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Three Roses by Annette Neuffer

11th July 2024

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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The Musk Collection by Areej Le Doré: Reviews

20th March 2024

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

 

Lists Review Rose Round-Ups Single note exploration

A Rosy Roster: My Favourite Rose Fragrances

7th October 2023

 

Roses are an intensely personal thing, aren’t they?  A fresh, wet ‘ripped from nature’ rose is one person’s idea of heaven and another person’s hell.   Now, this is kind of fun because it means you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince and self-guided discovery is never not a thing of joy. 

 

But about nine years ago,  I went on a rose expedition for a now-defunct perfume blog and by the end of four separate articles about rose perfumes of every type and flavor, I ran into a big ole rose-scented wall.  I was done.  This was when I learned that if you are too comprehensive about any line of inquiry, you begin to hate the thing you were originally so excited about. 

 

These days, I am wearing and enjoying rose perfumes again, which is no mean feat for someone with rose-induced PTSD.  And this simply because I have stopped feeling the obsessive need to own a perfume in every single rose category, e.g., naturalistic, chypre, rose-patchouli, green rose, etc.  I am now guided purely by my own taste.  I like what I like, and if that doesn’t happen to be Nahema or Gucci No. III – and it most certainly does not – then that is ok.  While I do write about fragrance, I’m not sure why or when I began to equate what is essentially a hobby with any responsibility for covering all the bases.  I have neither the money nor the time to be anyone’s library. 

 

So, this is my very personal list of favorite rose fragrances.  You will notice that I like my rose to be a bit player rather than the main attraction, tucked behind a curtain of woods, spices, and resins.  I have a weakness for roses masquerading as one of those floral Indian puddings infused with saffron and pistachios, or as spiced chai, or even as a creamy sort of wood.  I enjoy roses covered in smoke, crushed cocoa nibs, inky mosses, papery grasses, or tons of soft, wet soil – I like to sense the struggle of roses trying to break through something and somewhat failing.  Rose needs to know its place.    

 

There are no rose soliflores on my list.  In fact, though I admire their verisimilitude, I find soliflores of every single flower to be incredibly boring.  Ok, you imitated a living flower, have a cookie.  Would I ever take you over the actual scent of a live flower?  Not a chance.  I would rather have the glorious scent of a real rose in my nostrils for the all-too-brief two point five seconds it lasts than The Perfumer’s Workshop Tea Rose on my person for more than five hours.  There are some smells better left to nature.  

 

Nahema, No. 19, Diva, Magie Noire, Heure Exquise, Coco –  I respect the hell out of you for occupying such an important place in perfume history.  But I don’t love love you.  Rose is an essential part of your very complicated fabric, but none of you are rosy enough for me to look past the slightly old-fashioned, ladies-who-lunch feel I get from you all.  (It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.)  

 

And God, have I grown tired of rose gourmands.  Oud Satin Mood, I raved about you, and honestly, let’s admit it now, you are nothing but a bloated pile of vanilla, violets, rose, and marshmallow fluff.  You have become synonymous with the modern (read: social media age) taste for loud, sweet perfumes simply designed to fill the air and get you attention in a sea of all the other people holding up selfie sticks.  I would be a little embarrassed at my lapse in judgement except that I didn’t exactly stop there.  I also went gaga for the hot syrupy mess that is Rose Jam by Tauer Perfumes, Rose Jam by Lush, and countless other variations on the theme.  I even bought a bottle of Nina Ricci’s L’Extase Rose Absolue, which is Francis Kurkdjian shamelessly knocking off his own Oud Satin Mood formula for a designer brand.  Have I mentioned that I own a bottle of Oud Satin Mood and that I had already started to detest it when I bought L’Extase Rose Absolue?  Yep.  This whole blog is me calling myself to account for my own bullshit.

 

 

Anyway, if it’s not clear by now, the perfumes below are the renditions of rose that I love, or at least prefer above all others that I have worn or owned (or, God knows, still own despite myself).  

 

     

 

Rose Oud by By Kilian {Full review here

Photo by Heather on Unsplash 

 

Rose Oud is unimaginatively named, obnoxiously over-priced (especially for what is synthetic oud), and not terribly original.  Yet it is beautiful from every angle and, unusually for a rose-oud, speaks with the softest, most indoor voice imaginable.  Its magic lies in the effortless smoothing over of all the cracks between normally pugnacious materials such as guaiacol, oud, and rose. 

 

Think of the most beautiful supermodel you’ve ever laid eyes on – but one who nonetheless fails to either move you or turn you on – and that’s Rose Oud by Kilian.  Because it is almost rosewater-levels of gentle, I use it when I want to feel seen but not heard, like a sleek black cat winding around the ankles of people at a party. 

 

 

Mohur by Neela Vermeire

 

Mohur is a handful of red rose petals strewn on the surface of a glass of cold almond milk into which have been stirred grated carrots, black pepper, and cardamom.  There is a cold restraint to the fragrance that elevates it.  The notes strain against a muslin cloth, drip feeding into the fragrance on a time-release mechanism and allowing the wearer to smell everything both in and out of order.  



First wave – an austere oud note and a sourish leather, underpinned by a green cardamom note.  Behind the sharpness of the opening accord, some fruit and rose petals begin to take shape.  In this moment, the rose smells like the dried rose petals stirred into black tea that you can buy from Marriage Freres.  Then, for about half an hour, I can’t smell a thing –  it’s as if all the opening notes have sharply withdrawn, leaving only a haunting impression of something enticingly boozy and sour on the skin.

 

Then, without warning, the fragrance seems to rev back up again like rusty engine.  Now underpinning the tart fruitiness of the emerging rose is the fuzzy, almost raw feel of a green almond freshly peeled from its shell and pressed to release its fragrant milk.  The red rose petals lose their tea-like dryness and bloom into wet, jammy rose petals plucked straight from the flower.  The sticky rose combines with the milky almond notes to produce something almost edible in its deliciousness.  But the jam and milk notes are spread out on a foundation of earth and roots (carrots), powdery chalk (benzoin), and wood (sandalwood and cedar), so it never quite fully crosses over into gourmand territory.

The intense (but filtered, shaded) whirligig of spice and rose notes never really settles.  Even in the base, it just keeps on shifting through a kaleidoscope of impressions.  At times, the base reads to me like a dusty, rose-tinted talcum powder – the combination of now-dried rose petals and benzoin – and at others, a full-throated, creamy sandalwood that tilted its sweetness towards a weighty vanilla, again, nuanced by rose but never dominated by it.  Sometimes, Mohur strikes me as a very pretty Indian rose; other times, a small miracle.  

 

 

Parfum Sacre by Caron

 

Parfum Sacre hooked me early, at a tender time of my life when I needed a Big Perfume Love, and is therefore resistant to any attempt I make at objective analysis.  If pushed, I would say it smells like an ancient carved sandalwood chest filled to the brim with myrrh resin reduced to a fine golden powder and tender pink curlicues of rose soap lovingly carved off a block of Camay with a pocketknife.  It smells full and soft, like cashmere, but studded with little kitten licks of black pepper and lemon that trickle the back of the throat.  Even the thin, reedy version of Parfum Sacre available to buy today possesses that gently peppery, rosy, soapy quality that says ‘Mother’ to me.  Therefore, it continues to be one of my Big, Albeit Incoherently Described Perfume Loves.

 

 

Smyrna by Le Couvent {Full review here}

Photo by Zoe Schaeffer on Unsplash

 

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.  Though ostensibly modelled after Rose 31 by Le Labo or (even closer, I’d argue)  Rose Poivrée by The Different Company, the black pepper gives the scent a kick but no funk.  It smells planty, not underpanty.  It is so smooth, slippery, and oddly lotiony that I can’t help but love it, if only as a spa-like extension of my grooming ritual after a long, hot bath. 

 

 

Portrait of a Lady by Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle

 

Regal and brutal in equal measure, Portrait of a Lady is the kind of fragrance best suited to boardroom intimidation than it is to personal enjoyment.  I only ever call upon it when suiting up for battle – it is my own pocket Iron Lady, complete with the bouffant hair and 1980s power suits.  Crushing, smothering belly rolls of the ashiest incense this side of Tobacco Oud crowd in on the pulpy raspberry rose, the neon green flicker of camphor or eucalyptus acting as a warning light.  A sober, dry patchouli hulks in the background, somewhat discreetly at first until you take a second look and realize just how massive it is. 

 

Portrait of a Lady is less of a fragrance than it is a behemoth – an institution.  These days, the rose is a little less brilliant than before, so some of that ‘red jewel glittering against a grey fog of ash’ effect is lost.  But it is still an impressive perfume and still eminently suited to business of turning you into a walking weapon of mass destruction.  I respect its power more than I like it, but I will never be without a little vial of it, like a flick knife tucked inside my knickers. 

 

 

Eau de Protection by Etat Libre d’Orange, aka Rossy de Palma

 

Eau de Protection gives me all the sulky, stroppy darkness I’d ever dreamed of as a baby Goth circa 1993.  The opening is bright and scratchy feeling, a neon rose teeming with enough ginger, pepper, and geranium to make you wince.  This is soon somewhat softened by a cocoa-ish musk that feels slightly funky in a cat’s paws kind of way, which in turn sets the stage for a dramatic smackdown between the drawing-blood-on-metal sharpness of geranium, wine, a more pulp fiction sort of rose, and an earthy patchouli.  In winding down, it seems to lurch between dried earth, roses, musk, amber, and cocoa, shunting you from the high-toned and pitchy to the dusky and velvety, and then back again.  The whole ride never once feels comfortable or predictable.  Bravo you weird, wonderful people at Etat Libre d’Orange!  This is as jolie-laide as Signora Rossy de Palma herself.

 

 

Rose de Nuit by Serge Lutens

 

There is a true rose in there somewhere, a mere memory of a living, breathing thing of beauty, but it is smothered and muffled with layers of wax, adipose, and decaying rose petals. The opening verges on the unpleasant, with a rose as sharply tannic as the dregs of red wine in the glass you forgot to rinse the night before.  The beeswax takes some of the sting out of it but adds a note of greasy scalp or hair that has not been washed for five days.  The rose dries up and becomes blackened, parched, and leathery, but the fat honeyed wax undertone only grows more animalic. 

 

The first time I wore it, I was repulsed.  But also intrigued.  I put it on before bed and each time I awoke during the night, I became aware of an enticing aroma surrounding me and emanating off my body.  It possesses the slightly sour, intriguingly musty, altogether human smell of a piece of skin you (or a lover) have licked.  Reader, I bought a bell bottle of it.  Though I rarely wear it because its forced intimacy makes me feel unsettled, I am glad that I have something this evocative (and slightly creepy) in my possession. 

 

 

Lyric Woman by Amouage

Photo by Jaspreet Kalsi on Unsplash

 

I didn’t think very much of Lyric Woman until I spilled a sample vial of it on some paper in my office one day and was met by this most incredible aroma of real Indian sandalwood – creamy but dry, rosy but as sturdy as a table.  I was felled; it moved me.  But if the sandalwood was the hook, I ended up sticking around for the lush rose and smoky-buttery-banana ylang, floral shapes in the air carved out and defined by the spices that jostled in the air pockets in and around them – mostly a prickly, piquant green cardamom, which gives the rose a grainy, beery-like dimension, and a fiery black pepper that sharpens and adds angularity to the custardy ylang. 

 

The overall effect is surprisingly smooth and mild for something so densely packed with spice, and I’ve come to realize that Lyric Woman shares a similar structure with Parfum Sacre, in that the botanical ‘true-ness’ of the rose is modulated and made lotiony-smooth by the buffing action of the spices, and intertwined so deeply with the sandal that it is tough to see where the seams between rose and wood actually lie. 

 

In the 2009 Guide, Luca Turin talks about a fruity-woody damascone note in Lyric Woman that turns it from a nice perfume into one that might be called a masterpiece.  And he is right, of course – there is a raisiny, dried plum quality to the rose that makes you think of rot at the heart of an otherwise perfect-looking apple – but I also think that the piquant cardamom and incredible sandalwood are also key players in the magic.  Without them, this might be a nice fruity-woody-incense rose – with them, Lyric Woman becomes the most accomplished translation of the traditional rosy-sandal attar motif of Arabian perfumery to a format more familiar to Western Europeans.         

 

 

Encens Mythique d’Orient by Guerlain

 

This is what I like to call my ‘expensive French whore’ perfume.  It calls to mind an extremely well-dressed Parisian lady at lunch who has peed in her pants a little but is supremely confident that nobody is going to call her on it because she’s just ordered a bottle of the 1975 Clos du Mesnil Blanc de Blancs.  Opening on a steam-pressed barrage of starch and aldehydes, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in a Chinese laundry.  There is a brief glimpse of a rich rose and sour oud wood, but this is whipped away fairly quickly, leaving you enough time to wallow in all those fizzing, airborne ‘white shirt’ particles floating in the air, stuffed to such density that it almost takes on a physical form in front of your nose.  As metallic as a hot wire brush, you can almost feel the aldehydes clogging your lungs like cotton fluff.

 

When the starch cloud calms down, it reveals a rich, salty, ‘fatty’ ambergris note – semi-urinous too – that turns the lights up on the rose.  The effect of the ambergris is like the glare of hard, speckled sunlight on water – so bright you have to half-close your eyes to perceive it.  This approach effectively merges the classical ‘French’ style of aldehydic, operatic florals with certain hallmarks of ‘Eastern’ perfumery, such as the  hay-like bitterness of saffron and the gilded pungency of ambergris, to startling effect.  Acid rather than alkaline.  It smells oddly cheap (scratchy) and luxurious at the same time, a dichotomy I particularly enjoy (see Noir de Noir, below).  

 

 

Rose Nacrée du Desert by Guerlain

 

Rose Nacrée du Desert is technically a balsamic rose-oud, yet, for me, the role played by the patchouli is so central to its character that I mentally classify it as part of the rose-and-patchouli sub-genre.  A bright, jammy Taifi rose is set down to smolder in a pit of smoking resins, medicinal saffron, and the sour, incensey greenness of oud wood, and this accord is what dominates at first.  But then, in the drydown, in rolls that gloomy, soil-like patchouli, trampling all over the powdery, sweet benzoin to give it a dirty, lived-in edge. 

 

Rose Nacrée means pearlized rose, which implies something delicate or femme.  Don’t believe one bit of it.  This is the darkly beautiful oil anointing the beard and robes of Emirati men, wafting evocatively in their trail as they head into the Mosque for evening prayer.  It is as heavy as a length of gold-embroidered damask, so I think carefully before spraying it on, but once it is securely soaked into my every skin cell and nose hair, becoming part of my organic compounds, I luxuriate in it like a cat rolling around in catnip.   

 

 

Rozu by Aesop {Full review here}

 

Rozu 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. 

 

 

Epic Woman by Amouage

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

 

Epic Woman balances the hot and the sour and the sweet as masterfully as a delicate Chinese dish – the heat from the black pepper and cinnamon, the green pickling spices (caraway), and the soft-but-oh-so-vinegary oud are the major players here.  But there is also a diffuse sweetness, coming off the pink rose that blooms behind the sour opening notes and what feels like a mixture of powdered cinnamon and vanilla.  The parched tannins of the black tea are difficult to pick out when placed up against the smoky guaiac wood, incense, and other spicy-woody notes, but they are nonetheless present and correct.



The vanilla in the base is subtle – a thimbleful of crème anglaise rather than an ice-cream sundae – and spiked with just enough sugar added to round out the sourness of the oud wood.  The sourness and the delicate spices surrounding the rose persist all through the perfume, though, and keep me smacking my lips.  This is a perfume to be savored like the snap of a cold dill pickle straight from the jar when you’re starving.  In its perfectly judged balance of sweet, piquant, spicy and anisic, Epic Woman is my favorite rose-as-sherbet perfume.  

 

 

Noir de Noir by Tom Ford

 

The recipe in Nigella Lawson’s ‘Feast’ for Chocolate Guinness Cake makes an enormous wodge of damp, dense (yet springy) chocolate cake of the deepest black imaginable, topped with a thick single layer of white cream cheese frosting meant to resemble the head on a pint.  The beauty of this cake is the way what Nigella calls ‘the ferrous twang’ of Guinness holds its own against the chocolatey sweetness of the crumb and the tartness of the cream cheese.  If you think about it, the pairing makes sense – there is something almost animalic, or at least iron-rich, like blood, that connects the loamy darkness of stout (and soil) with the aroma of a 90% cocoa bar of chocolate being melted in a bain marie.

 

Noir de Noir uses the iodine-like sting of saffron and the plushness of Turkish rose to perform the same trick.  The slightly garbagey, vegetal iron-filling aspect of the spice acts upon the patchouli and roses to create an extraordinarily dark truffle accord that feels like a cross-section of that Chocolate Guinness Cake.  The rose note here is slightly rosewater-ish, providing a cheap and cheerful Turkish Delight brightness that countermands the black velvet lushness of the chocolate-oud.  Probably the most romantic perfume in my collection, though, like dark chocolate and Turkish Delight, a strictly once-in-a-blue-moon kind of craving.

 

 

Paestum Rose by Eau d’Italie

 

This translucent wash of rose, myrrh, and black pepper – set over a base of incensey cedar or cedar-ish incense (depending on the angle you look at it) – never strikes me as being as dark or as gothic as some reviews describe it.  However, there is a water-washing-over-river-stones quality to the myrrh that lends it a certain seriousness, like delicate roses bleached of their lifeblood, their pinkness fading slowly to greige.  The tartness of the pepper tickles my taste buds in much the same way as Epic Woman does, but this is far more sheer and weightless a composition.  I also sense the urinous greenness of blackcurrant bud, sucking any moisture out of the air. 

 

For years, I vacillated between Costes I and Paestum Rose, as I see these fragrances as two sides of the same coin – transparent, spiced woods and rose – and for a while was sold on the more cinnamony Costes I.  But my fascination with the Costes waned as I could never get it to rouse itself past the first, shy, minor C wave of aroma it summoned.  Paestum Rose, while almost equally as sheer as the Costes, seems somehow more robust and characterful in construction, so I sold my two bottles of Costes I and purchased a bottle of Paestum Rose in 2017.  Doesn’t matter now, of course – both the Costes and Paestum Rose have been discontinued.  Rozu by Aesop might be an adequate substitute for the airy, piquant freshness of the peppery rose smell that I love so much, but I’m doubtful.  Paestum Rose is one of my most worn rose fragrances of all time, because it’s just so damn easy to wear, yet never less than soulful. 

 

 

Santal Majuscule by Serge Lutens

Photo by Jessica Loaiza on Unsplash

 

For a perfume that lists so many comforting notes – cocoa, rose petals, sandalwood, and so on – Santal Majuscule by Serge Lutens is full of things that pull and push against each other, creating tension.  The first few minutes feel dense to the point of sensory overload, a strong, boozy cocoa note interacting so violently with a jammy red rose that it conjures up a phantom note of aromatic coffee bean.   The sour, lactic tang of the sandalwood clashes with the syrupy sweetness of the rose; the bitter dustiness of the dark cocoa stands off against the oiliness of the wood; these contrasting notes and textures rub up against each and then pull apart again in the most interesting ways possible.  

Much like Chanel’s Bois des Iles, Santal Majuscule is a reconstruction of the characteristically creamy but arid scent of true Indian sandalwood.  It draws on the different textures and angles of the rose, cocoa, and woody notes to suggest – roughly – the range of tones you get in sandalwood, which run from rosy, woody, and syrupy to dusty, milky, sour, sweet, and oily.  Towards the end, the aridity lets up with a tandem of woods and rose arranged in that floral Indian pudding style, complete with rosewater and saffron.  A perfectly autumnal, woody rose experience and one that is deeply meaningful to me. 


 

Muschio by Lorenzo Villoresi 

 

Past the rosy-minty slap of the geranium leaf, Muschio is a surprisingly creamy rose-musk-sandal affair not a million miles away from Safran Troublant by L’Artisan Parfumeur.  Tremendously diffusive and enveloping, it is one of those rare scents that manages to be sharp and mellow at the same time, thus straddling the Great Gender divide with ease.  Yes, it feels like rose custard, but at the same time, it also smells like crushed herbs, that arid-umami Villoresi sandalwood, and a clean, woody musk.  It is one of my favorite scents of all time, let alone a rose one, and among one of my most worn in 2019, when I was living in Rome. 

 

 

Sballo by Bruno Acampora

 

Sballo means ‘trip’ in Italian.  Not as in a ‘trip to the seaside’, but in the ‘I ate some funny-looking mushrooms and now your face is a rainbow’ sense of the word.  Which is appropriate when you consider how mind-bendingly seventies the Acampora oils smell.  Trippy, psychedelic, groovy – all words that fit the Acampora aesthetic like a glove.

 

Sballo is the banner-carrier for this seventies feel, so it goes heavy on the aromatics, hay, patchouli, and oakmoss.  It ain’t pretty, but it sure does smell authentic.  The main thrust is a patchouli-rose chypre in the Bernard Chant style.  Think Aromatics Elixir and Aramis 900, but richer and rougher in texture.  An artisanal, homemade take on a commercial model.  The rose is brilliant and red, but smothered by armfuls of dry, rustic grasses and hay note acting in tandem with oakmoss and patchouli.  

 

Most modern chypre scents fake the bitterness of oakmoss in the traditional chypre accord via other materials that share a similarly ashen dryness, like denatured patchouli aromachemicals (Akigalawood), hay, galbanum, or even saffron.  But though there is no oakmoss listed for Sballo, I can’t imagine that it doesn’t actually contain at least some.  To my nose, the shadowy dankness of the material is unmistakably present.  

 

Sballo shores up this oakmoss effect by flanking it with equally dank or earthy-dry materials such as hay, clove, patchouli, and a material that smells like tobacco or black tea leaves.  The overall effect is gloomy and desiccated in the grand rose chypre tradition.  Saving it from a classic ‘ladies who lunch’ formality of the chypre is the rough, almost burnt-ashy texture of the moss and patchouli.  It is like the rough, stubbled jaw of a brutish male thrust into your personal airspace, causing both discomfort and the thrill of secret excitement. 

 

 

Traversée du Bosphore by L’Artisan Parfumeur

 

Despite buying almost every iteration of the theme in the past, and me originally thinking that it smelled like a cherry-flavored Jolly Rancher, Traversée du Bosphore is the only rose loukhoum scent I have kept in my collection. 

 

The notes say apple and pomegranate, two ingredients heavily used in Turkish and Balkan cuisine.  But I am used to my mother-in-law’s wild pomegranate syrup, which is tart and sweet and tannic all at once, so for the longest while I couldn’t see the connection to the more single-cell syrup I was smelling in the topnotes.  The dry down, on the other hand, was always more interesting to me – a fat, pink suede cushion thickly dusted with icing sugar and trembling under the weight of rose petals.  The Tl;dr of all this is that while the drydown felt luxe to me, the opening always smell cheap. 



But then it struck me – what the hell am I talking about?  Loukhoum is cheap.  Its cheapness is practically its whole point.  It is cheap to make, cheap to consume, and it tastes a bit cheap too.  I lived in the Balkans for 17 years, and at meetings in Bosnia, Serbia, or Montenegro, someone would invariably pull out a tin of loukhoum and you’d find yourself mindlessly chomping through two or three cubes of vaguely rose-flavored gelatin with the coffee (always more of a texture than a taste), careless of the post-loukhoum sugar headache that loomed over your medulla oblungata like a nuclear cloud. 



Knowing that loukhoum costs pennies is part of its hokey charm, I guess.  It’s like coffee, good bread, and chocolate – small things that cost relatively little and yet provide a spot of brilliance or colour in the drabness of our daily lives.  And this (essential) cheapness is key to appreciating Traversée du Bosphore.  Enough with the mythologizing of Eastern sweetmeats, this perfume seems to be saying – loukhoum is made from boiled up horses’ hooves, so let’s not all pretend that it’s something fancier than it is.  I no longer live in the Balkans, so when I feel a bit nostalgic for the cheap rosewater taste of the local loukhoum, Traversée du Bosphore is my solution. 

 

 

Tocade by Rochas

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

 

A great big, cheap, creamy delight – basically the fattiness of L’Oréal Riche Shine lipstick mixed with the scent of sugar cookies pulled fresh from the oven, and a few non-descript florals (the Roucelian magnolia is there, of course, but also lily of the valley) thrown in purely in a futile attempt to freshen the stodge of its muffin top.  The overall effect is super sweet and plasticky and acetone-ish, like a 1980s My Little Pony scissored in half, or one of those rhubarb-and-custard boiled sweets you’d buy at the corner shop in Ireland circa 1993, which of course is what makes Tocade such a fun, nostalgic wear. 

 

By Killian’s take on Tocade, Woman in Gold, missed the whole point when it made the basic template smell more luxurious.  Tocade is a rose-flavored crème brulée, yes, but more the kind you’d buy in Lidl during their Turkish week than in an upmarket restaurant – and like any loukhoum-and-lipstick scent, this creamy, sugary trashiness is an essential part of its charm.  I wear Tocade only occasionally, but it’s always a good time when I do. 

 

 

Oha by Teo Cabanel 

 

Dark, lush, and curvaceous as heck, Oha smells like a 1940s vintage perfume resurrected from the dregs of a dried-up vial found in somebody’s handbag.  It smells like an authentic, honest-to-goodness musky rose chypre, by which I mean it smells almost embarrassingly sexual, in a similar vein to L’Arte di Gucci and Rose de Nuit by Lutens, but stripped back a bit so that the effect whispers rather than cat calls.  The roses are lusty and sharp – a blend of Bulgarian and Turkish – and the bed they lie on is a sort of mossy patchouli-oak-musk thing that feels suitably dank but still incredibly perfumey. 

 

Oha is as close as I have ever found to that whole ideal of your mother, dressed to the nines in a body-hugging black velvet dress and soaked in Coco by Chanel, coming in to give you a kiss goodnight.  Well, to be honest, I never had a mother like that, but when I wear Oha, I simultaneously feel like I am both the child and the mother in that fictive scenario.  This was the most unneutered and most serious perfume that Teo Cabanel has ever done, only to be promptly thrown out in 2021 with all the other perfumes by the house that didn’t smell like a bleached sun dress and citrus body spray and the whole pre-teen French girl fantasy vibe they’re going for these days.  Assholes.   

 

 

Le Mat by Mendittorosa {Full review here}

 

Le Mat is a study in decrepitude.  Picture a time-release reel of a rose blooming violently and then slowly desaturating in hue from a pulpy, blackened red to brown, dirty gold, and finally grey – a smudge of ash crushed between the pages of a book.  Everything bracketing the rose is desiccated, from the dried fallen leaves of the patchouli to the hay and dried honey spackle of the curry-ish immortelle.  It smells like summer grasses so bleached by the sun you can almost hear the cicadas.  The dense spicing of nutmeg, clove, and black pepper force-ages the rose and buries it under a fine layer of white powder, like the mastic coating on a nubbin of Orthodox incense.  I still dream about this one long after my sample is gone.  

 

 

Safran Troublant by L’Artisan Troublant  

 

Conor McTeague, my friend and much loved writer who wrote under the pen name of Jtd, died in spring of 2020, and I think about him at least once a week.  He was a far better writer (and thinker) than I could ever be, and I looked up to him immensely.  And I know that he loved me.  My heart hurts that he chose to leave, but I know that a part of him lives on in his perfume reviews.  This is why, rather than writing my own words about Safran Troublant, I want to quote Jtd, as his review of this perfume always struck me as the only thing anyone ever needed to say about it. 

 

He said that Olivia Giacobetti almost always  ‘gives us something that doesn’t really exist, but easily could since it makes perfect sense.  In Safran Troublant, she doesn’t give us a talking bear or a winged horse.  She gives us a rose/saffron marshmallow.  Not only is this imaginable, it starts to convinces me that I might actually have eaten one of these marshmallow at some time or other.  The perfume is so persuasive that I question myself.  Is the perfume a memory or an imagination?  Giacobetti speculates so effectively that I question the experience, but she does it so deftly that ultimately I don’t care.  It’s as if I’m day-dreaming.  My mind eases a bit and I become more mindful and less perplexed’. 

 

Conor, how I wish that Safran Troublant had worked a little better as a panacea.  I never wear this rose/saffron marshmallow without thinking of you.

 

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Levko Lyudochka on Unsplash 

 

Source of Samples:  I bought (or swapped for) all the perfumes I talked about in this post either in full bottle or sample form.  

     

  

 

 

 

Green Floral Iris Musk Review Rose The Discard Pile Woods

Heure Exquise by Annick Goutal: A Review

25th July 2023

 

I fought tooth and nail to get my hands on a vintage-ish bottle of Annick Goutal’s Heure Exquise, and each time I wear it, I am less and less convinced that the juice was worth the squeeze.  Yes, the sandalwood in the drydown is gloriously real, yes, the rose is a powdery delight, and yes, the iris is the starchiest, whitest Irish linen tablecloth you ever did touch.  But given the ocean of sharp, musky green soap you have to wade through to get to them, I wonder if I’d have been better off investing in another bottle of 1980s Samsara.  Until I remember that I’m not terribly fond of that one either.

 

I have no real criticism to levy at Heure Exquise in particular.  Viewed under any even halfway objective lens, it is a beautiful fragrance.  It is just that my soul remains unstirred by green, aldehydic fragrances that draw on galbanum for their emotive power. 

 

My problem, however, is that I am also drawn to the evocative descriptions of the scent’s retro, womanly charm whenever it is reviewed.  I project myself onto these descriptions, imagining myself to be the type of woman – elegant, fastened-up, but undeniably sensual – for whom Heure Exquise seems to have been created. 

 

But not only am I not that woman, once on the skin, Heure Exquise and its ilk (yes, the whole genre) smells dated to me.  Chanel No. 19, Annick Goutal Heure Exquise, Chanel Cristalle, Ormonde Jayne Tiare, Guerlain Chamade, Lancôme Climat, Amouage Gold Woman – all behemoths of classic female ‘power top’ perfumery – are scents that I respect but cannot bring myself to love.  On the rare occasion that I do wear them, any attempt to mold them to my own personality falls flat and I am left feeling slightly judged (by my own perfume!) for doing unladylike stuff in its presence, like answering emails in my underwear or balancing a bowl of peanuts on my belly as I flick through Netflix.  

 

Still, with Heure Exquise, the am-I-a-dirty-girl-or-am-I-not vibe gives me pause for thought.  Past that atmosphere-rip-tear of a virulently green, dry (gaspingly so) galbanum resin, which gives it more than a passing resemblance to Chanel No. 19, Heure Exquise settles into the almost civety-floral aroma of a bar of Chanel No. 5 soap that’s cracking and grey at the edges, making it seem not entirely impossible that this particular lady who lunches may not have changed her underwear in recent memory.   I’m not saying that it’s animalic but there is something a little poopy or yeasty about that musk-sandalwood tandem.

 

And it is precisely this quality of Heure Exquise that makes me cling to my half used bottle.  I appreciate a bit of ladylike smut holding its corner against the hospital corners of floral aldehydes (the horsey, slightly grimy undercurrent in both Vega and Cuir de Russie, for example, is exactly why I love those fragrances).  But while Heure Exquise is probably the epitome of the classic, feminine power scent and deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Mitsouko and No. 19, I am never 100% myself in it and for that reason, it has got to go. 

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Ravi Patel on Unsplash 

 

Source of sample:  I bought two bottles of vintage-ish Heure Exquise from the Parfumo Souk in 2021 – the second one only because the first was confiscated en route to me by Dutch customs.  I should have taken this as a sign from the universe that this perfume and I are ill-matched. But of course I didn’t. 

 

All Natural Amber Aromatic Balsamic Chypre Cult of Raw Materials Floral Oriental Independent Perfumery Patchouli Review Rose

Raven by Teone Reinthal Natural Perfume: A Review

12th July 2023

 

Raven by Teone Reinthal Natural Perfume (TRNP) is the kind of rose chypre that hasn’t been in production since the 1980s – big, tart roses spread strewn across bittersweet, glittery balsams and a dank, woody patchouli that smells more of mold than of the oakmoss it’s standing in for.  Something about its opening reminds me both of Oha, a dark, musky rose chypre by Teo Cabanel that has been sadly discontinued, and L’Arte di Gucci, a very civety, rude, ‘full bush’ type of rose scent.  At first you think this is going in the moody, Goth-chic direction of Voleur de Roses, but once that peachy ylang and that spiced amber comes in, you realize that this thing is wearing shoulder pads rather than black eyeliner.

 

I am consistently impressed how Teone Reinthal manages to wring a whole Coco, Opium, or even a Giorgio out of a restricted palette of naturals.  Perfumey to the point of abstraction, what Raven loses in clear-sighted focus on the rose or patchouli or ylang it makes up in sophistication: it is something that your mother or aunt would have smelled like on the nights when they came in to kiss you goodnight before leaving you with the babysitter.  Ah, the mysterious power of adult women….

 

All of which to say that Raven is a freak on the streets – the hairspray sharpness of the opening, the wet mold, the gaseous fumes off that hissing ylang – and a Chanel-blazer-wearing lady between the sheets.  It is both astonishingly beautiful and entirely too mature for my taste.

 

 

Source of sample: My friend, Alex, gifted me her sample a couple of years ago.

 

Cover Image: Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

 

Amber Balsamic Carnation Leather Opoponox Review Rose Smoke Spice Spicy Floral Suede

En Avion by Caron: A Review

24th April 2023

 

 

There’s no mistaking En Avion as anything other than a Caron.  Everything comes from a well-established rulebook – flip to page ten for the stinging clove topnote of Poivre, the smoky, medicinal amber tilting its cap to leather, well, that’s Tabac Blond, and the piles of soft, mossy, licorice-and-rose-scented face power are lifted straight out of the drydown of Nuit de Noel.

 

But I have a sneaking fondness for En Avion above and beyond these other, possibly better regarded perfumes.  It could be because that first big whoosh of scent mixes the ridiculous with the sublime – expensive jasmine mingling with the tack of sun-warmed pleather, an opulent amber against the spicy shaving soap of opoponax, or a stick of clove-scented stick of rock or bubblegum (vaguely Brighton Beach-ish) dropped into an exquisitely ornate pot of pink face powder, the kind that the sales assistants retrieve wordlessly from beneath the counter the minute they catch sight of your American Express Centurion. 

 

Mostly, though, I love that it has this opaque texture halfway between smoke and cream, and no underlying structure to speak of.  En Avion gives you all its glory upfront and then does a slow, graceful fade out that simply lowers the saturation level with each passing minute.  Wearing it reminds me of being in one of those glider planes that drift so smoothly from one altitude to the next that you are unaware of your own descent until you suddenly see the ground.  In the end, all that remains is a pouf of spicy powder from a big red tin of Imperial Leather talc, which makes me wonder if that’s all it ever was to begin with.

 

Source of sample:  I bought a 15ml bottle of En Avion extrait from Parfumerie du Soleil d’Or in Lille in late 2015.  I should have bought more.  It is half gone and doesn’t seem to be available to buy anymore.  

 

Cover Image:  My own photo.  Please kindly do not reprint or reuse without my permission. 

Animalic Balsamic Floral Herbal Incense Oud Resins Review Rose Sandalwood Spice Spicy Floral

Baruti Indigo: A Review

21st March 2023

 

Spyros Drosopoulos of Baruti is one of the most consistently original perfumers I have ever encountered.  Baruti Indigo is a case in point.  This is a perfume built on a series of weird but wearable contrasts.

 

First, it is balsamic but also airily floral.  With its clutch of frankincense and mastic, it smells like a dense wall of greenish balsams – all crushed pine needles, sap, and terpenes – through which a slightly wilted (but still deodorant fresh) tandem of oily hyacinth and lush rose throbs like a flesh wound.  Still, despite all the floral and balsamic notes, the first big hit to the synapses is of polished wood and spice.

 

It is never less than syrupy sweet, thanks to that rose, but it is also as vegetally piquant as long fingers of butter pickles fished straight from a jar to your mouth.  This watery, almost cucumberish element seems like it would make the scent feel fresh, but instead, the overall impression is one of dark, seedy warmth.

 

Something about the interaction between the peppered wood, the gripe water florals, and that balsamic curtain of green makes me think of something delicious reduced to a dark, sticky concentrate.  Its nectary heft makes me think of those balsamic vinegar glazes you buy to drizzle over a tagliata or green walnut salad – sweet, sour, and thick with the umami tang of Parmesan or soy.

 

The sandalwood and labdanum in the base are supposed to bring the bodacious comfort of an amber to finish things off, but hold up, because though there is creaminess, it is the animalic creaminess of goat yoghurt, sweat, and caramel taken too far past burning point.  The lingering tartness or acidity from the hyacinth, or maybe even from Baruti’s signature ‘nood’ – a dank, metallic, but rousing synthetic base built to approximate oud without using any of the industry’s off-the-shelf oud synths – runs in the background like an application, giving the blend an addictive piquancy that keeps your nose returning for more.

 

Like many of Spyros’ creations, Indigo is perhaps too special or distracting for me to wear on a regular basis.  But I plan to buy it one day, if only as a piece of olfactory art I bring out for those specific moments when I want to tumble down wormholes and wander the labyrinthine pathways of a true artist’s imagination.  Vero is gone.  But we still have Spyros. 

 

Source of Sample: I purchased a sample from Indiescents quite a few years ago.

 

Cover Image:  Photo by miro polca on Unsplash

 

Aromatic Chocolate Chypre Fruity Chypre Gourmand Immortelle Patchouli Rose Single note exploration Smoke Spice Woods

Personal Pantheon of Patchouli Perfumes: PART II (The Deviations)

6th March 2023

 

 

Fragrances in this group – the patchouli deviations – tend to be more perfumey, abstract, and therefore more individual in character.  Some of these deviations treat the patchouli as a fixed point on a map, others as a jumping off point into unknown avenues of discovery.  Though some clear sub-categories can still be discerned (patchouli chypre, rose-patch, fruitchouli, etc.), even the patchouli perfumes that may be said to fit a ‘type’ surprise you by sliding instead into tight slots intended, in retrospect, for them alone.  For example, though Noir de Noir (Tom Ford) and Rose Nacrée (Guerlain) both play with the rose-patch template, the first smells like French chocolate truffles and the second smells like the inside of a Mosque.

 

Stepping away from the more straightforwardly patchouli patchouli group (earth, cocoa, amber) discussed in Part I opens the door to a diverse group of potential new entrants.  Because once you start cross-pollinating patchouli with jasmine, oakmoss, immortelle, black pepper, vanilla, and tonka bean, the results vary as infinitely as the combinations to a bank vault safe.

 

On the one hand, this makes it easier to identify and avoid redundancies.  On the other, the temptation to add these fragrances to your collection is strong, precisely because each of them is special in their own unique way.  My approach to curation of this second group, therefore, is less structured than the first.  I will have to feel my way intuitively through it, being completely honest about the specialness or ‘essential-ness’ of each choice to my personal collection.

 

Remember, this is by no means a comprehensive analysis of every single patchouli-esque perfume I have ever smelled or reviewed, but rather a good hard look at my personal collection and collecting habits.

 

 

Phenolic Patchouli

Photo by Tobias Rademacher on Unsplash

 

Patchouli 24 by Le Labo.  Yes, yes, I know that 80% of the patchouli in Patchouli 24 is in its name.  And yes, if you were to argue that Patchouli 24 smells more like smoking tar pits and the aftermath of a chemical fire in a tire factory than it does patchouli, you’d certainly have a point.  But are you writing this blog, or am I?

 

Something about the way the burned, smoky ‘electrical fire’ facet mingles with the thin, poisonously sweet slick of vanillin and the faint whiff of runner’s sweat (vetiver) pooled at the base makes me feel like Lisbeth from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, chasing a bad guy down on her motorcycle.  The salty-sweet ‘glazed ham’ quality to the smoke is also something that feels weirdly sexy to me.   I would wear this more often, but for the fact that when I do, my husband stops the car to check for an electrical shortage or fire of some sort.

 

 

Immortelle Patchouli

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

 

Saying goodbye to:

 

PARFUMS Luxe: Patchouli by Comme des Garçons.  Luxe: Patchouli’s opening salvo of wet teak, hickory smoke, syrupy immortelle, anisic fenugreek, and herbal patchouli is both impressive and challenging.  I swooned when I first smelled this in a niche perfumery store in Belgium but should have remembered that scents that are characterful enough to push past the thick fuzz of hundreds of other perfumes being sprayed into the air are often too big for me when I get them home.

 

There are parts of this fragrance that I love.  It is a genius idea, for example, for the perfumer to flank the patchouli with the syrupy warmth of the immortelle, the burning white pepper, the dried alfalfa sweetgrass, and the bold smokiness of the opoponax, because these notes render all the soil out of the patchouli like fat from a sausage, leaving only its vegetal facets on display.  On the other hand, vegetal in patchouli speak always translates to a stewed celery-like tonality, which is not ideal, because, you know, walking around smelling like a vegetable stock cube is not something I aspire to.

 

And unfortunately, this is the aspect that gets further accentuated by the curryish fenugreek note, which smells like crushed celery seeds mixed with pine and mint.  I can take fenugreek in spicy sandalwood settings (like Santal de Mysore by Serge Lutens) but my tolerance level plummets when it is shoved up against an already vegetal-smelling patchouli.  There is nothing like this in my collection, let alone my patchouli collection, but Luxe: Patchouli gets worn too infrequently to earn a permanent place.

 

Dreaming about:

 

Le Mat by Mendittorosa.  A dry-yet-syrupy exposition on the same immortelle-patchouli idea as Luxe: Patchouli, but far less confrontational and saturnine than the Comme des Garcons.  I find it beautiful.  However, at €250 a bottle, it is one of those small, precious things that I am content to file away in my memory palace and think about every now and then.         

 

 

Rose-and-Patchouli

Photo by Salman Khan on Unsplash

 

Rose-patchouli fragrances work in much the same way as rose-oud fragrances do, in that they pair something lush, floral, sweet and stereotypically feminine (the rose) with something rougher, darker, woodier and more stereotypically masculine (patchouli, oud).  The fragrance works because the contrast works.  For some reason, rose-patchouli fragrances all have a slightly Victorian, gothic feel to them – stormy, dramatic, morose (serious Morrissey vibes) – while rose-oud fragrances read as dry and exotic.  I must be in the mood to wear a rose-patchouli fragrance, as they tend to feel quite rich and over-bearing on my skin, and I am not always ready for their sturm-und-drang.  However, I have found two that both suit me and fill very different mood slots in my collection.

 

Eau de Protection by Etat Libre d’Orange, aka Rossy de Palma.  This is the Gothic darkness I’d been hoping for from Voleur de Roses.  The opening is bright and scratchy feeling, teeming with enough ginger, pepper, and geranium to make you wince.  This is soon somewhat softened by a cocoa-ish musk that feels slightly funky in a cat’s paws kind of way, which in turn sets the stage for a dramatic smackdown between the drawing-blood-on-metal sharpness of geranium, wine, a pulp fiction rose, and an earthy patchouli.  Towards the end, the scent seems to lurch between dried earth, roses, musk, amber, and cocoa, shunting you from the high-toned and pitchy to the dusky and velvety, and then back again.  The whole ride, which takes place over ten hours on my skin, never once feels comfortable or predictable.  Bravo you weird, wonderful people at Etat Libre d’Orange!  This is as jolie-laide as Signora Rossy de Palma herself.

 

 

Rose Nacrée du Desert by Guerlain.  By rights, Rose Nacrée du Desert is a balsamic rose-oud – exotic and Eastern in character – rather than a rose-patchouli.  Yet, for me, the role played by the patchouli is so central to its character that I personally classify it as part of the rose-and-patchouli sub-genre.  It is dry, rich, and as hefty as a hippo.  A bright, jammy Taif rose is set down to smolder in a pit of smoking resins, medicinal saffron, and the sour, incensey greenness of oud wood, and this accord is what dominates the scene at first.  But then, in the drydown, in rolls that tremendously gloomy, soil-like patchouli, trampling all over a powdery, sweet benzoin to give it a dirty, lived-in edge.  Rose Nacrée means pearlized rose, which implies something delicate or femme.  But nope.  This is the darkly beautiful oil anointing the beard and robes of Emirati men, wafting evocatively in their trail as they head into the Mosque for evening prayer.  

 

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

 

Voleur de Roses by L’Artisan Parfumeur.  Voleur de Roses is a relatively simple scent based on three notes – rose, patchouli, and stone fruit – but it is the interplay between these notes that makes it fascinating.  The opening is that of plums on the turn, the sweet smell of fruit slowly rotting in the sun.  Since this is so quickly joined by wet young rose and an earthy patchouli, you are never quite sure whether the fruity decay belongs to the rose or to the freshly upturned earth, so the rotting plums effectively form a bridge between the rose and patchouli.

 

The feel of the perfume is wet, lush, and botanical.  It is certainly not as dark or as brooding as reviews paint it.  The patchouli dominates the rose, yes, but it is not a sinister, raw, or aggressive sort of patchouli.  In fact, the whole thing comes off as delicate and transparent, like a Japanese silk screen print.  With notes as lusty as patchouli and rose these, you want the scent to be deep, bloody, resonant and almost pounding in their intensity.  Or at least I do.  But Voleur de Roses never delivers the intensity I crave, and to add insult to injury, it seems to dissipate from my skin in under two hours.  And I refuse to pay L’Artisan Parfumeur prices for what amounts to a patchouli-rose splash.  

 

 

Sexy Baby Powder Patchouli (Yes, it’s a category, deal with it)

Photo by Miguel Salgado on Unsplash

 

Patchouli Bohème by LM Parfums.  Immediately, this recalls the smeary aroma of the ladies’ communal changing room where my mother would bring me into as a little child to wait while she tried on clothes.  The closed air swollen with the collective unsnapping of bras and unpeeling of pantyhose, the yeasty aroma of cooped-up underboob and flesh rolls suddenly released from their whalebone prisons, and the clouds of deodorizing talcum powders moistened by the day’s wear and tear.

 

At the center of all this is a balmy-greasy accord like clay or playdough spiked with the rosy-minty spikes of geranium leaf.  There is an ungodly amount of tonka bean in this, its slightly roasted almond butter facet roughed up by an oily patchouli masquerading as a black leather jacket.  Thanks to the strong role played by the tolu balsam, the texture of the perfume oscillates between sticky (turgid, airless, and ‘brown’) but and dusty (baby powder spliced with glints of metal).  Tolu balsam is similar to benzoin (woody, vanillic, spicy) but deeper, waxier, and more medicinal, with a pronounced leathery or tobacco like effect.  In Patchouly Bohème, it is as essential as the patchouli.  This is a scent that catches me off guard every time I wear it, because I never anticipate the way its soft, balmy, nutty-powdery skin is just a front – a wee baby Shalimar – hiding this massively earthy, roasted leather.  It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

 

 

Peppery Patchouli

Photo by Pratiksha Mohanty on Unsplash

 

Lord of Misrule by Lush.  The opening smells like black pepper but only if you imagine a handful of black pepper powder being blown at you through the sweet, glittery miasma of mica and minerals that hovers around the bath bomb wall at Lush.  If you told me this is what Outer Space smells like, I’d believe you.

 

Straight away, there are two layers.  The first, that minty-mineralic ‘bath bomb’ dust that impregnates every available air particle to the point you feel a little ‘choked out’.  The second, a wet, syrupy-sweet accord that smells a little like the Coca Cola syrup you mix with seltzer in a Soda Stream.  In this regard, it feels like Lush is recycling a few ideas from previous perfumes in Lord of Misrule, most notably the bright, Coca Cola-ish marmalade-myrrh accord from 1000 Kisses Deep and the burnt sugar notes from All Good Things.  The patchouli is hiding out in the heart, but it is so heavily bookended by the sharp pepper and the syrupy amber that, for the first hour or two, it is easy to miss.

 

But the greyish fuzz of minerals and space dust eventually burns off, revealing a sumptuous patchouli amber so rich you can almost feel it as a weight on your skin.  Essentially, in marrying a sexy ice-creamy amber-vanilla tandem to a headshoppy patchouli (think more the incensey sweetness of patchouli nag champa than the essential oil), Lush has recreated the more expensive feel of niche vanillambers, like Ani (Nishane) or Ambre Extrême (L’Artisan Parfumeur) but charges you a mere €35 for the pleasure.  As long as Lush makes Lord of Misrule, I will be buying it.

 

 

Green Patchouli

Photo by Rebecca Orlov | Epic Playdate on Unsplash

 

One herbal and dusty, one creamy and playdough-y.  Both greenish.  Both essential (to me).   

 

Cozé 02 by Parfumerie Generale.  Coze smells like someone picked up the nicest smelling things in the world – coffee, pepper, dark chocolate, hash resin, patchouli – and shoved them into a perfume.  For something that references both hash and the chocolate we eat when we get the munchies, this is as far away from the druggy atmosphere of a teenage boy’s bedroom as can be.  The sativa note has been cleverly married to a host of other green, herbal, and woody elements, thus yanking the whole thing outdoors.  Whenever I wear this, I feel like I am in the company of friendly lumberjacks, sitting down in a forest opening to coffee, brownies, and a funny cigarette or two after a morning of cutting down trees.  It is the type of perfume that makes you feel happy in an uncomplicated way.

 

The opening is rather dry and dark – a brief boozy patch followed by ashy tobacco and a fine dusting of something that can only be cocoa powder.  It is delicious and slightly spicy, with hot pepper and cloves.  This ashen layer is fitted closely over a sticky green hemp base, and then finally set to smolder on a base of mahogany wood chips.   There is a near perfect balance between edible and inedible, dry and balmy, and smoke and cold, clean air.  Technically, it would probably be correct to call Coze a quasi-gourmand, but its genius lies in dotting the foody notes so evenly around a dark, woodsy, smoky base that it would never occur to anyone to call it yummy.

 

 

Arbolé Arbolé by Hiram Green.  Full review here.  There is a wonderfully soft, smeary quality to the patchouli used here – it is clearly patchouli, but not at all headshoppy.  Rather, backlit with a greenish, rosy tint that makes me think of exotic liqueurs, it takes on a pleasantly stale, waxy chocolate softness that recalls vintage make-up, heavy silks taken out of storage in cedar trunks, and huge beeswax candles dripping over everything.  There is a sort of cosmetic, floral wax tonality that smudges the corners of the other notes and gives the perfumes a touch of vintage glamour.  Hiram Green perfumes wear as if lit from within and this is no exception.

 

All the individual characteristics of the raw materials – the cedar, patchouli, sandalwood – have been sanded down until only a smooth, integrated woodiness remains.  There is none of the normal bitter muskiness of cedar, none of the raw, earthy, or leafy facets of patchouli, and the sandalwood registers only as a unifying texture of creamy butter.  There is a smutty quality to this perfume that appeals enormously to me.  It shares the same soft ‘musky cocoa powder’ sexiness with Mazzolari Lei and Parfumerie Generale L’Ombre Fauve, both of which also blur the lines between patchouli, musk, and ambery-vanilla aromas so smoothly that the nose doesn’t immediately recognize one or the other.

 

 

Patchouli Nu-Chypres (Sans Moss)

Photo by Irene Kredenets on Unsplash

 

I have two favorites in this category.  Stellar job at curation, Claire!  Both use the earthy-minty ‘emotional remoteness’ of patchouli as a replacement for oakmoss in the chypre equation.  But they are so different to one another, as well as criminally discontinued and therefore unobtanium, that I have no choice (no choice, I tell you!) but to keep both in my collection.  

 

Bottega Veneta eau de parfum (For Her) by Bottega Veneta.  Like the famous intrecciato handbag upon which it is based, Bottega Veneta weaves together tonally-greige strands of plum, jasmine, and patchouli for a dusky, hoarse-throated take on suede.  It has the same milky bitterness you get in other light suede fragrances such as Daim Blond (Serge Lutens), which it resembles slightly.  But it is the addition of the gruff, stone-washed patchouli that makes Bottega Veneta the more robust and sexier scent.  Sadly, Bottega Veneta has discontinued this perfume, along with all its original ‘department store’ perfumes, choosing instead to throw the brand’s entire marketing budget at its soulless, couldn’t-strike-upon-an-idea-if-it-tried luxury segment (Le Gemme).  Well, fuck you very much, Bottega Veneta.

 

 

31 Rue Cambon by Chanel.  This is a fragrance that proves that a fragrance doesn’t need oakmoss for it to smell like a proper chypre.  Though I didn’t love it at first, it has slowly taken hold in my life, occupying roughly the same general space in my head as Mitsouko (Guerlain) and Profumo (Acqua di Parma).  But because Rue Cambon draws on a dry patchouli to provide that bitter mossiness essential to the drydown of a chypre, it is more modern, i.e., more streamlined in structure and far less powdery.

 

31 Rue Cambon is essentially a jostling together of ice and earth – the bitter, stinging purity of that bergamot, the Grappa-like chill of orris root, a touch of milky peach skin and jasmine in the heart to fool you into thinking that there is something akin to human warmth in here (there isn’t) – all grounded by a patchouli material that smells more like dried rose petals crumbled into dried earth than the chocolatey version used in Coromandel.  It makes me smell like someone who has her shit together.  The version I wear – the original eau de toilette – was discontinued in autumn of 2016, a sacrificial lamb slaughtered on the altar to modern consumer demand for beauty to last more than five hours (the fucking heathens).   Unfortunately, the post-2016 eau de parfum version suffers from an overload of thick, swampy ylang or vetiver that suffocates the lacy delicacy of the bergamot-iris-jasmine-patchouli structure.

 

In other words, when both my Bottega Veneta and 31 Rue Cambon are gone, I will be nu-chypre-less.  

    

 

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

 

Mon Parfum Chéri, par Camille by Annick Goutal.  A throwback chypre, all sharp elbows and no curves – and yet Mon Parfum Chéri, par Camille is a modern construction, launched in 2011.  The plum note is tart and sour, the iris starchy, and the patchouli as dry as a bone.  It manages to be rich and dark without being earthy, and light and powdery without being sweet.  For me, it immediately formed a memory bridge between the mossy plum of Guerlain’s discontinued chypre, Parure, the woody violets of Bois de Violette (Serge Lutens) – without the candied sweetness – and the dirty patchouli drydowns of grungy drugstore rose chypre classics such as La Perla Classic.  Its bitter, dusty grandeur suggests a perfume with a long and storied past, like Mitsouko.  I respect the hell out of Mon Parfum Chéri, par Camille (to the extent that I bought and sold it twice in two years) but found it difficult to wear comfortably.  I struggled to bend it to my will, make it sink properly into my skin.  Its noli-me-tangere air made it a forbidding and standoffish experience.

 

 

Oakmossy Pagan Patchouli

Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

 

Aromatics Elixir by Clinique.  We all know what Aromatics Elixir smells like.  Or do we?  It initially smelled murky and old-fashioned to me, until I leaned into it and realized that it is one of the great perfume anachronisms of the last century.  Created by Barnard Chant in 1975, Aromatics Elixir blazed a trail of agrestic patchouli, bitter herbs, rose, resins, and moss through what was a very different perfume world, setting itself in opposition to the clean, sporty fragrances that followed soon after but also breaking ties with the mannered formality of the green floral chypres of the fifties and sixties.  Aromatics Elixir’s groovy, loose-hipped manner is the kind of messy that earns you a lifetime of therapy later.  Sometimes it smells less like a perfume and more like a collection of elements a pagan goddess might summon from the undergrowth.  It lives exclusively in the small, private space between my clavicle and my sweater where it can do the least damage.  I apply the potent urine-yellow juice delicately – sprayed lightly onto my fingertips and then pressed gently onto my flesh – but in the end, the submission is all mine.

 

 

Saying goodbye to:

 

Beloved Woman by Amouage.   Beloved is beautifully done.  But was it necessary for me to invest in a whole bottle of it when it is clearly Amouage’s homage to Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir?  No, Claire, it most certainly was not.  Example number 202 of spectacularly poor judgement.  Beloved opens with a bitter, powdered clove, lavender, and sage combination that smells as aromatic and talc-like as Histoires de Parfums’ 1876.  But really, the rose, the hay-like chamomile, and the sage all combine to sing an Aromatics Elixir-shaped song.  Beloved is a fine lady, and Aromatics a hippy mom.  But the essential bone structure is there.  One might have been the other had different choices been made, and all that.

 

Now, of course, there are differences.  Aromatics Elixir is earthier, its airways gunked up with patchouli.  And the rose note in Beloved is arguably more remarkable.  Hidden behind the aromatic powder of the opening, you might miss it at first, but then it swells in intensity, rising from a crumble of dusty potpourri rose petals to become a big, juicy rose fluffed out by moisture.  The rose lingers for a while in a pool of boozy, hay-like immortelle, for a combination that is simultaneously syrupy and dry, sweet and savory.

 

But again, did these small differences provide adequate justification for slapping down a cool €300-and-something down on the table for a bottle of Beloved when Aromatics Elixir performs the same basic trick of making you feel womanly, powerful, and in control of your own fate, but at a cost that is almost ten times less?  No, Claire, they did not.  

 

 

Already yeeted from the Patchouli Patch:

 

Noir Patchouli by Histoires de Parfum.  A very refined take on the Bernard Chant canon of patchouli classics from Aramis 900 to Aromatics Elixir, retrofitted for modern tastes with a soft leather bag accent, every inch of its lining thickly dusted with green floral cosmetic powders.  But the earthy, almost metallic bitterness comes from the tree moss rather than from the patchouli, so while it is dark, it is also fresher and livelier (mintier) than expected.  I liked it, but liking is not a strong enough emotion for me to keep anything.  And once I’d spotted the familial Aromatics Elixir DNA, it was time for it to go.

 

 

Tramp by Lush.  Tramp was my Lush favorite body wash for a full decade, so when I got the chance to order a bottle of Tramp perfume from the Lush Kitchen in 2016 or 2017, I didn’t hesitate.  A simple blend of two especially dank forest-floor materials – patchouli and oakmoss – I can understand why they were forced to discontinue it in this post-IFRA world (my last remaining bottle of the body wash still lists Evernia prunastri on the label).  What I don’t understand is why I loved the shower gel so much and the perfume not at all.  In one of those ‘be careful what you wish for’ scenarios, it turns out that a straight-up, one-two punch of patchouli and oakmoss smells like an unfinished sketch of Polo or Brut.  Bitter, aftershavey, pungent, and unrelenting – gah!

 

 

Patchouli Truffles

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

 

Unlike the cocoa aspect of the more patchouli-forward fragrances in Part I, which appear only as a facet of the patchouli material itself, this category refers to a more explicitly gourmand treatment, i.e., melted chocolate, dark chocolate truffles, Nutella, etc.  Where patchouli becomes transubstantiated into something purely edible.   

 

Noir de Noir by Tom Ford.  The recipe in Nigella Lawson’s ‘Feast’ for Chocolate Guinness Cake makes an enormous wodge of damp, dense (yet springy) chocolate cake of the deepest black imaginable, topped with a thick single layer of white cream cheese frosting meant to resemble the head on a pint.  The beauty of this cake is the way what Nigella calls ‘the ferrous twang’ of Guinness holds its own against the chocolatey sweetness of the crumb and the tartness of the cream cheese.  If you think about it, the pairing makes sense – there is something almost animalic, or at least iron-rich, like blood, that connects the loamy darkness of stout (and soil) with the aroma of a 90% cocoa bar of chocolate being melted in a bain marie.

 

Noir de Noir uses the iodine-like sting of saffron to perform the same trick.  The slightly garbagey, vegetal iron-filling aspect of the spice acts upon the patchouli and roses to create an extraordinarily dark truffle accord that feels like a cross-section of that Chocolate Guinness Cake.  It’s worth noting that the rose note here is slightly rosewater-ish, providing a chippy Turkish Delight brightness that countermands the black velvet lushness of the chocolate-oud.  Probably the most romantic perfume in my collection, though, like dark chocolate and Turkish Delight, a strictly once-in-a-blue-moon kind of craving.

 

 

Angel Muse by Thierry Mugler.  Full review here.  Muse is an improvement on the original Angel because (a) it manages to drown out the high-octane Maltol shriek of its predecessor with a velvety blanket of hazelnut cream, and (b) the treatment of the patchouli in Muse tacks towards gianduja rather than the sour, wet dishrag left to molder overnight in a sink of the original Angel.  Muse smells both edible and inedible, like a posh chocolate truffle mashed underfoot into the warm, sweet grass of a polo pitch, which makes it a successful perfume rather than just a successful gourmand perfume.  The addition of vetiver is critical.  Vetiver often smells like ground hazelnuts (see Vetiver Tonka, Sycomore, Onda) but adds a savory, mealy element that restrains the sugar.  That effect is noticeable here, and matched to the soft chocolate of the patchouli, the inevitable result is that of a creamy, nutty chocolate truffle (gianduja).  Naturally, because I like it so much, Angel Muse has been discontinued.

 

 

Fruitchouli

Photo by Jasmine Waheed on Unsplash

The marriage of inedible (patchouli) and edible (fruit).  Note that the patchouli in this style of fragrance is usually very clean and ‘pink’, i.e., a prettied-up version of the material, stripped of all its brown, grungy earth tones, instead bulked out by tons of white musks and sweet, syrupy Maltol.  This style of fragrance is not my kind of thing, but I have managed to find two examples that I can not only bear but truly love.

 

Visa by Robert Piguet.  In a slightly similar vein to Mauboussin, Angel, and Chinatown, it would probably be more accurate to call Visa a complex, fruited ‘oriental’ with a distinct patchouli character, however since we are no longer saying the O word and since this attempt at curation is focused on patchouli, I am going to place Visa in the fruitchouli category and invite anyone with a problem with that to write me an angry letter.  The fruit notes in Visa are remarkable – white peaches, plums, and pears that smell true to life without smelling the slightest bit loud or fake.  Darkened at the edges by the burnt sugar of immortelle and wrapped up tenderly in a powdery benzoin and patchouli blanket, Visa’s peaches and plums come bathed in autumnal dusk compared to the strobe-lit glare of other fruity-floral fragrances.  There’s a certain winey, ‘stained-glass’ glow to the stone fruit here that makes me ridiculously happy.

 

Everything in Visa feels hushed.  Even the leather note is gentle – a buffed grey suede rather than a twangy new shoe.  The suede and the slight drinking chocolate powder feel in the base offers a gentle cushion for the fruit notes.  Half the pleasure I derive from wearing Visa lies in trying to guess what category it falls into.  It straddles several at once – the fruity-floral, leather chypre, fruit leather, gourmand, and yes, definitely the dreaded fruitchouli.  But far being a brainless fruity, sweet thing that you use to stun the opposite sex into submission, Visa smells poised and a little bit mysterious.

 

 

1969 Parfum de Révolte by Histoires de Parfums.  It’s a fruitchouli, but not as we know it, Jim.  The perfume’s name refers to the sexual revolution occurring in San Francisco in the late 1960s, but by 1969 the once idyllic hippy kingdom that was Haight-Ashbury had already started to be corrupted by hard drugs, homelessness, and unsavory criminal elements.  And in a way, 1969 Parfum de Révolte pays homage to this shift, by grafting an exuberantly sexy, brash fruit top onto a darkly spiced patchouli base.  At first glance, 1969 is all about playtime.  It opens with the biggest, trashiest peach note ever – as crude and as effective as a child’s painting of a peach, smeared with Day-Glo pink and orange paint.  The green cardamom note squirts a gob of Fairy washing up liquid into the pot.  Joined by a dizzying swirl of rose, chocolate, and vanilla, the peach vibrates and expands at an alarming rate until you feel like you are literally walking around in your own personal fantasy ice-cream sundae (one that features liberal helpings of vinyl and boiled sweets).

 

Once the shock and awe of the fruit-vanilla assault dies down, spicier elements enter the picture and quietly anchor the whole thing.  The mid-section is a fruity rose and vanilla spiced with the gentle green heat of cardamom pods and the woody warmth of coffee beans.  The fruity, creamy roundness is still there, but now with depth and presence.  I like 1969 Parfum de Révolte because it gives me both the low-rent pleasure of a Tocade-style plastic rose-vanilla and a darker, more adult finish that rescues it from tipping too far into the gourmand category.  When all analysis is folded up and put away, what’s left is a sexy catcall of a fruitchouli with just the right balance of vulgarity and wit.

 

 

Saying goodbye to:

 

 

Coco Mademoiselle Eau de Parfum Intense by Chanel.   I remember something in the original Guide (Perfumes: The Guide, 2009) about Chanel doing their version of Angel and being surprised (and embarrassed, it is implied) that it was such a success.  But really, what is surprising in people craving a softer, posher, Chanel-ized take on a fragrance so famously jarring?  The essential idea of Angel – sugared fruit clashing with a hoary, masculine patchouli – is a clever one but not that easy to pull off.  Coco Mademoiselle took the basic template and cleaned it all up, turning the dial from heavy, sour and syrupy to luminous, pretty, and girly.

 

The Eau de Parfum Intense version plays it very close to the model for original eau de toilette, i.e., the pinkish, perfumey fruit pop of lychee set alight with a shower of metallic aldehydes, all underlaid with a cleaned-up, fractionated version of patchouli and a shit ton of those bouncy, expensive-smelling white musks that Chanel stuffs into its fragrances.  The only innovation in the Eau de Parfum Intense is the additional warmth and depth of tonka bean, but the differences between this and the original Eau de Toilette are not as significant as, say, the differences between Mon Guerlain and Mon Guerlain Intense, or YSL Libre and YSL Libre Intense.

 

I am letting Coco Mademoiselle Eau de Parfum Intense go because I bought it for all the wrong reasons.  On my way to live in Rome in late 2018 and leaving my (very young) family behind, I saw the pinkish juice in that reassuringly square Chanel bottle in the airport duty free, and between my tears (and copious amounts of snot), I thought, why not make myself disappear by wearing something that will make me smell like practically everyone else.  It was an act of self-effacement and of sorrow.  And it worked.  Coco Mademoiselle became my urban camouflage – the skin I slipped into every morning when I felt most like a freshly peeled egg turned out into the city.  Wearing it, I instantly became one with the faceless mass of women sleepwalking their way through the metro and train systems in the mornings.

 

I stopped wearing it for two reasons.  First, Helen, a tall and lovely but rather intimidating English colleague spun me around at the train station one morning, bellowing in my ear, Oi!  Who’s been wearing my perfume then?  (Sigh.  The inevitable downside of wearing a perfume this popular).  Second, more importantly, since I no longer live in Rome and no longer suffer the absence of my children or husband, I no longer feel the need to punish myself by making myself anonymous.  Wearing Coco Mademoiselle now feels as not-me as it always was.      

 

 

Conclusion

 

Out of the 22 patchouli fragrances discussed as part this second group, I am keeping 14, or roughly two thirds.  Sigh.  You see?  This is why you should never curate in public.  Now normal people will find this blog – maybe, if my SEO is working – and wonder why on earth someone would need this many fragrances, let alone a grand total of 18 of them dedicated to patchouli.  The answer is, of course, that I’m not normal.  And if you’ve made it this far down the page, then maybe – just maybe – you aren’t so normal yourself.    

 

 

Source of samples:  All the bottles reviewed or, ahem, curated here were bought or swapped for by me.  (Using the word curated is supposed to fool both you and me into thinking that this is an artistic endeavour rather than the pitiful result of unrestrained consumption that it really is).  

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash 

Aromatic Balsamic Hay Immortelle Patchouli Review Rose Spicy Floral

Le Mat by Mendittorosa: A Review

3rd February 2023

 

 

Le Mat is a study in decrepitude.  Picture a time-release reel of a rose blooming violently and then slowly desaturating in hue from a pulpy, blackened red to brown, dirty gold, and finally grey – a smudge of ash crushed between the pages of a book.  Everything bracketing the rose is desiccated, from the dried fallen leaves of the patchouli to the hay and dried honey spackle of the curry-ish immortelle.  It smells like summer grasses so bleached by the sun you can almost hear the cicadas.  The dense spicing of nutmeg, clove, and black pepper force-ages the rose and buries it under a fine layer of white powder, like the mastic coating on a nubbin of Orthodox incense.

I have never smelled anything this dry that is also this beautiful.  But dry doesn’t mean dead.  Le Mat is more like a string of DNA captured in amber than a fossil – there is life here yet.  Bury your nose in the white dust of Le Mat, breathe on it, and sometimes a small, fleshy part of the rose or the damp soil of patchouli springs to life again.  It is this momentary, but repeatable, capacity for reanimation that makes Le Mat so special.

There are some parallels to 1876 (Histoires de Parfums) and Afternoon of a Faun (Etat Libre d’Orange), especially in the dry potpourri rose of the former and in the curried-maple immortelle chypre feel of the latter, but Le Mat is far less dandyish than 1876, and it is much drier and more controlled than Afternoon of a Faun.  Perhaps in spirit and feel, the fragrance it comes closest to is Bruno Acampora’s magisterial hay chypre, Sballo.  Both romantic and deeply moody, Le Mat is a perfume for empaths and writers and madmen who howl at the moon.

 

Source of sample:  The sample is over six years old at this point, so I can’t remember whether I bought it or received it in a swap.   

 

Cover Image:  Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash    

Amber Balsamic Honey Patchouli Resins Review Rose

Dior Mitzah: A Review

13th January 2023

 

If you’ve never smelled Dior Mitzah before, then telling you that it smells like cinnamon, honey, rose, amber and incense is about as useful as telling you that a pound cake contains butter, eggs, and flour.   Change the proportion of any one of those ingredients and you get a different result but only slightly.  Because it’s still a pound cake.  Most spicy-sparkly-balsamic ambers exist on a pound cake plane, separated by infinitesimal degrees of smoke or sweetness or heft.  Perfumes like Ambre Sultan (Serge Lutens), Ambra Aurea (Profumum Roma), Miyako (Annayake), Vento nel Vento (Bois 1920), and yes, Mitzah (Dior) all form part of a universal comfort lexicon.  It is hard to go wrong with any of them.  But they are also much of a muchness.

 

There are primarily three things that distinguish Mitzah.  First, its texture.  For a scent made with such heavy materials – honey, labdanum, cardamom, patchouli – it feels remarkably airy, like gauze stretched across a window.  Mitzah wears as if all these materials had been placed in a low oven, dried overnight, and then, once cooled, ground to a fine golden mica that applies like one of those edible body dusting powders.  If you’ve ever eaten a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut right after the red light flashes, then you’ll know that sensation of sinking your teeth into that thin glaze and suddenly finding nothing in your mouth but air because the entire thing dissolved the minute it hit the warmth of your tongue.  Mitzah replicates that.

 

Second, the peppery bitterness introduced by the cardamom note, which firmly pushes back against the glittery sweetness of the perfumed, freeze-dried air that is the rest of Mitzah.  The same might be said for the gentle earthiness of the patchouli, which subtly darkens the bright rose gold aura of the scent and gives it a hint of something approaching depth.  These little counterpoints give Mitzah an air of balance and refinement not that common in the amber genre.

 

Third, there is a ghostly ‘roasted’ note that smells like the sesame seeds or cinnamon sticks toasted in a dry pan.  It is not a major component, but it adds a point of interest, much like the crushed thyme and bay leaf in Ambre Sultan, or the licorice and spilled petrol notes in Vento nel Vento.  Mitzah needs this point of interest, because without it, it becomes one of those diaphanous ambery-spicy scents without distinction that you throw on for comfort on a cold day and promptly forget about five minutes later.   And while I don’t think Mitzah is quite as interesting or as exceptional as its reputation makes it out to be (Paris exclusivity having greatly shaped its mystique over the years), it does do an excellent job of straddling that gap between mindless comfort and intentionality.  For that reason alone, I can almost forgive myself for not buying Eau Noire instead when I was last downwind of the Dior Paris Mothership’s postal reach.      

 

Cover Image: Photo by Lucas Kapla on Unsplash

 

Source of SampleSample, ha!  My jeroboam-sized bottle laughs in the face of a mere sample.  Does double duty as a barbell.  Purchased by my own fair hand in 2017 from Dior Paris.