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Chanel

Chypre Immortelle Iris Masculine Review Woods

Etat Libre d’Orange Afternoon of a Faun

29th June 2015

Etat Libre d’Orange Afternoon of a Faun is NOT an oriental, powdery, spicy leather as the notes might suggest. Nope, this one muscles its way into the green chypre category with an overall vibe halfway between a drenched forest and a bowl full of crushed iris roots. It’s described as an aromatic, spicy scent on Fragrantica and as an incense-leather oriental here, but actually, it comes off as a scorched-earth chypre.

It shouldn’t work. But the contrast of wet, bitter green iris and the dry woods is all kinds of addictive.

I love the way it takes me on a ride every time I put it on. It reminds me somewhat of a vintage No. 19 pure parfum I had from the 1950’s which had turned badly – it shares something of that singed woods and burned coffee smell the parfum had. But in contrast, Afternoon of a Faun smells really good to me.

Right away, the strangeness of the immortelle note is apparent. It adds a sticky, savory syrup note, like sugared hay boiled down in whiskey. This has the effect of injecting the chilly green halls of No. 19 with streaks of autumnal warmth. So, for once, you have a damp, mossy chypre that smells….warm, human, sunny almost. It makes this an exceedingly comfortable wear without sacrificing an ounce of its stylish swagger, like a pair of fabulous, wide-cut slacks that are both comfortable and capable of making you look like Marlene Dietrich.

I love, love, love the textures at play in Afternoon of a Faun too. The opening is sort of damp and glazed, like the patina from old wood that you’ve just loving rubbed with oil. The immortelle adds a spicy, vegetal syrupy feel, and orris butter a creamy, rooty smell and texture. It is sweet, but also dry and slightly spicy, like good old wood.

In the dry down, the most amazing transformation in texture takes place – it sheds any sticky or wet feel it may have add, and becomes dry and smoky, like ash smoldering in the grate. At this stage, the immortelle smells like slightly burned coffee, which is a wonderfully dry, aromatic smell that I really enjoy.

In fact, I feel comfortable characterizing this as a dry, smoky iris perfume with a significant green/woody aspect to it. It smells like a real chypre too, even without oakmoss, so hats off to the folks at ELDO for proving that you can still produce a fantastic perfume that smells like the real deal rather than a sad sack imitation of what once was.

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Summer

Chanel No. 5 Eau Premiere

25th June 2015
Champagne
Sergey Melkonov / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

A beautifully sheer, crisp take on the enduring classic that is Chanel No. 5, the wonderful Chanel No. 5 Eau Premiere is perfect for anyone who adores the original but who finds it too rich and too bombastic for use in the summer heat. Or indeed, for anyone who can’t stand the original.

To be perfectly honest, although I do have a healthy appreciation for the original (especially in its vintage extrait form), it’s not a perfume I ever managed to love. I do love Eau Premiere, though. To me, it smells like a glass of lemony champagne poured over powdered rose, jasmine, and sandalwood. If the original No. 5 is a luxurious cashmere, Eau Premiere is a gossamer-thin silk. Just the ticket for a lunch out with girlfriends on a hot day.

It’s been reformulated. The first version, in the tall bottles, is the best, but is very difficult to find these days. The current version, housed in the more standard-issue Chanel square bottles (those tall bottles must have made the OCD folks at Chanel shudder every time they walked past a Chanel display in a department store), is closer to the original No. 5, and is all around a heavier, muskier, more abstract thing altogether.

I’ve been through a whole 150ml bottle of the original version, but now that I’m out, I’m not bothering with the new version. I’m done. Switching to 31 Rue Cambon instead from here on out.

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Oud

Oud Satin Mood

25th June 2015

Oud Satin Mood by Maison Francis Kurkdijan is a big, fat Middle Eastern sweet, the kind that is doused in rose syrup, thickened with salep, aromatized with mastic, sprinkled with rosewater and pistachios, and then, finally, dusted with a thick layer or five of powdered sugar so thick your teeth leaves indents in it.

Which means, of course, that I love it.

How could I not? I live in a country so thoroughly marked by a Turkish occupation in the late 1500s that every second word in the food vocabulary is Turkish. And since Turkish cuisine is influenced also by high Persian cuisine, we have quite a few Persian words for food too. Lokum (Turkish delight), halva, tulumba (fried cakes doused in honey syrup), baklava, sutlias (rice pudding) and many, many others – well, you get the picture.

To be honest, I don’t like to eat that stuff – but I do love perfumes that are based on what they smell like.

To me, Oud Satin Mood is a real standout in the Middle Eastern “dessert” genre (if such a genre exists outside of my own head, that is). The opening smells like a thick jam of berries and rose petals stirred through a pot of condensed milk on the stove. We are preparing to make Kulfi here. As vanilla, milk, sugar, and rose petals are cooked down, the sugar and sweet milk combine to produce a sort of toffee-like note.

This sounds almost oppressively sweet, doesn’t it? But it’s not, I swear. There’s a shot of violet here too, which combined with the rose, injects the mixture with the powdery smell you get when you open a Chanel pressed powder compact. It smells, in short, like a Middle Eastern sweet crossed (and leavened with) a rich cosmetics powder accord.

There is also a very faint backbone of oud, and although it’s very subtle, it adds a medicinal woodiness that keeps the sugariness of the vanilla-milk syrup and rose jam in check. At this stage, it smells like MFK’s original Oud got together with Chanel’s Misia and had a baby. In a Middle Eastern pastry shop.

Oh, and the sillage, baby, the sillage!……this one wafts across crowded bars and noisy parties. A perfume as opulent and as powdered as this demands a generous bosom from which to radiate. Could a man wear this? I don’t see why not, as long as the man in question likes deeply sweet, powdery fragrances. He will be missing the cleavage, though. This perfume needs the cleavage.

It gets a bit too monotonously sweet in the dry down. The oud and rose disappear leaving only the hefty vanilla-amber and violet-y powder to do the heavy lifting. I wonder, with the amber and violet, if this smells anything like the fabled Guet–Apens by Guerlain? I’ve never smelled it, so I don’t know. Maybe someone can report back.

Anyone who dislikes powder or very sweet vanillas and ambers might have a problem with this. For a while, I could have sworn there was both caramel and white musk in this, so powdery and syrupy-sweet was the dry down, but I can’t see it listed in the notes anywhere. It must be the amber.

It reminds me somewhat of the crumbly butter cookies I smell in the far dry down of Tocade, but maybe even more of the oppressively-thick musk and caramel dry down of Dame Perfumery’s Black Flower Mexican Vanilla, which represents my own personal line in the sand when it comes to powder and sweetness. In short, I love most of this perfume except for the final last gasps, where it gets a bit cloying.

The price is €306 for 70ml, which is a bit too rich for my blood and especially for a perfume where the oud note – real or synthetic as the case might be – is simply too subtle to justify the cost. But there’s no denying that this is a real bombshell of a perfume and a standout in the Middle Eastern sweet gourmand/oud genre.

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Leather Review Scent Memory

Chanel Cuir de Russie

25th June 2015

I grew up riding horses. Chanel Cuir de Russie is the archetypal Proustian Madeleine that hurtles me back through the corridors of time to the simple pleasure of resting my face against the neck of a sweaty horse. It is THE classic floral leather. We grew up in a family with lots of kids and very little money, so I begged, borrowed, or stole horses to ride on whenever I could. I did hard labor on a farm in exchange for rides on a fat, bad-tempered pony, and when I outgrew him, my dad drove me to the nearest racing stables and volunteered my services.

Now, looking back, it might not have been the safest or wisest of things to glibly offer your thirteen-year-old daughter to a working racehorse stables in Ireland. Those places are rough and the horses are dangerous. I would sit precariously perched, knees up near my ears, on over a thousand pounds of fast moving horseflesh as they galloped 35 miles per hour around a muddy track or down the beach…..looking back, it makes me shudder. But then again, my dad taught all four of us kids to swim by picking us up and throwing us into the Irish Sea and yelling “Now SWIM, you little feckers!” so maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised.

Anyway, there was this wonderful, quiet moment every morning that I would cherish – after racing the horses on the beach, we would take their saddles off, throw the reins over their heads and lead them into the sea to cool their legs down. There, I would lean in and rest my face against the flank of the horse, dark and wet with sweat. Often, the sweat would lie in creamy rings looping around the flesh where the English saddle had been, so your nose would be taking in the smell of leather and sweat at once. I loved that moment, and now I wish I could get that simple sort of peace again – the sort of exhausted peace that exists between two animals who have taken exercise together. At home, I would often have no time to get ready for school, so I would just wash my arms, neck and face with Imperial Leather soap, and head off to school.

Cuir de Russie smells like me and this moment in time – horsey, vaguely dirty/sweaty in a clean sort of way, creamy soap, warm horse flank, and the underside of English leather saddles freshly lifted off a horse who has run five kilometres up and down a beach in County Wexford, Ireland. No more, no less. I can’t identify or dissect any of the notes in this beyond the soapy aldehydes and the soft, vaguely floral leather, and I can’t for the life of me imagine how you go about reconstructing a horse in such 3D glory using the simple list of notes I see for it. In fact, I would rather remain in ignorance for fear of breaking the power it has to conjure up that memory, just like I imagine Proust didn’t bother asking his housemaid what type of butter and what type of flour went into making his Madeleine. I am simply glad that this exists in the world.

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