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Aromatic Review Rose Spice Spicy Floral Woods

Smyrna by Le Couvent

8th September 2022

 

Although Le Couvent house perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena art-directed rather than authored Smyrna, he almost certainly slipped whoever did it an early draft of his own Rose Poivrée (The Different Company).  But while Rose Poivrée’s pepper, cumin, and coriander overload created a savory, metallic funk that came uncomfortably close to the scent of second-day men’s underwear, the formula for Smyrna has been stripped back to a simple premise of rose, woods, and a bit of black pepper.

 

Where Smyrna remains similar to Rose Poivrée (The Different Company) and even Rose 31 (Le Labo) is in that neat sleight of hand where, despite it ostensibly being a rose scent, the rose comes and goes, as unreliable as sunbeams on a cloudy day.  Sometimes it smells like a peppery rose, sometimes like gently spiced woods.  But never the twain shall meet.

 

Smyrna, for the most part, reminds me of the steamy, botanical smell of a warm greenhouse where you are dividing geranium plantlets – the vaporous aroma of sun-warmed wood frames, the peppery snap of the roots and stalks, the rosy-minty smell of the geraniums.  The black pepper gives the scent a kick but no funk.  It smells planty, not underpanty.

 

Simultaneously, though, it also smells like a body lotion or shampoo, one scented with Turkish rosewater or loukhoum.  Unlike in Rose 31 or Rose Poivrée, therefore, every time the spice threatens to flare up to the point of pungency, there is enough of this balm to sooth it all down again.  In fact, there is an almost Uncanny Valley lack of sharp corners here.  The scent is preternaturally smooth. 

 

I’m in two minds about Smyrna, to be honest.   On the one hand, fragrances like Rose Poivrée (the original version at least) are too vegetally-sharp or culinarily stinky for me to enjoy comfortably.  Smyrna resolves this by removing the more pungent spicing and adding an almost candied rosewater balminess.  It is therefore much brighter and easier to wear.  But ultimately, Smyrna remains a copy of something that, while not to my personal taste, was deeply original and artistic.  Wearing Smyrna kind of feels like wearing the original soaked in stain remover and put through the hot cycle – it suits me better, but it also feels like a bit of a cop out.

 

Source of sample: Provided by the brand for copyrighting purposes.

 

Cover image: Photo by Bence Balla-Schottner on Unsplash 

 

 

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Aromatic Chocolate Green Herbal Iris Leather Masculine Review Smoke Spice Spicy Floral Suede Vanilla Woods

Iris Malikhân by Maison Crivelli

22nd August 2022

 

 

Iris Malikhân is immediately two things.  It is a leather bundle charred in the grate, so smoky and bitter it short circuits to the word ‘chemical’ in my mind.   But equally, it is a thick iris-vanilla cream that fills the room with a haunting sweetness.

 

It took me ages to figure out that second is causally linked to the first.  Unwrap the scorched, blackened skin of the leather bundle, blowing on your fingers for relief, and you reveal the slightly singed, chalky orris roots that lie within, the violence of the char the catalyst to releasing those cocoa-thickened vanilla spores.

 

For six months, I have struggled mightily with the burnt part of Iris Malikhân.  I believed that it was just like any number of other sweetened iris-suede scents out there – Dior Homme Intense (Dior), Bois d’Iris (Van Cleef & Arpels), Vanille d’Iris (Ormonde Jayne) and so on – just not as good or at least more ‘on trend’ in its use of those intrusive liquid smoke aromachemicals that brands like Maison Martin Margiela, seem to be so fond of.  

 

Funnily enough, it was all those upvotes on Fragrantica for Iris Malikhân smelling like Dior Homme Intense that made me revisit the perfume and try to reframe it for myself.  Because that comparison definitely doesn’t tell the full story.  I’ve smelled Dior Homme knockoffs before (like D600 by Carner Barcelona) and there is more artistry and kink in this one’s little finger than in all of those.  The weird Pastis-like note of artemisia or mastic upfront makes this clear.

 

The moment I was able to mentally reclassify the harshness of the opening accord as part and parcel of a leather tanning process – which in and of itself involves chemicals – was when the clouds cleared and Iris Malikhân clicked for me.   Whereas before I was gritting my teeth through one part to get to the other, I now experience the fragrance as a whole, where the tanning chemical front end is key to unlocking and releasing the full fatness of that licorice crème anglaise, infusing it with a hint of anise, bitter chocolate, and woodsmoke.   If I squint, I just about get leather.   Heck, I can sometimes make out the shape of the purported orris root.  But like Dior Homme Intense, Iris Malikhân is so much more than a sum of its parts.

 

 

Source of sample:  Provided free of charge by the brand for copywriting purposes.      

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash 

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All Natural Aromatic Floral Green Herbal Musk Resins Review Rose

Rozu by Aesop

20th August 2022

 

 

Just when I thought roses had lost their capacity to surprise, along comes Rozu, which wraps a fresh, dewy rose in paper-thin layers of pink pepper, shiso leaf, and aromatic grasses that crackle with intent.  Surprisingly, it is not the spice or the aromatics that shine through the hardest.  For me, it is the evocative aroma of freshly-turned soil that makes Rozu special.  Moist, sharp, alive – this is the healthful, plush air inside a Japanese onsen.  There is also even a tenuous link to mitti, an attar that captures the aroma of the first rains of the season hitting the red earth of Mother India.

 

In line with other Aesop fragrances, Rozu smells uncluttered.  Simplicity is not shorthand for laziness, though.  On the face of it, you might write Rozu off as a rose perched between herb and wood, a dash of pink pepper providing an electrical spark to keep it moving.  But pay attention and you’ll start to wonder why you never noticed until now how minty shiso leaf can smell warm or how spices can smell cold or how a rose can smell indistinguishable from clay.  

 

There is grace (and design) in the way your impressions are prompted to shift from roses to earth to spice to wood and back again.  Yet, it is all as effortless as if Rozu had leapt fully formed from a Japanese forest floor rather than from a perfumer’s organ.

 

Hours in and you start paying for its supreme naturalness.  One by one, the sharper, zestier notes fall back and even that dewiest of roses starts to feel a little faded around the edges.  Every time I wear Rozu, I have to remind myself to stay still and let it roll over me like a fog.  Otherwise, it is easy to miss parts of its conversation.

 

For example, on my third test, I noticed that Rozu has a deeply fragrant, almost ‘dry-roasted’ drydown that, while subtle, provides the wearer with the sense of a party meandering pleasantly to a close instead of the abrupt full stop common to most ‘natural’ (or natural-styled) fragrances.   Whether this is due to a particular resin or wood is besides the point.  If you’re still paying attention at this stage, the only solid thing you grasp is a feeling of warmth.

 

My God, but it’s good.

 

 

 

Source of sample:  I have sampled Rozu several times in a department store.  Unfortunately for me, Aesop seems to apply production pricing to its catalogue of scents, so while other Aesop fragrances cost as little as €100 per 50ml bottle, Rozu is priced in the €150 range (implying that the essential oils required to make it are particularly expensive).  One day, probably when the Aesop shop girls start to object more vociferously to my soaking myself in 20mls in it at a time, or when my Catholic shame gets the better of me – whichever comes first – I might be persuaded to bring it home with me. 

 

Cover Image:   Photo by Oleh Morhun on Unsplash    

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Animalic Carnation Cult of Raw Materials Independent Perfumery Iris Musk Review Sandalwood Violet

Iris Ghalia by Ensar Oud

17th August 2022

 

 

Iris Ghalia by Ensar Oud makes for an unconventional iris but a reassuringly traditional Ghaliyah*.  It takes the gin-and-ice ethereality of orris and dispassionately sets it up to either thrive or fail against an onslaught by grungiest, most uncouth cast of characters ever licked up from a zoo floor – castoreum from the anal glands of a beaver, warm-scalpy costus root, calcified urine scraped off a rock (hyraceum), and saliva-ish musk grains scooped out of the undercarriage of some poor unsuspecting Tibetan deer.  And that’s before we even talk about the marshwater skank of natural ambergris.

 

Yeah, it was never going to be a fair fight.  If you have any experience at all, then you go into Iris Ghalia knowing that it is only a matter of time before quivering silver bloom of the iris is subsumed by the powerful animalics.

 

But the perfumer has sought to stack the deck a little in favor of the iris by flanking it with a sharp, fresh accord that is one third citrus peel, one third plant juice, and one third piano rosin.  Therefore, you get that first dopamine hit of warm, plush iris (smelling divinely of antique wood furniture, old books, and closed-up mansions) and just as the sugary deer musk bubbles up to nip at its heels, your nose flashes on the shrill, metallic greenery of violet leaf and the funky cat pee fruitiness of blackcurrant leaf.  Together these notes form a citric-resinous barricade around the iris, allowing it to stand up and assert itself just a little longer.

 

Iris Ghalia also benefits by being a spray and not an attar or an oily distillate, because a note as ephemeral as iris needs its own space (think a whole castle rather than a room).  For a while, the notes teeter, achieving a precarious balance between something very classical and something very grunge-indie-artisanal.

 

Of course, in the end, it is inevitable that the warm animalic notes begin to tighten around the trembling neck of the iris like a dirty fur stole.  The musks, which start out smelling as sweet and as dusty as powdered sugar sifted over a hot wolf, grow ever staler by the minute, a time-lapse video of animal fur collapsing into decay over the course of a week.

 

All this might prove heavy going indeed were it not for the persistent effervescence of a bright Coca Cola note running like ambient noise in the background.  I suspect that some combination of the iris and the powdery musks is what’s conjuring this effect.  But at times it also smells like all those minor aspects of benzoin – brown sugar, crackling brown paper, camphor, mint gum, and yes, Coca Cola – that only ever come out when benzoin is left alone to do its own thing rather than called in to serve as a member of the fantasy amber trope or as a rough stand in for vanilla.  No benzoin listed, by the way.  Pure conjecture on my part.  

  

Anyway, no matter how it’s configured, the contrast works.  And it seems to be a series of contrasts, rather than just one thing.   Notes-wise, you have something quite funky and animalic (scalpy) – the musks, the ambergris, and so on – jutting right up against something quite ethereal or even effervescent – the iris, benzoin, the powdered sugar of the Tibetan deer musk.  But there is also a textural contrast between the greasy/leathery and the dusty/sparkling.   In terms of ‘taste’, the contrast between the intensely sugariness of the musks and the sourness of the funky, leathery castoreum in the tailbone is clearly no afterthought either.  (Flanked by the saliva-ish musks, I find the murkiness of the castoreum to be very similar to the bases of other Ensar Oud scents, most notably Chypre Sultan, but the innovation here is all in that Coca Cola effervescence).    

 

All in all, a novel idea.  The sharp, greyish, concrete-like violet leaf (think Kerbside Violet by Lush) shoring up the elegant woodiness of the iris, the powdered sugar musks, the swelling chorus of animal gland secrete, just licked skin, and that miles-deep, bubbly Coca Cola sweetness.  Could I pull it off on the regular?  Probably not – it feels too much like hard work at times, and it is incredibly heavy.  Yet I found Iris Ghalia a tremendously exciting scent to wear.

 

*Ghaliyah, meaning ‘most precious’ or ‘most fragrant’ depending on the source, is a common type of mukhallat in the Middle East.  These were once all-natural affairs containing real ambergris, musks, oud, and spices, offered primarily to royal princes and members of the ruling class.  

 

 

Source of sample: Ensar Oud very kindly sent me a sample free of charge for review purposes (I paid a small customs fee).  I freely acknowledge that I am in a privileged position, as a fragrance writer, to receive free samples of the most expensive or rarest fragrances in the world.  The hope is that I perform some sort of service for the reader by reviewing them.

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Dorothea Bartek on Unsplash 

 

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All Natural Animalic Aromatic Chypre Cult of Raw Materials Green Hay Herbal Independent Perfumery Jasmine Leather Masculine Musk Oud Review Sandalwood Spice Woods

Chypre Sultan by Ensar Oud

11th August 2022

 

Always brave, I think, for a perfumer to set their cap at making a chypre in this day and age.  Most falter not because they can’t find an oakmoss replacement or the low-atranol stuff, but because they are so focused on getting the moss element right that they miss the whole point of a chypre in the first place, which is that abstract, kaleidoscopic richness, that sweet-and-sour balance that makes your mouth both salivate and shrivel up a bit.   Good chypres feel murky and on the knife edge of bitter to me – a mysterious conflagration of forest floor and a miso-based tare that took hours to make.  

 

Chypre Sultan feels like a real chypre because it treats the chypric model (bergamot, moss, labdanum) more as a suggestion than a straitjacket.  Bergamot?  Forget bergamot, too stuffy, let’s put yuzu in instead.  Labdanum?  Booooring.  Tends to take over.  Put in the quietest of sandalwood instead, creamy and substantial enough to anchor the scent.

 

In playing fast and loose with the rules, Chypre Sultan successfully captures the mysterious umami character of chypre that eludes the grasp of others.  The opening is winey and dark, a dense carpet of forest floor notes – minty wet moss, woods, artemisia, hay, sage, perhaps even a touch of rubbery myrrh – which give it a distinctly medicinal tinge, similar to Tiger Balm.  It wears like the deepest green velvet this side of Scarlet O’ Hara’s curtain dress.

 

Naturally, being an Ensar Oud creation, Chypre Sultan is kitted out with the most exquisite medley of natural oud, castoreum, and musks, which weighs down the flightier herbal and citrus notes, and creates the ‘pea souper’ murkiness so essential to a chypre’s character.  It is so thick that I can almost taste it at the back of my mouth.

 

The castoreum alone is extraordinary – leathery, almost burnt in its dryness, and in conjunction with the minty-vegetal tones of the (genuine) oakmoss, distinctly savory in tone.  The musk element is not animalic or heavy-smelling in and of itself.  In fact, it seems to be there only to give the castoreum and oakmoss this buffed-out, diffused ‘glow’ effect.  Imagine burying your nose in a man’s leather jacket and then walking around in a ‘head space’ cloud of those same molecules all day long.  This feels like that.

 

Surprisingly for such a dense, winey stew, I can clearly smell the jonquil.  Jonquil is a type of daffodil (narcissus) that smells like hay but also quite like jasmine under some conditions.  At some point, the sweet, sunny wafts of hay and jasmine begin to shake loose of the darker backdrop, and the effect is like a sudden shaft of sunlight piercing the gloom of a medieval forest.

 

Bear in mind that this floral effect is really subtle.  There is, however, a moment when the savory (almost celery-like) oakmoss meets the jonquil, and I think of Vol de Nuit.  It is a similarly ‘long simmered greens’ train of thought that connects the two.  But of course Chypre Sultan is an indie-artisanal perfume, while Vol de Nuit is a perfume made in the grand manner of French classical perfumery, so both the finish and the intent are very different.  Chypre Sultan is, naturally, far richer, more pungent, and rougher around the edges than Vol de Nuit.   

 

But there is a distant link, nonetheless, and you might be the type of person who prefers the raw authenticity of the natural ouds, musks, or oakmoss that an artisan outfit can offer.  Chypre Sultan is Vol de Nuit if she got up from her table at Le Cinq, delicately wiped her lips on the Irish linen napkin, and disappeared off into Fontainebleau forest to roll around in the muck and the hummus and the animal carcasses, only to emerge naked ten hours later with nothing more than a smirk and eyeliner smudged all over her chin.  

 

There is only one slightly difficult moment for me, and that is when all the minty herbs and hay-like florals fade out, leaving only the surround system of the castoreum, musk, and oud to play out their slightly gloomy brown tune.  Without the distraction of the fresher notes, the oniony-sweat nuances of oakmoss, complete with that slight over-stewed celery tea note, start to wear on me a little.  However, the rich, rubbery castoreum, musk, and oud step in to smooth this over and it steadies itself, finishing out the day (and this is a serious all-day kind of thing) in a softly murky, leathery-foresty haze that hovers rather than ‘sits’ on your skin.

 

I am hard-pressed to say what Chypre Sultan might be compared to, because a perfume by an oud artisan like Ensar Oud is always going to be on a different level of pungency and purity to a commercial perfume.  So, allowing for the sheer ‘apples and oranges’-ness of the comparison, I suppose that Chypre Sultan reminds me a little of Diaghilev (Roja Dove) in terms of the bitter, foresty greenness and masculine-leaning character.  However, Diaghilev has a stouter floral core and, being a commercially-produced rather than artisanal perfume, lacks the leathery castoreum-musk depth of Chypre Sultan.

 

Chypre Palatin (Parfums MDCI) is also a fair comparison, but is much sweater and creamier, its florals appearing almost powdery in comparison (Chypre Sultan is a powder-free zone).  The Vol de Nuit linkage is but a fleeting impression and probably a figment of my overactive imagination; Dryad (Papillon) is another possibility because of its costus note. 

 

But in fairness, Chypre Sultan is far less classical in structure than these two fragrances, and in its ‘brewed up in a wild jungle’ intensity, comes closer to the tannic, crunchy-organic Peruvian Amazon experience that is Carta Moena 12|69.  In terms of murkiness, complexity, and that ‘Chinese meal’ completeness you get with a good chypre, it drifts along the same orbit of Kintsugi (Masque Milano) without smelling like it at all.  Either way, Chypre Sultan is very much its own thing, and that thing happens to be a force of nature chypre.

 

 

Source of Sample:  Ensar Oud very kindly sent me a sample free of charge for review purposes (I paid a small customs fee).  I freely acknowledge that I am in a privileged position, as a fragrance writer, to receive free samples of the most expensive or rarest fragrances in the world.  The hope is that I perform some sort of service for the reader by reviewing them.

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Philipp Pilz on Unsplash 

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Review Vanilla Woods

Vaniglia by Santa Maria Novella

9th August 2022

 

 

Vaniglia is one of the few vanilla-centric vanilla perfumes I own, and to be honest, I am not sure why it has become such a big part of my rotation other than the fact that my children, currently on their school holidays, have blocked my access to my perfume collection with a rickety tower of soft toys.  Since 1st September is the earliest I can yeet it off my summer tray into the deepest depths of my cupboard where it belongs, now is as good a time as any to review it.

 

Vaniglia is a Jekyll and Hyde vanilla.  In the air, it smells like a scoop of artisanal vanilla gelato, thick with egg yolks and stiff with tiny, crackling particles of vanilla bean.  People have accused Vaniglia of smelling a little like extract, which it does, except it is probably more accurate to say it smells like vanilla bean paste, which is woodier and has less of an alcohol shriek.

 

The sillage is thick, unctuously creamy, and even a bit sticky or cloying.  Like many of the richer Santa Maria Novella perfumes (Muschio, for example), there is a Biscoff undertone running through the lower register that strikes me as obscene in a perfume meant for grown-ups.  But because there’s the slight bitterness of the booze in which the bean has been preserved, or a dusting of something cocoa-ish at the edges of this aroma, you do have that rather alluring (and yes, vanilla extract-like) contrast between the very expensive and the very cheap.

 

Smelled this way, I can take Vaniglia.  It is a little disgusting in its biscuity foodiness, but since it has survived several collection culls, I obviously have some sort of feeling for it.  Smelled up close, however – my God, what a shitshow.  The vanilla eggnog thing completely disappears, replaced by the ugly aroma of melting plastic, which assaults the nostrils relentlessly for the first couple of hours.  Given that Santa Maria Novella is one of the more traditional, and therefore, naturals-heavy brands, I will give the benefit of the doubt here and say that this is possibly an overdose of a latexy myrrh or an inherently plasticky jasmine material.

 

I am leaning towards the latter because this repulsive banana-plastic-acetone-industrial-fire aspect reminds me very much of Vanillary by Lush, another scent that burns my nose hairs when I get too close to it.

 

My solution for Vaniglia is not to get too close to it.  

 

 

Source of sample: I bought my own bottle of Vaniglia from the Santa Maria Novella store in Florence.  I know – what was I thinking? I blame the heat, the crowds, that final glass of Prosecco at lunch….   

 

Cover Image: Photo by Rachael Gorjestani on Unsplash 

 

 

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Aromatic Citrus Floral Fruity Scents Green Floral Musk Review Suede Summer Vetiver Violet Woods

Gatsby 22 by Ormonde Jayne

9th August 2022

 

Because I feel that I should love Gatsby 22, but definitely don’t, I have worn it heavily over the course of the summer to figure out how to describe it to someone who very well might.  All perfume reviewers have their blind spots, and here’s mine: I am terrible at describing huge floral-woody musks that are little more than a vague shape in the air.

 

Amber smells delicious, kind of like food.  Flowers smell distinctly of themselves, once you know what they smell like individually.  Incense smells like church.  Pine smells like the forest.   But to me, Gatsby smells less like the individual flowers or woods or vetiver referenced in the notes list, and more like an abstract (and ever-shifting) set of ‘moods’ caused by these notes bouncing off each other as they jostle around that expanse of sour, rubbery musk.  

 

Parts of it certainly smell good.  I appreciate the clean, bright citrus shifting into the spearmint tones of geranium, the tangy waft of violets, that Ormonde Jayne osmanthus with its high-end, peach fuzz suede, all washed down until shiny with benzyl salicylate water for that mild, sweet balsamic touch.  This familiar familial arrangement of Ormonde Jayne notes cannot fail to please.

 

But then again, these accords all come drenched in, and partially obscured by a woody musk material that screams eau de department store for once, rather than the usually palatable (to me) Iso E Super accord that Ormonde Jayne uses.  The effect of this particular woody musk is to make the more natural-smelling fruit and floral notes read as arch, highly stylized versions of themselves – glossy magazine inserts rather than the real thing.

 

Here’s the kicker.  I am not the young professional or cool girl/gal at whom it is aimed.  So, can I do this scent justice for the reader who does form part of this demographic?  Ormonde Jayne call Gatsby 22 edgy, but it took me a whole month of wearing it to figure out that they didn’t really mean that it smells edgy (it doesn’t) but rather that it has that clean, androgenous, Ambroxinated vibe that people who wear Glossier You or Tanagra by Maison de Violet or even Baccarat Rouge 540 find so sexy.  These are perfumes that smell like nothing at all but also like crushed gemstones, fresh air, sexual confidence, and the aspiration of personal wealth.

 

In other words, it is the abstraction of Gatsby 22 that matters.   Worn side by side with, for example, Bal d’Afrique (Byredo), a scent that goes for a similar sparkly champagne-lemon-vetiver vibe, it soon becomes clear that Gatsby 22 is much drier, more urbane, and far less literal than the Byredo (which suddenly seems quite ostentatiously gourmand-ish in comparison).  Gatsby’s tart woody musks act like a pour of the driest Vermouth on earth, swishing all the notes together into a blur of things that your field of perception sometimes catches (was that grappa?) but more often not (why am I not picking up on the vetiver?).

 

Gatsby 22 isn’t something I can see myself ever leaning into, but I appreciate that it made me work harder than usual to figure out why I don’t like it and, conversely, think more seriously about the person for whom it might be the best thing ever.  Because, as it turns out, those are two types of people whose tastes will never intersect on a Venn diagram.  And that’s ok too.

 

 

Source of sample:  Ormonde Jayne very kindly sent me a 50ml bottle of this free of charge for review.

 

Cover Image: Photo by Atikh Bana on Unsplash

 

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Amber Animalic Iris Leather Masculine Review

Cuir d’Iris by Parfumerie Generale

8th August 2022

 

The secret to Cuir d’Iris is that it is simultaneously sooty and wet.  Bone-dry cedarwood and iris kick up dust eddies as stale as the air from a newly-fired radiator.  Floating in this thick miasma is the scent of the milking shed, successive days of cow juice coagulating slowly on the concrete floor, soured slightly by the sun.  Wisps of charcoal or soot add a grainy dimension that might be interpreted as smoke of some sort.

 

Add to this Pierre Guillaume’s signature amber-musk combo that smells uniquely intimate, like the sweet, yeasty folds of skin under a baby’s neck or the two-day scalp of a loved one, and you have yourself a result that stands less with the Cuir de Russies and the Knize Tens of the world, and more with the L’Air de Riens.  And yet, step back, and this is still clearly leather – freshly cured, curdy, a bit raw and thin.

 

But leather is just skin after all.  And human skin is still animal skin.  In the series ‘Hannibal’, his therapist tells him that while she admires its construction, what he is wearing is a well-constructed person suit, suggesting that his humanity is something one can slip into (or out of) as easily as one would a pair of dress pants.  Cuir d’Iris, with its organic, lived-in human-ness, is the ultimate parfum de peau.  Robots and psychopaths, take note.     

 

 

Source of sample:  I bought my own bottle of Cuir d’Iris in 2015.  Many thanks to Danny C. who safeguarded it in London for two whole years before my brother was able to go pick it up.  

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash  

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Amber Ambergris Animalic Carnation Musk Resins Review

Fiore d’Ambra by Profumum Roma

22nd June 2022

 

 

What I find disturbing about Fiore d’Ambra by Profumum Roma is that it is sweet and filthy in equal measure, like Youth Dew sprayed on a dirty crotch.  Unlike Ambra Aurea, which is immediately pleasant, Fiore d’Ambra mouths off at you in three different languages at once and gives you little time to catch up.  Best I can make out, the smell boils down to a particularly clovey stick of clove rock, sugar cubes soaked in antibiotics, and underneath, a stirring of some very unclean musks.  The combination is suggestive of both the pleasures of the headshop (musk cubes, unlit incense, dust) and of the faintly sour-sweet breath of unwashed ladybits that must have risen like yeast every time Henry VIII lifted a lady’s gown.

 

I love it.  I thumb my nose at anyone suggesting it is an amber, though.  Names are powerful things, but smell this without thinking of the ‘amber’ in the title or the fact that it sits right next to a similarly-named fragrance (Ambra Aurea) in the Profumum Roma catalogue, and you begin to see that its feral poop-fur quality aligns it far more closely with scents like Muscs Khoublai Khan (Serge Lutens), L’Air de Rien (Miller Harris), and L’Ombre Fauve (Parfumerie Generale) than with stuff like Ambre Sultan (Serge Lutens) or even Ambra Aurea.  

 

As an accord in perfumery, amber is both a comfort and a straitjacket.  On the one hand, the smoky-spicy sweetness of warm resins and vanilla never fails to hit, plugging into our dopamine receptors with the same ease as the smell of coffee first thing in the morning or something good in the oven when you’re hungry.   Amber cocoons you, satiating your basic appetite for warmth and richness.  It is the flannel pajamas of the scent world.

 

But there is not to distinguish between ambers – or if there is, it is a matter of minute variations to the left or the right of the same basic ambery accord.  Think of just how much really separates Ambra Aurea from an Amber Absolute (Tom Ford), say, or from an Ambre Sultan (Serge Lutens), or a Mitzah (Dior Privée).   Past a certain point, you’re just playing with varying degrees of sweetness (vanilla), powderiness (benzoin), leather or caramel (labdanum), smoke (incense) and the accoutrements of spice or herbs.  The result always smells good.  But does it smell interesting or original?  Hardly ever.

 

Now, Fiore d’Ambra innovates.  It doesn’t even really smell like amber to me, unless you count any sweet element at all – here a soda stream-Coca Cola syrupiness – as ‘amber’.  The ‘opium’ element, which has traditionally been interpreted in perfumery by way of eugenol – a substance that is almost as verboten as opium itself these days – has probably been built with clove oil instead.  But the perfumers didn’t even bother to lather it up into a soft froth with geranium or rose, so the clove note juts out of the topnotes like a sudden erection.  The musks are sensual, but raw and unclean (a bit salty even), strangely reminiscent of the dry honey-toner-ink accord from M/Mink (Byredo).

 

The minute I smelled Fiore d’Ambra, I was reminded of the vials of Fleur Poudrée de Musc (Les Nereides) that the Conor McTeague (aka Jtd), my friend and the best fragrance writer in the world, sent to a group of perfume friends around the world in early 2015.  I think he got enormous fun out of the collective recoil.  It smelled like the most innocent of baby powders combined with the foulest of human shits, a merry middle finger to the frou-frou Botticelli angels and Ye Olde Italian Script of the brand itself.  Conor wrote this of Fleur Poudrée de Musc:  “Have you ever undressed somebody after a long day of winter sport, all those layers amplifying the scent of skin that’s sweated then dried multiple times? Remember that scent, then imagine some powder on top”.  I don’t know if Conor ever smelled Fiore d’Ambra, but I like to think he might have described it in much the same way.  

 

 

 

Source of sample: I purchased my 18ml travel bottle of Fiore d’Ambra from the Profumum Roma store in Rome, March 2022.  It cost €55.

 

Cover Image: Photo by Inge Poelman on Unsplash 

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Amber Cult of Raw Materials Musk Oriental Review Vanilla

Shalimar Millésime Vanilla Plantifolia by Guerlain

14th June 2022

 

 

I love Shalimar.  I love Shalimar so much that I own almost every iteration of it – meaning the different concentrations – as well as any modern perfume that riffs on the Shalimar template.  It’s like having a favorite t-shirt that is so soft, comfy and absurdly flattering that you don’t think twice about owning it in fifteen different colors.  However, I am a harsh judge of the Shalimar flankers and over the years, have bought and sold a lot of what I’d consider dead wood.  So I consider myself a bit of an expert on them.  And in my experience, Shalimar flankers tend to fall into two main food groups.

 

First, you have the fresh lemon bar or key lime pie category of Shalimar, i.e., Shalimar Light, Shalimar Eau Legere, Shalimar Cologne (2015) and Shalimar Initial L’Eau Si Sensuelle, and so on.  These I like but you definitely don’t need more than one.  Pick your poison and don’t waste time pining for the ones that got away.  The only one that stands out as something possibly new-ish is the original Shalimar Initial, which happens to be 50% Shalimar, 40% Dior Homme Intense, and 10% Angel – interesting, but caramel-fruitchouli Shalimar is not really my thing.

 

The other category is what I call the “Guerlain milking the cash cow” category.  This is where the company places an expensive natural like single-plantation cocoa or vanilla (the real stuff, not vanillin) into Shalimar’s formula, thereby fixing some of the problems with the current EDP formula and upselling it at twice or three times the price.  Basically, the cult of raw materials, courtesy of Guerlain.  This is where all those Ode à la Vanille Sur La Route de Madagascar, de Mexique, de Dublin, de Johannesburg and de Beers* slot in.

 

I have bought and eventually sold every single one of ‘em.  Want to know why?  Because they are – aside from a minute detail or two – pretty much indistinguishable from regular Shalimar EDP.  Believe me, my wallet and my confirmation bias long to say different.  But no matter how hard I strained (and I strained hard enough to pop a blood vessel or two) to smell the most minute of nuances, I am honor-bound to inform you that these fancy flankers are little more than deeper, richer versions of the EDP.  And if we are talking about a €100 difference per 50ml, you’d better believe that I am going to fix any problems that modern Shalimar EDP has by simply spraying more or spraying again.

 

Anyway, when I saw this new flanker – Shalimar Millésime Vanilla Plantifolia – and heard the whole ‘single batch’ and ‘vanilla plantation’ and ‘2021 cru’ backstory – I did two things.  First, I bought a bottle of it blind, because, well, of course I did.  Second, I girded my loins and hardened my heart against it, bitter from past experience.  I pre-despised it as yet another piece of ‘cult of raw materials’ wankery that we are constantly being upsold on in the name of love of perfume, or at least, of this perfume.  

 

I am so happy to report that I was wrong.  Dead wrong, in fact.  What we have here is 80% Shalimar extrait and 20% one of those eye-wateringly expensive niche vanillas like Lira (Xerjoff) or Tihota (Indult), the kind that smell like exquisite, handcrafted Viennoiseries stuffed with thick vanilla cream and shiny with a real butter glaze.  My argument for selling those other Ode a la X, Y and Z Shalimars was that if I wanted Shalimar, then I could just reach for, you know, Shalimar.  But here, if I’m reaching for  Shalimar Millésime Vanilla Plantifolia, it’s because I’m in the mood for a little bit of Shalimar and a lotta bit of rich bakery vanilla. In fact, the vanilla is so well done that it makes it into my vanilla Hall of Fame, which, for someone who doesn’t own or wear a lot of vanilla scents, says something.  In fact, and I risk bringing the wrath of hard-bitten Guerlainophiles down upon me here, this is much better than the other famous Guerlain vanilla, i.e., Spiritueuse Double Vanille.  

 

Despite the vanilla confectionary overload, Shalimar Millésime Vanilla Plantifolia still smells distinctly and recognizably of Shalimar.  Make no mistake, though, if you want the smoke and the leather and the sexy bitch-ness and the sturm und drang of Shalimar, just wear Shalimar.  This flanker smothers all of that in a big musky cloud of vanilla cream powder, turning it into the equivalent of a weighted blanket or a chenille onesie.  It is not sexy but there is something sensual about it, perhaps because it is so embarrassingly thick and sillageaceous.  In the drydown, it reminds me a little of those honey and cream-scented edible body powers.

 

All in all, a rare good buy for me from this most cynical of Shalimar flanker categories and one that is doing a hell of a lot more than any of the Ode series ever did.  Naturally, it has been discontinued, because Guerlain has a sourcing narrative to flog / scarcity marketing tactic to uphold / only a few vanilla beans left in the cupboard of scarcity of the vanilla beans from this particular harvest.  But don’t worry if you’ve missed the boat on this one.  It is good.  But it is hardly the Second Coming.  If you have and love Shalimar EDP or extrait, you will be just fine.  And remember, there will always be other once-in-a-lifetime harvests and cynical sourcing narratives and rare single-plantation raw materials with which to gussy Shalimar up.  Catch this boat the next time around.  

 

 

Source of sample:  I bought my bottle of Shalimar Millésime Vanilla Plantifolia directly from Mes Origines, a French e-tailer.

 

Cover Image:  Photo by jonathan ocampo on Unsplash 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Some of these might or might not be actual Shalimar flankers.      

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