock value to Jicky, even today. That clash of the citrus/aromatics (the bergamot and lavender) with the creamy civet-tonka feels all kinds of wrong at first, to the point you wonder what the hell the perfumer was thinking. But Guerlain built its reputation on such sly dissonance, the clashing of fronts in a perfume to cause tension. As with Shalimar, there’s a typical cycle of repulsion, then attraction, repulsion again, and then finally, a sort of an incredulous addiction to the stuff. Jicky is habit-forming.

I’ve always had a bit of Jicky around, in various forms – the EDT, the PDT, and samples of the parfum in particular. But Jicky famously differs from concentration to concentration – even more so than the other Guerlain classics – so it’s taken me until now to find the exact formula of Jicky to make me fall in love. While researching fougeres for my Basenotes article on the top ten male designer fragrances that every beginner should sample, I got a hold of a sample of the current EDP, and bam! That was my Eureka moment with Jicky.

In a way, Jicky benefited from my neglect over the years. I tend to overthink the Guerlain classics, worrying about their details and nuances based on concentration, age, and back story, which results in me thinking of them rather more as homework than perfume to wear and enjoy every day. All my early energy went into studying Chamade, Shalimar, Mitsouko, Nahema, and L’Heure Bleue – and I strained so hard to understand those weighty volumes that any emotional connection I made to the perfume was difficult; arrived at under duress. Still to this day, I cannot wear any of those perfumes (except Shalimar) without a heavy sense of respect and almost dread. I know the experience is going to be rewarding, but they are almost never immediately satisfying.

Jicky, on the other hand, I never bothered to subject to this rigorous type of inspection. I don’t know why, but perhaps it’s because I had read, early on in my journey, that Jicky was just a simple sketch of a perfume waiting to be made into Shalimar. So I just didn’t bother with it.

But not bothering with it doesn’t mean I didn’t wear it! I wore Jicky, oh yes, I did. I worked my way through sizeable decants of the EDT (sparkling, herbaceous, full of sprightly mischief, but with the civet bluntly exposed, creating a sharply vomitous aroma that I never truly warmed to), the vintage PDT (less civet, funnily enough, and a more classical lavender fougere feel to it which made it perfect for casual beach wear), and a few samples of the modern pure parfum (round, sensual, civet-heavy, truly more oriental in feel than fougere). I enjoyed my small bits of Jicky without ever once feeling to need to own a full bottle of it.

That is, until I discovered Jicky EDP. Jicky in EDP format is the perfect version for me, and I realized very quickly that I would need a whole bottle of it. There is far more civet in the EDP than in the EDT, but it is far better folded into the creamy vanilla and herbs, so it smells both richer and more animalic. The pure parfum dials up the civet a notch further, but I am more comfortable with the civet levels in the EDP: enough to call itself a real presence but not so heavy as to hunt me around the room.

The lively, sparkling fougere feel of the EDT is preserved in the EDP (not lost, like in the pure parfum) but is much punchier and emphatic. The tonka in the base is far creamier and heavier than in the EDT, although the pure parfum is the creamiest of the lot, with a smooth, thick oriental base that is surprisingly close to vintage Shalimar extrait. I call it for the EDP, though, based on value and on the matter of balance between the fougere and animalic elements.

So there it is. Since I’ve gotten my bottle of Jicky, I’ve been wearing it almost every day. It is humble and naturally good-looking, like a well-cut pair of blue jeans. I find it as satisfying as Shalimar but far more versatile and androgynous. It’s funny, but the Guerlains I’ve ignored the most, like Jicky and Apres L’Ondee, are the ones I ultimately find the most rewarding to wear when I have nothing to prove to anyone but myself.

5 Comments
Amber Iris Leather Review

Annick Goutal Ambre Fetiche

13th February 2016

I like Annick Goutal Ambre Fetiche, but I have to admit that the opening smells more like a byproduct of the petroleum industry than a perfume. Something plasticky and greasy in the top notes suggests Vaseline to me, or perhaps pleather. I don’t find this unpleasant, merely a little unsettling, especially when mixed with the sickly, biscuity undertone of the amber underneath.

The mental image: a prostitute at the Bunny Ranch, Nevada, at 2:30 in the afternoon, a big dollop of lubricant making a snail’s trail down the inside of her left thigh while a man in Stetsons huffs and puffs on top of her. The man’s breath smells like biscuit crumbs – he hasn’t washed his teeth. Bored, she turns her head to admire her new white pleather knee-highs, up around her ears now and close enough for inspection. Squeak-squeak goes the pleather with every thrust.

Biscuits, syrup, Vaseline, pleather. Stale cigarette smoke mingling with the powerfully sweet Victoria’s Secret Amber Romance body lotion she applied that morning.

The texture of the perfume is both dry-harsh and syrupy-sweet, resulting in an interesting pulling apart motion in the fabric, like honey rubbed against the grain of a plank of wood. The syrupy white amber is thickly poured, but clashes against the parched powder of benzoin. The resin sticks in my craw and the syrup cloys. It’s too intense, this feeling. The only other perfume that mimics this effect is Byredo’s 1996.

The discordant harmony of the birch tar, the amber, and the iris produces something of a similar push-pull feeling within me: I like it, and then I like it not. Each time I wear this fragrance, it’s like plucking out petals and never knowing whether you’re going to end up. Sometimes, I find the thought of the ride quite exciting. Sometimes, the thought of it exhausts me. Either way, like the Bunny Girl’s client, it always lasts way longer than I want it to.

0 Comments
Independent Perfumery Review

The Entire Sammarco Line-Up

16th November 2015

I’ve already reviewed Sammarco’s wonderful Bond-T here, but I realized that I’d neglected to test the other perfumes in the line. After a whirlwind sampling session or five, I have to say that the entire Sammarco line is a winner in my book – they are direct, unpretentious perfumes with little to no marketing BS behind them, a clear emphasis on quality raw materials, and an evident skill in bringing those raw materials together. Here are my thoughts on the others in the Sammarco line-up.

Sammarco Vitrum

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In my testing round of Sammarco samples, I had put Vitrum off until last, because I despise vetiver as a note and most vetiver soliflores (soliroots? Solidirax?) end up smelling like runner’s sweat to me. But I eat my vetiver-hating hat. It shows off the great skill of Giovanni Sammarco, I believe, that he is able to present all of the nice aspects of vetiver (the smoke, the woodiness, the greenness) without slipping in any of the nasty aspects (most notably that dank, sour “folded-away-when-wet-gym-clothes” funk).

This is pure woodsmoke to me – a sort of lank green-black tendril of smoke from an open fire, simultaneously airy and solid. Dry as a bone, this would work brilliantly for anyone who hates the saltmarshy, sweaty, rooty side of vetiver (like me), for anyone who loves the sooty smoke notes in Comme des Garcons Black and Amouage Memoir Man. To my surprise and delight, two big thumbs up for this utterly wearable vetiver.

Sammarco Alter

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Although I really rate Bond-T and Vitrum, Alter is possibly my favorite from the Sammarco line-up. It presents an incredibly indolic, almost raw-feeling jasmine, and underlines its inherent funk with a sizeable amount of civet. But here’s the thing – none of this comes off as imbalanced or shrill. The potentially screechy combination of jasmine and civet is smoothed out by a rich, earthy myrrh, noted by perfumers for its use in compositions to lend a rich, deep smoothness, much like the use of butter in a cake. The smell of the myrrh is noticeable to my nose, with that earthy bitterness and fungal density you get in myrrh oil, and it acts as an effective grounding foil to the fluffy, almond-blossom-scented mimosa present in the topnotes.

The topnotes also have an almost gasoline or rubber twang to them, pointing to the massive amount of raw jasmine sambac used. For much of the time wearing Alter, I was convinced that the jasmine was actually tuberose, so prominent was the buttery rubber note. The civet in the base creates a oddly leather-like feel, and lends the composition a lived-in, masculine feel. This is one white floral that guys could wear with total confidence. All of Sammarco perfume samples lasted a long time on my skin, and Alter was no exception – about 16 hours in and I could smell the leathery civet and the super-indolic jasmine.

Sammarco Ariel

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A serious blast of violets opens this perfume, but if you’re thinking powdery girly perfume, you’d be wrong – Ariel ties the violets into a weirdly oily spice note at the start (probably the ginger-mandarin combination), rendering the opening effect unsettling and anti-classical. It feels like a new way of treating violets to me, and about a hundred times more interesting than the tired lipstick trope seen in countless violet perfumes from Misia onwards. The spiced, oily floral effect extends into the heart, but Ariel eventually loses the violet and dovetails into a sweet, creamy sandalwood base that recalls Samsara but without the synthetic sonic boom that accompanies it. It ends up being a little too sweet for my taste, but I have to say I like this version of Samsara much better than the current version out there at the moment.

1 Comments
Amber Floral Oriental Review Smoke Vanilla

Tom Ford Noir Pour Femme

20th October 2015

Tom Ford Noir Pour Femme is a big-boned, 90’s style floral vanilla very much in the style of Givenchy’s Organza Indecence and the original, pre-reformulation Dior Addict. In fact, this smells so like those perfumes that the cynic in me is tempted to think that savvy Tom Ford was browsing eBay one day, happened to see what everyone was willing to pay for even partial bottles of the original Addict and Indecence, and a little light bulb went off in his head.

So, how did he do?

Well, let’s say that it’s neither the masterpiece nor the mediocre piece of crap that Tom Ford fans or detractors would have you believe. Actually, it’s a very competent piece of designer work that aims for a particular target and totally lands it.

For women yearning for the va-va-VOOM of 90’s vanilla powerhouses built with Jessica Rabbit-style curves, this will be your jam.

Noir Pour Femme opens with a bitter orange and stale milk chocolate accord, briefly recalling a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and then slides into a heavy, plasticky vanilla that owes all of its cues to the orchid flower and none to the vanilla bean. It’s sort of Black Orchid-lite at this point, minus the repellent tuber and cucumber notes. The vanilla is musky and floral, and it might fold over under the weight of its own voluptuousness but for the waft of bad-gal cigarette and the sour tang of fresh ginger root acting in consort to cut the cream.

The trajectory from opening notes to the base is rather short, but I’m not blaming Tom Ford for doing what every other designer is doing, which is to frontload all the rich notes and leave the heart and base to deflate like a balloon (the attenuation happening just after you’ve already handed over the credit card, of course). The base here is a typical ambery, woody oriental affair – nothing too exceptional but (to give credit where credit is due) nothing even vaguely synthetic-smelling in that Iso E Super or potent woody amber aromachemical way.

The whole shebang is a Greatest Hits tour of some of the high points from Tom Ford’s own stable of scents (the plummy ginger from Plum Japonais, the vanilla from Tobacco Vanille, the heavy, musky orchid from Black Orchid, and the bitter orange from Sahara Noir) as well as from the powerhouse vanillas from the 90’s (the orange vanilla from Organza Indecence, and the boozy, smoky floral vanilla from Addict).

There’s also a distinctly sleazy, morning-after-the-night-before quality to Noir Pour Femme. If you’ve ever yearned for the days when you stumble home from a nightclub at 6 in the morning, lipstick smeared and your lips stained with cheap wine, smelling like last night’s smoke and wearing some random man’s black leather jacket, the Noir Pour Femme is for you. Or even if you still do that. I’m not judging.

Noir Pour Femme is going to be a massive hit. There does seem to have been a cult-like yearning for a heavy, va-va-voom floral vanilla in the style of  Organza Indecence and Dior Addict – and Noir Pour Femme totally fills this gap. Tom Ford put his cool commercial goggles on and engineered something to fit a straight man’s list of desires – curves, vanilla, softness, sweetness, muskiness, and so on. Expect this to turn up on every list of fragrances made from now on that men find utterly irresistible and sexy on women.

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Animalic Chypre Musk Review

Papillon Salome

9th October 2015

Wearing Papillon Salome is like listening to Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice and wondering why the opening bars sound so familiar. You know you’ve heard it before, but even while your brain is scrambling to retrieve the reference, you’re enjoying the hell out of the song.

Half the pleasure comes from that feeling of “I know this tune…. don’t I?”

The thrill of the new is over-rated anyway. A friend of mine once said that the older he got, the more ok he was with buying multiple variations of a fragrance he loved. In other words, as long as it was a fantastic rendition of something he already loved, he didn’t mind if it was original or not.

I completely understand this sentiment. I am only a little bit ashamed of myself for owning six or seven other fragrances that are all declensions of Shalimar in some shape or form (Shaal Nur, Fate Woman, Ambre 114, Mona di Orio Vanille, Musc Ravageur, and Opus 1144 to name a few).

The realization that Vanilla Ice simply (shop) lifted entire sections from Queen’s Under Pressure doesn’t stop me from loving Ice Ice Baby. It is its own creature, even though it plays off a chord that is deeply familiar. Both songs make me smile – Under Pressure, because it bristles with a very camp, very British sense of humor, and Ice Ice Baby, because it’s hilarious.

Salome is a tour of the greatest hits of the fragrance skankiverse, sampling riffs from well-loved songs such as vintage Bal a Versailes, Musc Tonkin, Femme, and Theo Fennel Scent, and spinning them off into something that, while not new or wildly original, is an utter pleasure to wear. And it is such a beautiful and accomplished riff on those fragrances that one might be tempted to replace some or all of them with just Salome.

It is a ludicrously dense, packed fragrance. A super-saturated supernova of a scent with layers and layers of heavy musks, fur, flowers, spice, and sweat.

Let me try to unpack the layers.

Right away, I smell a layer of vintage Bal a Versailles floating on top – honeyed orange blossoms, tobacco-leather, and a refined urine note (possibly civet). Salome’s take on Bal a Versailles is – dare I say it – an improvement on the original, because it completely removes that odd, cheap note I like to call “Plasticized Air” that always pokes out at me from Bal a Versailles. The sleaziness I always pick up from orange blossom slots in perfectly here with the cumin.

And wow, Salome is also super-cuminy. This layer strongly recalls Rochas Femme – not the softer, muskier vintage version, but the modern version which fairly shrieks with cumin, put there to give Femme back the sex curves it lost when all manner of nitro musks were banned. The cumin gives Salome a crude sexuality, reminiscent of a musky, female crotch – not unwashed crotch, just, um,….. heated, shall we say. If you’re someone who thinks that Amouage’s Jubilation 25 (the woman’s version) or Al Oudh smell like the armpits of a New York cab driver, then avoid Salome at all costs.

Under all this, there are heavy, animalic musks providing a sort of subwoofer effect, amplifying and fluffing up the other notes. I can easily identify two of my favorite musks here.

First to reach my nose (and then fade away very quickly) is a rich, furry musk strongly reminiscent of Muscs Khoublai Khan. This is mostly the effect of a rich, warm castoreum soaked in rose oil, but the similarity is impressive. MKK and Salome share this unique effect of the musk almost taking up a physical presence in front of your nose – like the swelling scent of damp hair or a damp fur coat being dried off in front of an old-fashioned electric bar heater. I can’t quite explain it, but the musk here has a tactile quality quite like sticking your nose above an agora sweater and feeling the static pulling the fine angora hairs towards your nostrils.

Underneath the short-lived MKK-style musk is the almost painfully animalic musk from Musc Tonkin – one so utterly redolent of the fur and animal fat of a marine animal that it comes off as faintly briny. Thankfully, though, it never quite approaches that metallic edge that Musc Tonkin has (which fascinates me but also repels me in equal measure). But that salty, fatty animal aspect of Musc Tonkin’s musk is present in Salome to a large degree. It accounts for the scent’s overall savory profile (as opposed to sweet).

More than anything, though, Salome reminds me of the female-sweat-soaked, musky Scent by Theo Fennell. In fact, what unites Salome, Theo Fennell Scent, and to a lesser degree, Musc Tonkin (in my mind) is the mental image I have of a group of ladies visiting each other in a formal front room in the early 1900s. It is a picture of repressed Victoriana – a room almost suffocating under the weight of dying flowers in vases, a certain “closed in” feel of an over-heated room, and stiff, rustling garments that haven’t been washed or aired recently.

And just below the surface, a massive wall of scent roiling off damp, heated womanflesh too long cooped up in restrictive brassieres and corsets. Although the room is heavily perfumed with roses and jasmine, there is something unhealthy and morbid about the atmosphere.

It’s just the type of perverseness I find sexy.

Overall, Salome has a very vintage vibe to it. If one were to subtract the brash cumin and one of the saltier animal secretions, then it would take up a more recognizably French, classical form. Underneath all the animal howling and beating of the breast, Salome is a chypre and as such has a dark, abstract structure to it that stops the dirtier elements from being a total pork fest. In its last gasps, Salome takes on the 1970’s feel of La Nuit by Paco Rabanne with its dank honey and moss tones.

Salome might be a remix rather than an original, but it reminds me that, in terms of sheer enjoyment, remixes can sometimes surpass or replace the original. I absolutely love it.

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