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Guerlain

Fruity Chypre Review

Guerlain Mitsouko

1st July 2015

Guerlain Mitsouko is by far the most fascinating, and at times frustrating, perfume in my collection. I have a complicated relationship with her. How I feel about Mitsouko depends very much on what she decides to show of herself to me on any given day. Some days, she is cold and reserved, and whatever glimpse of peaches I get is more like a pan of hard, unripe fruit being simmered in formaldehyde in a far off room than the ripe, juicy fruit of which others speak. Oh but when she decides to relent! There is nothing better than Mitsouko when she is in a good mood. Slowly, she will drop her standoffish reserve and part her musty curtains to reveal a bed of spiced peaches on a dark, mossy bed – this Mitsouko is playful and mysterious.

I am working on a theory that you can break Mitsouko a little, or at least try to bend her to your will by placing her in situations where she is forced to come out of her shell. I discovered this when I spritzed it on one day in Spring this year before going for a long, six hour walk through the city with my husband, young son, baby daughter and my mum. By the end of the day, Mitsouko had taken on this salty, outdoorsy, herbal aspect that merged with the faint sweat on my skin. It was if both Mitsouko and I had finally learned to stop pacing edgily around each other and just chill out a bit.

Part of my frustration is her unpredictability. I can never know which one of her Janus faces she will show me on any given day. I own Mitsouko in many different concentrations and vintages: the 2013 EDP, a 1970’s EDT, a 1960’s EDT (onion bottle), the modern pure perfume, and lastly, a 1970’s spray deodorant. Each one of them smells, and behaves, slightly different on my skin, and none of them are consistent in what they reveal to me of their character. For example, today, to write this , I sprayed the 1970’s EDT – a version with real oakmoss listed on the back of the bottle – on the back of one arm. It is usually the friendliest version of them all, for me. But today, its opening was rather severe and unforgiving.

Two hours in, however, and I get a surprise! For the first time in my relationship with Mitsouko, she is giving me a glimpse of her spiced floral mid-section, the rose, ylang, and jasmine that when combined with the peach and moss, manage to smell like freshly proved bread dough. It’s delicious. I am not sure how long this little détente will last, so I am holding my breath, hoping not to alert her to my presence. If it is not clear by now, then I will say it openly: Mitsouko is not a perfume you own. She owns you. As for me, she’s grabbed me by the short and curlies, if not my heart strings, and doesn’t seem like she’s letting go anytime soon.

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Review Rose

Guerlain Nahema

30th June 2015

Guerlain Nahema is a perfume that I am struggling to wrap my head around. Part of the problem is that it smells nothing like the image I had built up in my head based on descriptors used over and over in the many reviews on this famous perfume, words like “lush”, “honeyed”, “sexy”, and “bombastic”. On my skin, it reads as a pale, vegetal rose choked back by a bush of oily green thorns and the pale green talc of hyacinth. In fact, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the spicy, resinous green floral of Chamade than to other perfumes in the fruity, oriental rose category such as Amouage’s Lyric Woman.

My first impression was not favorable. But I persisted, knowing that some of the classic Guerlains can take years of testing before truly understanding and loving the perfume. After weeks of sustained testing from my decant, I began to notice an interesting thing – Nahema comes alive as a rose only in its far sillage. I sprayed some on as a mid-course refresher during a family lunch, and my niece nearly swooned. “What do you smell?” I asked her. “Roses, big red roses, and maybe some fruit?”, she replied, “Definitely spices too. Oh, it is so beautiful!”

Ever since then, I’ve wondered if I am hunting the mystical rose in Nahema the same way I hunted for Mitsouko’s peach for a whole year – that is, in completely the wrong way, with my nose pressed anxiously against my wrist, like a detective looking so hard for a clue that he fails to notice the obvious. Perhaps Nahema’s rose just needs some room to breathe and unfold into being, on her own time. It’s funny, but I expected Nahema to be simpler than Mitsouko, which it is, but I hadn’t expected the main advertised note to be so damn elusive.

As always with Guerlain classics, the concentration and the vintage of the version one is testing tend to differ wildly. This certainly holds true for Nahema. I have a small decant of the 1980’s Parfum de Toilette and a 2ml bottle of the pure parfum (modern, I believe). The Parfum de Toilette is green, tart, and strident all the way through, and recalls Chamade more than anything else. Here and there in the PDT, I do catch whiffs of a pale, chalky rose and some fruit, but on the whole, it is not particularly inviting.

The pure parfum is much better, and presents itself as an exuberantly fruity, winey, almost decaying rose and peach or passion fruit combination. However, it lacks the bombastic punch I had been expecting of a perfume so stuffed with different varieties of rose oils that Thierry Wasser of Guerlain thinks that if IFRA caught wind of it, it would be immediately deemed a “Weapon of Mass Destruction”. Neither the pure parfum nor the PDT give me any hint of the famous red rose dripping in honey and fruit that I’d read so much about, and longed for.

Layered, the pure parfum and the Parfum de Toilette do eventually come together to provide an image of a rose – the green talc of the poisonous hyacinth suggesting the thorns, the rotting fruit and wine of the pure parfum suggesting the petals. Luca Turin said of Nahema in the Guide that it is too complex to analyze, and that the first few minutes are like “an explosion played in reverse: a hundred disparate, torn shreds of fragrance propelled by a fierce, accelerating vortex to coalesce into a perfect form that you fancy would then walk towards you, smiling as if nothing had happened.” Reading his words, I long for his experience of Nahema, because I wanted it to be mine too – but I simply can’t match it to the polite, muted, oddly sour mixed green floral I am smelling.

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Masculine Maurice Roucel Musk Review

Frederic Malle Musc Ravageur

29th June 2015

Frederic Malle Musc Ravageur is a big ole sex musk with a leer on its face. Luca Turin says it’s more flashy than good, and I’d agree, but then again, I don’t think Musc Ravageur takes itself all that seriously to begin with. It’s a musk with bedroom eyes and an Adam’s apple.

The more I wear it, the more I think of it as the male equivalent of Shalimar. It’s a big-boned oriental at heart, a crude, deconstructed version of the older versions of Shalimar extrait – all rude body musks, thick vanilla, and butter-like tonka. Objectionably rich, and quite pungent in parts.

Even the top notes of Musc Ravageur share a certain barbershoppy feel with Shalimar: in Musc Ravageur, it’s lavender and cloves, and in Shalimar, it’s something like herbes de Provence (thyme?). Perhaps that’s why so many men find the opening challenging – the pungent spices, dirty musk, and sweet vanilla churning their stomachs in a way they can’t handle.

But I’m a Shalimar girl all the way, baby, so this is familiar territory for me. People either hate the opening and love the dry down, or wish that the rough opening would last all the way through – me, I love every part of Musc Ravageur from front to end.

It smells like someone rubbed a vanilla-glazed Cinnabon across the sweaty perineum of a man who hadn’t washed for a few days. Hot, sweet, a bit dirty (in a good way). The combination of the rich, sweet vanilla, tonka, and sandalwood in the base is to die for, no matter where you stand on the exact dirtiness of the musk at the start.

I used to think that it was too loud and too dirty for a lady to be wearing outside the house. But then I realized that the Shalimar extrait I wear is pretty dirty and I wear that out of the house all the time. I think I bought into the hype about this being a disgusting, filthy, old-man kind of smell. Now, I just think it’s a fabulous gourmand musk/oriental that’s both sexy and comfortable.

Vulgar? Yeah. Hell yeah! And so what! A bit of vulgarity never hurt nobody.

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Amber Maurice Roucel Musk Review The Discard Pile

Le Labo Labdanum 18

29th June 2015

Maurice Roucel, you old roué! I think I’ve figured out your game. You made a beautiful musk-vanilla-amber template in the lab one day, and you thought to yourself, “Maurice, old boy, this ain’t half bad! I can get at least three good fragrances out of this.” You dialed up the rude bits on the template to arrive at Musc Ravageur, and you sanitized it with cotton and heliotrope and doll’s head plastic to come up with Helmut Lang EDP.

Le Labo comes a knocking, and you decide, you know what – let’s see if we can’t wring a last drop of juice from this old sponge. We’ll name it after an ingredient that isn’t noticeably in it, let’s say labdanum, so as to give those contrary hipster mofos at Le Labo their jollies. Add a pinch of cinnamon, a touch of powder, and my standard musky-ambery-vanilla, and BAM! Everybody’s happy.

Well, not me, Maurice, not me. The last imprint of the well-used template is too faint to leave much of an impression. It’s a midget in a hall of giants. Civet, leather – castoreum? Pfff, please. Shalimar has more underpantsy funk than this. The trouble is, of course, that Le Labo Labdanum 18 can only cower in the shadow of its more outgoing big brother, Musc Ravageur, and its more distinctive, characterful little sister, Helmut Lang EDP. And if I want a powdery musk-amber-patchouli scent that smells like skin, I always have the soured-fur delights of L’Ombre Fauve to fall back on. Desolee.

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Summer

Guerlain Shalimar Parfum Initial L’Eau

25th June 2015

Well, technically, Guerlain’s Shalimar Parfum Initial L’Eau Si Sensuelle. That’s right – a flanker of a flanker of a flanker.

I don’t care. Laugh all you like! I love this stuff.

And get this – this was my first Guerlain. EVER. It was my neural pathway to the original mothership oriental herself, i.e., real Shalimar. (Every time someone says that a flanker was their introduction to the original fragrance, a Thierry Wasser gets his wings.)

I can’t believe they just discontinued this little beauty, the bastards. I know that people are a bit sneery about this being a flanker of a flanker, but, honestly, it is just a fabulous smelling perfume. Whereas Parfum Initial is heavy on the iris/berry/patchouli and more than a few degrees closer to Dior Homme Intense than Shalimar, this one reads as a true Shalimar Light.

L’Eau is also, dare I say, a whole lot better than Parfum Initial. It is like a summer sketch of the original Shalimar using only the gauziest of notes. The heavy, stinky bergamot opening of the original, which can be utterly frightening to the unindoctrinated, has been replaced by sunny, zippy orange, neroli, and grapefruit. It smells like lemon tart or lime cheesecake sprinkled with candied rose petals. The opening is so irresistibly delicious and aromatic, you will want to drink your wrist.

The scent, being simple and direct, reaches the heart and base very quickly, where it stays in a lightly spiced, lightly creamy vanilla register for the duration. The lime cheesecake smell is utterly delicious. It makes me ridiculously happy.

Of course, don’t go into this expecting Shalimar – there is no smoke, heavy vanilla, leather, civet, or amber here. But this works fantastically as a sort of summer cologne-style version of Shalimar when you want to stay on the lighter side of things. Highly recommended, and stock up while you can still find this in shops. Knowing Guerlain, they will probably re-release this or Parfum Initial in the bee bottles in twenty years and try to charge us all $450 a bottle for it. So….buy it now.

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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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