Future Memories by Byredo treads a path familiar to many of us watching the brand over the past few years, in that it gives you just enough wow factor in the first thirty minutes to frog-march you to the cash register before petering out into a synthy mess on your arm once the damage to your wallet has been done.
The opening truly is lovely, with a spiced fruit topnote (no berries to my nose) that recalls a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice mixed with cinnamon and cloves, but an upbeat summer version of what you might be imagining is a Christmassy affair. When this meets the vanilla, it softens into an orange blossom accord redolent of marshmallow fluff stirred through with a fruit cordial of sorts. It almost gets into Love, Don’t be Shy territory, but for a wheaten-biscuit texture pushing through the creaminess that sets it apart. Not a caramelised biscuit – nothing at all like Biscoff – but toasted and grainy, like the roughened surface of a McVities Digestive.
And honestly, it’s the different textures at play in Future Memories that make this really quite attractive at first. The vanilla is that plasticky doughball vanilla that I remember from Gucci Rush and that Gucci brown bottle perfume whose name I can never remember. If you partied in the nineties, you’ll remember this as the scent soundtrack of shiny-vinyl purses and wonder bras and unwise decisions made late at night in dodgy nightclubs.
But thirty minutes on and the only genuinely unwise decision you’ve made, you realise, is falling for the empty promise of this perfume’s hype train. Let me spare you the suspense – Future Memories unravels rather quickly into that cheap feeling, as-glassy-as-a-boiled-sweet amber base that has been consistently stuffed into so many perfumes since Grand Soir. To my nose, this type of ‘amber’ smells more like a room in which broccoli has been boiled than resins or anything even vaguely associated with nature. Hate to see it coming in an otherwise good perfume. It gives me a glimpse of a ghastly emptiness at the core of the perfume, eating away at any soul or imagination it may have initially possessed, like The Nothing from The Neverending Story.
I don’t mind the soft projection or poor longevity of Cittá di Kyoto, but what I can’t forgive is its vagueness. It is mostly iris – that rooty, plaster-of-Paris iris material that Santa Maria Novella uses – over a blob of bitter, musky cedar, but it is dry enough for people to imagine they smell Japanese incense, sweet enough for people to think they smell fruit, and softly hawthorn-ish enough to make people think of Daim Blond.
However, nothing ever tilts too firmly in one direction or another, so you get this diaphanous, blown out blur of root and wood and petal refuses to commit to even one of those ideas. It flip flops between one thing and another so quickly that it could get elected to local government at least. Some people find this charming. I find it irritating, just as I do that dreamy, opaque way old Irish people have of answering every question with a half-laughed ‘ah sure, now, you know yourself’ when in fact, no, we don’t know, which is why we asked the question in the first place, you muppet.
I suspect that were it not for the evocative name or the inspiration, nobody would peg it as smelling particularly like Japanese incense or the woody air of an onsen in the forest, and so on and so forth. Indeed, in the hands of any other brand, it might even be called – gasp – unfinished. I bought a bottle, and not even blindly, simply because I had successfully mind-swindled myself into hearing the rustle of silk screens and bamboo mats.
But repeated wear just erodes the fantasy of Cittá di Kyoto a bit more each time. I can squint my eyes all I like but no amount of mental acrobatics is going to turn that damp, bitter blob of cedar into the airy, silvery-green hinoki of my imagination, nor is that dry iris and hint of smoke ever going to transform into a wisp of coreless Shoyeido incense, which itself smells far more characterfully of cloves, benzoin, and aloeswood that anything suggested by this milquetoast of a perfume.
Every spring since 2015, I have dutifully taken the frosted bottle out of the cupboard, dusted it off, and hoped that this would be the moment when it reveals its true beauty to me. And in truth, I don’t hate it. It is not a bad fragrance, objectively. But life is just too short for such low-impact fragrance.
Source of Sample: Oh, don’t I just I’d just bought a sample. I bought a whole bottle of the darned thing.
Because I feel that I should love Gatsby 22, but definitely don’t, I have worn it heavily over the course of the summer to figure out how to describe it to someone who very well might. All perfume reviewers have their blind spots, and here’s mine: I am terrible at describing huge floral-woody musks that are little more than a vague shape in the air.
Amber smells delicious, kind of like food. Flowers smell distinctly of themselves, once you know what they smell like individually. Incense smells like church. Pine smells like the forest. But to me, Gatsby smells less like the individual flowers or woods or vetiver referenced in the notes list, and more like an abstract (and ever-shifting) set of ‘moods’ caused by these notes bouncing off each other as they jostle around that expanse of sour, rubbery musk.
Parts of it certainly smell good. I appreciate the clean, bright citrus shifting into the spearmint tones of geranium, the tangy waft of violets, that Ormonde Jayne osmanthus with its high-end, peach fuzz suede, all washed down until shiny with benzyl salicylate water for that mild, sweet balsamic touch. This familiar familial arrangement of Ormonde Jayne notes cannot fail to please.
But then again, these accords all come drenched in, and partially obscured by a woody musk material that screams eau de department store for once, rather than the usually palatable (to me) Iso E Super accord that Ormonde Jayne uses. The effect of this particular woody musk is to make the more natural-smelling fruit and floral notes read as arch, highly stylized versions of themselves – glossy magazine inserts rather than the real thing.
Here’s the kicker. I am not the young professional or cool girl/gal at whom it is aimed. So, can I do this scent justice for the reader who does form part of this demographic? Ormonde Jayne call Gatsby 22 edgy, but it took me a whole month of wearing it to figure out that they didn’t really mean that it smells edgy (it doesn’t) but rather that it has that clean, androgenous, Ambroxinated vibe that people who wear Glossier You or Tanagra by Maison de Violet or even Baccarat Rouge 540 find so sexy. These are perfumes that smell like nothing at all but also like crushed gemstones, fresh air, sexual confidence, and the aspiration of personal wealth.
In other words, it is the abstraction of Gatsby 22 that matters. Worn side by side with, for example, Bal d’Afrique (Byredo), a scent that goes for a similar sparkly champagne-lemon-vetiver vibe, it soon becomes clear that Gatsby 22 is much drier, more urbane, and far less literal than the Byredo (which suddenly seems quite ostentatiously gourmand-ish in comparison). Gatsby’s tart woody musks act like a pour of the driest Vermouth on earth, swishing all the notes together into a blur of things that your field of perception sometimes catches (was that grappa?) but more often not (why am I not picking up on the vetiver?).
Gatsby 22 isn’t something I can see myself ever leaning into, but I appreciate that it made me work harder than usual to figure out why I don’t like it and, conversely, think more seriously about the person for whom it might be the best thing ever. Because, as it turns out, those are two types of people whose tastes will never intersect on a Venn diagram. And that’s ok too.
Source of sample: Ormonde Jayne very kindly sent me a 50ml bottle of this free of charge for review.
The fact that something as weird and borderline confrontational as Anamcara by Parfums Dusita was workshopped in a Facebook group known for its strict ‘say something nice or don’t say anything at all’ policy is hilarious to me. This is a humongous, syrupy fruity-floral that lurches at you with a pina colada in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. Though striking, it is more feral than pretty. Think less Juliette Binoche and more Béatrice Dalle.
If you are familiar with the pungency of some floral absolutes in the raw, like jasmine, with its grapey nail solvent highnotes, or ylang, with its banana fuel-spill aspect, then you’re going to love Anamcara, because it features a massive overload of natural orange blossom. If you’re unfamiliar with just how jolie laide naturals can smell or are new to the more artistic corners of niche-dom in general, however, Anamcara could be something of a shibboleth.
Because this is not the polite orange blossom of, say, Orange Blossom (Jo Malone) or Eau des Sens (Diptyque). Rather, this is the weirdly medicinal gunk of cough syrups, hard-boiled orange throat lozenges, and vitamin C gummy bears sold in rickety little apothecaries all throughout Provence. It reminds me very much of a holiday in Uzès, where everything from the ice-cream, honey, and chocolate to the bread (gibassier) seemed to be expensively infused with orange blossom or lavender essences and hyrosols. I think of this perfumey oddness as distinctly French.
In Anamcara’s opening notes, I smell a dense ‘brown’ floral syrup diluted with a pour of carbonated water for an uplift that reminds me of the orangey Coca Cola fizz of Incense Rosé (Tauer). This is shot through with the fresh, lime-green bite of petitgrain, which also smells very French to me, recalling the openings to both Eau Sauvage and Diorella (Dior) as well as the later Mito (Vero Kern). I can’t think of anything that smells quite like Anamcara in its totality, though. I suppose that Rubj (Vero Kern again) in eau de parfum format is the fragrance that comes the closest, in terms of a shared focus on the medicinal ‘boiled sweet’ aspect of orange blossom. But where Rubj piles on the sensuality with a shocking cumin seed note, Anamcara focuses on the weirdness of orange blossom alone. There is also a savory or umami element to Anamcara, possibly from the sandalwood, that reads as more Asian than European.
If I had a criticism, it would be that Anamcara is overdosed (on something) to the point of being oppressive, a monolith of floral muck so densely muscled that it’s hard to make out the shape of any of the tendons or veins. This will be somebody’s idea of floral bliss, no doubt, just not mine. I can’t wear fragrances like this – they wear me down, defying my attempt to parse them out. I do, however, respect the hell out of Pissara Umavijani’s refusal to color inside the lines on this one. Despite the ‘rainbows and unicorns’ vibe of its origin story, Anamcara will push buttons as well as boundaries.
Note: As widely reported, Anamcara translates roughly to ‘soul friend’ in Irish (and Scots Gaelic, which is similar), though ‘soul mate’ is probably closer in modern parlance. As an Irish person (and Irish speaker) myself, I can tell you that the vocative form of ‘cara’ is used very often in day to day speech, i.e., ‘mo chara’ to say ‘yo my fine friend’ and ‘a chara’ to mean Dear Sir/Modom when writing a letter to the Irish Times complaining that last week’s crossword puzzle was wrong or that the banks are running this country into the ground, etc. So it’s funny to see these words appear on a fancy French perfume.
Source of sample: Sent to me free of charge by the brand. My review and thoughts are my own.
I was going to start this review by saying that despite having studied French literature in college, my only experience with Baudelaire was with his poem Les Fleurs du Mal,but then I Googled to see where the phrase Luxe, Calme, et Volupté was from and saw that it’s actually from Les Fleurs du Mal, so not only is my Arts degree as useless as everyone said it would be but obviously Baudelaire’s chef d’oeuvre had slipped in one ear and out the next without encountering any resistance in between.
Anyway, having now smelled Luxe, Calme, Volupté by Francesca Bianchi, I’m relatively confident that it’s named not for anything from the poem but for the Matisse painting that takes one of its lines for its name. If you can’t be bothered to look the painting up, just know that it features several supine female figures in beside a river, painted in a style that would later become known as fauvism – daubs of unnatural colours laid down in dots and dashes that makes the figures appear almost normal (representative of real figures) from afar but disjointed and unrecognizable up close.
The perfume resembles the painting a bit in that it’s a very effective mixture of the soft and the harsh, or maybe more accurately, the fine and the gaudy. I feel like it’s obligatory, when reviewing a Francesca Bianchi fragrance, to mention the animalic, mica-dry iris accord that runs through her work like a recessive gene. But I’m thinking now that that’s an over simplification of what she actually does. Because what really strikes me about Luxe, Calme, Volupté is its balancing act between the slutty gaudiness of tropical fruit-and-ylang notes and the stern ashiness of the galbanum. It must have been a tough one to get right.
At first, it smells bitter and dusty, the galbanum and iris drawing a brief Heure Exquise-shaped hole in the air, but shot through with a neon orange ribbon of something luridly fruity, almost overblown, like a papaya or passionfruit. Galbanum, when it has shaken off all its wet, green bitterness, withers to a nubbin of ash. So Luxe, Calme, Volupté smells rather like someone spilled a can of Lilt on the ashes of a burned-out fire a week ago and it’s now living a second life as a string of fruit leather. This ashy-fruit-amber thing is something I’ve smelled before, namely in Nur by SoOud, which was later recycled into Soleil de Jeddah by SHL 777, neither of which were as half as good as this.
But here’s the fauvism of it all – from a distance of, say, a foot or two, the perfume just smells like a tropical fruit amber sliced through with sharp, rustling greenery. It’s loud, it’s effective, and most of all, it’s cohesive. Up close, however, the gaudy daubs of colour break apart into particles of ash, leather, and vetiver, too abstract for you to really say what you’re smelling apart from something intensely, intoxicatingly fragrant.
In a way, Luxe, Calme, Volupté is a mash-up of Lost in Heaven (powdery, civety flowers) and The Black Knight (tangy, mineral-rich leather) but with its parts rearranged and stuck back together with gobs of galbanum, a resin that can’t seem to decide whether it’s a cool, dewy blade of grass or a dry green leather bitch. The best is, in my opinion, yet to come, however, because it all dries down into a wierdly addictive basenote that I can only describe as bowl of creamy banana custard made by someone with a a smoker’s cough. For me, this is the best thing Francesca Bianchi has made since Under My Skin.
Source of sample: PR sample sent by Francesca Bianchi.
Based on my sampling of three perfumes from the Argentinian brand Frassaï, I can say that this is exactly the kind of thing that one hopes to see from modern niche perfumery but rarely does, i.e., perfumes that are unusual but not too much, and rendered in a soft, lovely manner that gives them wearability and ease.
Consider two points on that scale, for reference – the earlier perfumes of Serge Lutens, which offered bold new ideas but presented them in often luridly syrupy forms that made them challenging to wear as a personal scent outside of a grand occasion, and the perfumes of Parfums de Marly or XerJoff, which are mostly recycled ideas and tired old tropes rendered loud and muscular with über-radiant woody ambers that smash their way through more delicate accords like a bull in a china shop.
The Frassaï perfumes, on the other hand, appear to have been carefully and sensitively art-directed (by Natalia Outeda, a designer who had previously art-directed perfumes in NY for companies such as Bond No. 9, Proctor and Gamble, and Kiehl’s). Though the perfume reviewed here are all in different styles – one essentially a soliflore, one a spicy fruity scent, another a woody gourmand – and some of perfumers who composed them have usually easily-identifiable signature ‘moves’ (Rodrigo Flores-Roux, for example), there is a common thread of harmony and softness that links them all. Is it possible that the female gaze in art directorship for fragrance is just as much a thing as it is in literature, or essays, or film?
Tian Di (by perfumer Olivier Gillotin) is the most original of the three perfumes I sampled, and my outright favorite. It is really quite odd – a smoked-out peach skin nestled in a dusty ‘brown’ accord that remind me alternately of loose (peach-flavored) tea in those triangular nets sold by Dammann Frères, coffee grounds, or even cocoa – but also unexpectedly lovely. I am particularly charmed by the marvelous effect it produces on the skin, where it is all burnt peach licorice on the inhale (similar to the burnt anise-iris at the base of Guerlain’s Attrape-Coeur, albeit in dust form rather than apricot jam) and spearmint gum on the exhale. It is as gingery and as cooling as a tisane drink, yet as granular and coarsely-textured as the dry material before the hot water hits it.
Tian Di eventually deepens – or perhaps ‘spreads out’ – into a smudgy, smeary mint butterscotch and floor wax accord, with a hint of trampled grass and even beer, but never loses the malted, almost smoky graininess of the incense and tea. There is something about this that tugs a memory chord for me, making it difficult for me to evaluate objectively beyond the rather gormless ‘It’s odd but I love it’ review I’ve given it here. I think there’s either a loose connection to the peach of Trèsor (Lancôme) or to the sandalwoody, salty-minty, peony-esque weirdness of Dune (Dior), both of which I wore as a teenager, but again, this is all probably a Pavlovian response playing out in my mind and my mind only. Tian Di is special and unique. I’d buy this one in a heartbeat because I don’t have anything like it in my collection.
A Fuego Lento (by perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux) is a soft jasmine soliflore that smells like a wall covered in jasmine whose petals have started to dry a little in the late June sunshine, giving it a sweet hay or alfalfa dimension. There’s a tangy orange blossom note at the start that reads a little rubbery, like hot tarmacadam, so for a brief time, the scent gives off a pleasant sensation of being in a hot Southern city where the exhaust fumes of cars and hot pavement mingle with the sudden wafts of white flowers tucked away behind tall, patrician walls. But really, A Fuego Lento is all about that jasmine. A nutty, milky amber holds it all in place without interfering with the purity of the flowers.
I’m always moved by the simple but awe-inspiring beauty of a flower whose smell has been so faithfully recreated in scent form. This is, I recognize, no small feat in and of itself, unless you are willing to rely on the floral absolutes to do all the heavy lifting, in which case you have to deal with the more pungent, less pleasing aspects of the absolute – but Rodrigo Flores-Roux certainly knows his way around jasmine. That said, I’m a little surprised at the lack of accoutrements from a perfumer who produced both the complex, salty jasmine that is Ella (Arquiste) and the plummy jasmine chypre that is L’Âme Perdue (Le Galion), but I’m guessing that Outeda asked specifically for a pure, lush jasmine soliflore, and that is precisely what she got.
Personally, I don’t wear soliflores (preferring to smell flowers in nature than in the bottle) but if I were on the hunt for a great jasmine-dominant perfume, this would be a prime contender. The only other jasmine soliflore that matches the quality of A Fuego Lento is, in my opinion, the limited edition Diptyque Essences Insensées 2015, which is however far more syrupy and intense a smell.
Teisenddu (by perfumer Roxanne Kirkpatrick) is, in many ways, the most familiar-smelling perfume in the bunch, in that it mines a vein that many indie and niche perfumes before it have tapped into, i.e., that toasty-dry, caramelized scent of a working sauna, complete with all its spicy-fresh facets (juniper, conifer) and its dried fruit ones (cumin, caramel, prune, brandy). I quite like this toasty wood smell, even though it doesn’t really deviate from the pattern cut by scents such as Woodcut by Olympic Orchids or Bourbon by Hans Hendley.
Where it does innovate, however, is by pairing it with a full-blown movie butter popcorn accord with which I am only too familiar (unfortunately) thanks to my year-long exploration of the American indie oil sector. Every single perfume oil with the words ‘cake’ or ‘freshly baked bread’ or indeed ‘caramel’ featured precisely this note. Due to overexposure to this awful pyrazine-y aromachemical – whatever moniker it actually goes by – whenever I smell it, I think not of caramel or bread but instead of that awful fake butter popcorn flavoring they put in jellybeans. Because of its proximity to the hot, dry wood accord, the note emits a claggy ‘moistness’ that reads like warm, sweaty socks.
Now, it’s entirely possible that everyone else who smells this will smell what the perfumer intended, i.e., caramel, and that it is my particular sensitivity or over-exposure to this material that’s skewing the picture. I hope so. In any case, I hate this particular material with a passion and always wonder how Pierre Guillaume managed to pull off the toasted nuts and caramel in Aomassaï without resorting to it. (Part of me always thinks, well, if he can do it, why can’t everyone else?)
Mercifully, this note burns off quickly enough, and my patience is rewarded by a remarkable (and really quite unusual for a toasty, spicy wood scent like this) plant milk accord that smells like coconut milk, lotion, and something green and crunchy, like agave, fig leaves, or aloe vera. What this does is add a cooling, lactonic finish to the scent that effectively rehydrates the wood, balancing it so that it never tips over into outright aridity – typically the natural end of spicy indie wood scents. I really love this surprising element, and it’s enough to compensate me for any butter popcorn trauma I might have suffered previously.
It’s worth mentioning that, even when this milky lotion component fades away, we are left with a gently-spiced, gently-resinated, and gently-ambery wood accord that never pushes the envelope too far in any one direction. It’s all quite gentle. Which suits me just fine. In this last stretch, Teisenddu reminds me a lot of Gaiac by Micallef (and its twin, Dark Horse by Dame Perfumery), as well as Wenge by Donna Karan – all scents I’d describe as soft takes on the amber-incense-wood category, a popular and rather densely-populated intersection in niche perfumery. Scents like this are the fuzzy blanket of the perfume world (or ‘woody puddings’, as NST calls them), and while not entirely a novel form, Teisenddu innovates just far enough with that green, juicy plant milk accord to carve out a space for itself.
Source of Samples: I purchased samples of these Frassaï fragrances from Neroli Hungary, a Budapest-based niche perfume store here. I have purchased samples from Neroli multiple times since 2014 and am very happy to recommend them to my fellow European fumeheads.
Username checks out. In its totality, Iris Perle is an opalescent soap bubble of freshly peeled mandarin over soapy-waxy-fatty mimosa clasped in a child’s slightly sweaty paw, but studied closely over a day, it breaks down into two distinct phases. The first is reminiscent of what I think of as the typically Italian take on iris, i.e., slightly bitter, powdery, and freshly-laundered, rather than floral. This is clearly built around a ‘grey’ workaday iris material (rather than orris root) dressed up with lots of mandarin peel and the sharp, vegetal greenness of violet leaf, which lends a subtle leather accent. It’s not a million miles off the Acqua di Parma or Prada Infusion d’Irisline DNA. But more expensive-smelling. So, like Satori Iris Homme.
The mimosa, shy creature that it is, is slow to unfurl, but eventually we get glimpses of that “is it a flower? Is it school glue? Is it a cucumber?” oddness that makes this flower so charming. It smells high-toned and bleachy, which gives it only a glancing similarity to the treatment of mimosa in Une Fleur de Cassie (Malle) (Une Fleur de Cassie possesses a grungy, garbagey tone that Iris Perle does not), and absolutely no connection at all to the throatier, almond gateau takes on mimosa like Farnesiana (Caron). In fact, as time goes on, it is the subtly aquatic cucumber aspects of mimosa that come to the fore, joining with the violet leaf to form a pale (wispy) melony leather accord that splits the difference between Diorella (Dior) and Le Parfum de Thérèse (Malle). Verdict: Nice, though not required reading if you have either Diorella or Le Parfum de Thérèse.
Fougère Émeraude
I left Fougère Émeraude for last because (a) I have extremely narrow parameters for the type of tuberose I am willing to wear (see here for evidence of just how anal I get about it), and (b) I usually find fougères too masculine and bitter-smelling for me to pull off. But I’m pleasantly surprised! Fougère Émeraude manages to find my sweet spot on both the note (tuberose) and the style (fougère) and does so with such panache that I’m genuinely excited to wear it. It might even be – gasp – my favorite of the entire Les Indémodables sample set.
Let’s start with its treatment of tuberose. Fougère Émeraude captures all the toothpasty, camphoraceous ‘box hedge’ greenness I love in Carnal Flower and sidesteps entirely the lurid butter-bubblegum loudness that I abhor in Fracas. The tuberose smells dewy, crisp, and freshly-watered, not wilted or overblown. What I appreciate in particular is that, before the tuberose can start to droop and start smelling of its naturally fleshy, semi-decaying self, the note is quickly flanked by a softly powdery ‘fern’ accord made up of lavender, mimosa, tonka, and amber, so what you end up smelling is tuberose that’s been modulated and softened from all angles – a creamy, powdery floral accord with tuberose in the mix, rather than a full-on, straight-ahead tuberose.
The fougère element of the scent also plays squarely in the modern fougère sandbox, meaning that it leans on creamy tonka, powdery lavender, and soft floral notes rather than on the rather brusque aromatic sting of leaves, twigs, and bitter-minty oakmoss for its structure, thus making it perfectly easy for a women (certainly this woman) to wear.
The green, floral creaminess of Fougère Émeraude, particularly in its drydown, reminds me a little of the drydown of Chypre Palatin (Parfums MDCI), albeit without that scent’s lush, dense-as-a-brick castoreum-oakmoss-labdanum accord that makes it both sweetly creamy and subtly animalic. But where Chypre Palatin is a special occasion scent, Fougère Émeraude’s lightness of texture and (comparative) freshness makes for an altogether more casual wear, and thus is perfectly suited for an everyday ‘reach’.
Rose de Jamal
I don’t know who the Jamal in Rose de Jamal is, but I suspect he’s the guy they hired to sneak into the Kannauj attar factory at night and spoil an otherwise nice, fresh green rose distillation with an over-enthusiastic pour of whatever woody aromachemical they use in Rose 31 (Le Labo).
I can’t blame Jamal. The shortage of real sandalwood oil, coupled with the rise in India of a middle class of young men and women who largely prefer to smell fresh and modern in dupes of Dior Sauvage and Gucci Flora than of anything their parents or grandparents might have worn, i.e., attars and ruhs wrung from Mother India’s abundant flowers, herbs, and aromatics, has pretty much taken the traditional attar factories of Kannauj out at the knees.
Rose de Jamal smells like the stuff churned out these days by attar houses that have accepted reality and switched to producing oil-based freshies and designer dupes in their labs (no deg and bhapka here), their backrooms filled with gallon containers of modern aromachemicals rather than precious rose oils, sandalwood, or choyas. So, like I said, I don’t blame Jamal. He’s just out there, trying to survive, you know? I do blame Antoine Lie, however. I love Antoine Lie’s work in general, so I’m not too sure what went wrong here, unless it was a deliberate cash grab for the market share currently dominated by Rose 31 (Le Labo). Rose de Jamal smells like the beginnings of a decent rose accord – minty, powdery, but also jammy – quickly smothered by a brutal cloud of chemical ‘radiance’ that seems to last for days on fabric and on the skin.
Chypre Azural
What Acqua Viva (Profumum Roma) does for lemons, Chypre Azural does for oranges – a superbly naturalistic whole-of-tree citrus accord (leaves, fruit, pith, wood) sustained for an abnormally long time without resorting to any (obvious to me anyway) aromachemical support system. It’s basically my dream orange cologne-style fragrance – Hermes Concentré d’Orange – retrofitted to last more than ten minutes. And as long as you set your expectation dial at ‘long-lasting eau de cologne freshie’ level, Chypre Azural doesn’t disappoint. If you come to it looking for a genuine chypre with all its twists and turns, however – well. Chypre Azural is a lot of things (all of which are an orange) but a chypre it is not.
Aside from the midsection, where a rather soapy neroli-musk accord sets in, Chypre Azural is resolutely linear. If you want to smell of orange pith from morning to night, then this will thrill you. For me, personally? Smelling of citrus this bright is fantastic in the early morning hours but all kinds of inappropriate by dinnertime. My seven-year-old daughter, Mila, crawled into bed with me in the middle of the night after a nightmare, and after wriggling into ‘space pod now attached to mother ship’ position, she sniffed me and said, “Why does your neck smell like oranges? It’s the middle of the night!” Exactly.
Source of Samples: I purchased the Les Indémodables sample set here.
There are three types of tuberose fragrance and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Category I is Photorealistic Tuberose, which is where you find the dewy ‘ripped from nature’ takes like Carnal Flower (Malle), Moon Bloom (Hiram Green), and yes, even Tubéreuse Criminelle (Lutens) after it shimmies through that Listerine bead curtain up front.
Category II is Nights in White Satin tuberose, where you find all the aging Baby Janes sweating naked but for a fur coat on a hot Southern veranda, waiting to pounce on the mail boy, her left buttock making a slurping sound as she propels herself off her lounge chair – stuff like Amarige (Givenchy), Giorgio (Giorgio Beverly Hills), and Number One Intense (De Nicolai).
Category III is Tuberose Messed Up Beyond All Recognition, the hangout room for perfumes that drown out the objectionably fruity bubblegum bullshit of tuberose until you’re smelling as much hay, leather, incense, or patchouli as tuberose itself. Tubéreuse III (Histoires de Parfum) and Daphne (Comme des Garcons) are good examples.
I have little use for perfumes from Category I. I wear Carnal Flower about once a year, swooning at its limpid green beauty only to cheerfully bench it again for another twelve months. Category II, in all its “The Eighties Called and Want Their Shoulder Pads Back” glory, is triggering, for me, and therefore a hard no. (Even some really modern perfumes, like Mélodie de l’Amour (Dusita) and L’ Eau Scandaleuse (Anatole LeBreton), released in 2016 and 2014 respectively, accidentally fall into Category II due to the man-eating nature of their tuberose). Category III is really the only space in which I can enjoy tuberose, because, as you might have guessed by now, tuberose needs to be so heavily masked with other notes that I can get it down without gagging.
Because Tyger Tyger by Francesca Bianchi is fruit, tuberose (and ylang, to my nose) over smoky woods and uncured leather, it would seem to fall effortlessly into the third category. Right? And yep, it mostly does. However, the sticky peach jam note coaxes out all of the unfortunate bubblegum tendencies of tuberose, which means that it tips its rather cartoonish Jessica Rabbit sunhat just enough in the direction of the Nights in White Satin category to make me uncomfortable.
Which is my long-winded (even for me) way of saying that Tyger Tyger is not for me, but that is due entirely to my own personal issues with tuberose rather than the way in which the perfume is constructed or wears. The perfume itself is blameless. Lovers of the spicy 1980s floriental style of Big White Floral will rejoice in this juice. It starts off with a hugely sweet peach bubblegum note that might as well be tuberose candy – and at this point, I’m all #thanksifuckinghateit.
But this is Francesca Bianchi, y’all. She’s not going to leave those great, big honey-dripping white flowers out there on their own for long. Almost immediately, in fact, the familiar Bianchi accord of ‘stony, smoky, slutty iris leather with a side of licked skin’ (that’s how I refer to it anyway) rises up to infuse the floral candy with an attractive smokiness, kind of like hay, leather, and woods being smoked in a far off barn.
So, yes, by the mid-section, I’m starting to come around. There’s enough going on here to reduce the tuberose to something I can just about glimpse at the corner of my eye. Think Pèche Cardinal (Parfums MDCI) – minus the tropical coconut – sleeping with a stable boy, their sticky sex juices mingling with the grimy but healthy aroma of leather riding tack and hay. It shares something with the utterly mad, bubblegum-on-steroids tuberose incense of Daphne (Comme des Garcons), a bit of that fleshy peach sweetness of Pèche Cardinal, and quite a lot of overlap with the retro butter-caramel-leather-hay-filtered smut of Tubéreuse III.
The drydown smells curiously like the peach-scented floor wax of Chinatown, the tuberose boiled down until its bubblegum and peach juice juiciness evaporates, fading out into a gently smoky Crayola finish. But tuberose wax is still tuberose, and man, even a little bit of it is nigh on too much for this gal. As it flattens out slightly at the end, more of the scent’s candied tuberose-ness – and thus also its essentially 1980s floriental character – is laid bare. Don’t get me wrong – Tyger Tyger is a beautifully made, and surprisingly softly spoken white floral that will please many. It’s really no fault of the scent that it happens to brush up against one of my personal triggers.
Source of Sample: PR sample, provided gratis by the brand.
As you might have guessed from my
recent series of posts, I am a big fan of the house of Ormonde Jayne. After
having invested in several full bottles and having worked my way through samples
of most of the brand’s collection, I feel like I have a good handle on the
house DNA. Indeed, one of the things that I admire most about the brand is its strong
creative control; most of the perfumes feature a signature move or note that definitively
identifies them as members of the same genus. I’ve defined this signature
elsewhere as a polished abstraction that gives you more than you were
expecting.
But if the Ormonde Jayne DNA could be defined as ‘an original idea, softly stated’, the new La Route de la Soie Collection strikes me more as ‘a soft idea, softly stated.’ For me, the first four perfumes in the La Route de la Soie Collection are a disappointing deviation from the house DNA, sitting closer to the mainstream than to either niche or masstige (however you want to define it). The perfumes, although all as high quality as you’d expect from a brand like Ormonde Jayne, feature neither the exoticism promised by the Silk Road connection nor the quiet complexity we’ve been weaned on by years of Ormonde Jayne output. These perfumes are nice, competent, and pleasant – and one is even a little trashy (in a good way) – but not one of them sparks the fierce joy that has me saving up my pennies.
My point of reference is Nawab of Oudh from the Four Corners, because it features the house sleight of hand of making my mouth water and pucker at the same time. Perfumes like these remind me of the tart, peppery Vietnamese ouds, with their perfect balance of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter – addicting at first sniff, with a world of depth hiding behind the initial pop of flavor. Compared to something like this, the perfumes from the La Route de la Soie Collection are like those plastic-wrapped sponge cake snacks and Pocky you get from Japanese stores or a dispenser – cute as hell, but disappointingly bland on the tongue. Still, it’s probable that I’m not the target market here, and that’s fine. There’s plenty for me to love in the rest of the Ormonde Jayne stable.
I like that there’s no standard
‘house rose’ note used by Ormonde Jayne – their roses cover the broad sweep
from the peach-shampoo-and-date juiciness of Ta’if to the jellied
rosewater of Nawab al Oudh, to the smoky-fresh green rose in Rose
Gold. With a name like Damask, I was expecting a purebred rosa damascena
note up top, and right enough, this is promptly delivered in the form of a velvet
carpet of soft, purple-red rose petals. A smell deep and pure enough to make
you weep.
But just as my nose is burrowing
into the tightly furled core of the rose, it disappears. Just…poof! It is
substituted by a warm, waxy apple-rhubarb-amber accord that reminds me a bit of
Sexy Amber by Michael Kors or Burberry Woman, i.e., amorphous,
barely defined fruits, berries, and flowers dipped into a vat of fudgy amber
and sticky white musk.
This all smells good, of course –
it’s rhubarb and custard in scent form, after all – but I am surprised at just
how conventional and safe-smelling Damask turns out to be. You see the name
Damask and even if your brain knows that Damascus has been reduced to a pile of
smoking rubble, you not only expect the famous rosa damascena to show up, but
you expect it to be flanked by all sorts of mysterious accents like cardamom,
coffee, and resins. But Damask is about as exotic as the Dublin.
I’m scratching my head here. Usually,
if Ormonde Jayne is using innocuous fruity floral notes such as peony or pear
or blackcurrant, then the perfumer twists them into new forms with pepper and
citrus, teasing both your brain and nose until you work out what’s been done to
them. Damask is a missed opportunity. I want to see what Geza Schoen would do
if allowed to play around with a truly urinous, leafy blackcurrant or an
acetone pear note paired to a chocolate truffle rose, for example. But Damask
smells like he’s been kept on a tight leash this time around.
Without any of that Ormonde Jayne pepper or citrus – or even oud or carnation, other more occasional Ormonde Jayne star players – there’s nothing left in Damask to carve out the more exciting shapes of the rose or the fruit. It smells silky, waxy, and rounded, but not distinct. I don’t dislike Damask per se because (a) I can’t resist a bowl of stewed rhubarb and custard, and (b) my signature perfume for many years – Burberry Woman – features the same creamy fruit-amber core, so obviously I’m conditioned to find that kind of blurry, conventionally feminine warmth inviting. It’s just that it’s not exciting in the way we’ve come to expect Ormonde Jayne perfumes to be.
Interestingly, while Levant is
billed as a fresh, citrusy floral bouquet, it doesn’t smell that floral to me,
at least not at first. If I hadn’t seen the notes list, I would have pegged the
fuzzy, mineralic opening as a mixture of vetiver, cashmeran, and citrus à
la Terre d’Hermès. It smells like rain on hot pavement. This apparition might
have something to do with the rubbery-peppery nuances of the materials used to
build the peony accord used in perfumery (and also often by Ormonde Jayne). Or
perhaps there is a bit of unlisted vetiver or cashmeran in the mix.
After a few minutes of this, the
grey, quasi-industrial fog shifts to reveal a bittersweet orange blossom note
that smells remarkably like those simple orange blossom waters the French buy by
the liter to pour liberally into their babies’ bathwater. This tender floral
note is sharpened by pepper and a curl of citrus peel, which, although billed
as bergamot, smells more like rosy-leafy pink grapefruit to me. The notes I’d
previously pegged as rubber or hot pavement now come across as a pleasant,
low-key smokiness, almost as if there were such thing as an orange blossom
water-flavored cigarette.
Levant doesn’t evolve much beyond this point, but maybe I’m laboring for meaning in a deliberately simple plot. In its bringing together of a simple, natural-smelling orange blossom water note with the clean twang of rubber-soled sneakers and a barely-there smudge of cigarette ash, Levant could be the haute luxe analog to Freeway (4061 Tuesdays), or the orange blossom version of Jasmin et Cigarette (État Libre d’Orange). All three perfumes perform the same trick of cutting white florals with soft-rubbery-ashy notes that provide just enough grit to render the scent fresh and urban rather than romantic or traditionally ‘femme’. But to be perfectly honest, not only do the 4061 Tuesdays and the État Libre d’Orange fragrances do it better, they do it for less money.
Byzance is the scent I probably
liked the most out of the La Route de la Soie collection, which is strange,
because out of all these not-very-Ormonde-Jayne-smelling scents, Byzance is the
least Ormonde Jayne of all. Perhaps the fact that Byzance is so far outside
of the Ormonde Jayne envelope that I stop expecting to find all the signature
OJ tropes and enjoy it for what it is.
A plush, dove-grey suede accord
underpins everything here. Byzance is big, luscious, and unusually for Ormonde
Jayne, exuberant to the point of loudness. It smells like a fizzy,
cherry-flavored milkshake or sherbet that’s been dumped all over a new suede
couch, causing the suede to hiss and effervesce like a Mentos popped into a
bottle of Coca Cola and shaken hard.
I honestly can’t think of
anything else that smells like Byzance, except for, perhaps, a few key portions
of Diptyque’s Kimonanthe (intense apricot syrup over Japanese incense)
and État Libre d’Orange’s Bendelirious
(cherries over champagne and face powder). It smells so outlandish that I start
to wonder if Ormonde Jayne really meant to make a perfume that smelled of pink
antibiotic syrup spilled over the inside of a luxury car, or if it was an
accident that got bottled up.
Either way, it’s fun. For Ormonde Jayne, this is punchy, hyper-gourmand stuff with a smile on its face. For those of us still trying to find that line between class and sass, this could be it.
Tanger smells French in a way
that’s hard to define exactly, only to say that French men and women tend to
favor neroli-scented eaux de cologne and soaps, and that, somehow, I associate
this particular floral note with them. Neroli is a material that smells at first
fresh (orange-scented), then green (waxy leaves), and finally soapy-musky
(freshly-scrubbed hands, white laundered cotton towels straight from the
dryer). I tend to tire easily of neroli’s insistently soapy drydown, so a
perfume so single-mindedly focused on neroli would normally be an easy pass for
me.
But Tanger makes me reconsider my blanket ban. Though I’m still not sure I like neroli enough to wear and use a whole bottle of this, I have to give credit to the perfumer for somehow managing to keep the white soapiness of the material at bay for 90% of the ride, allowing me to enjoy the parts of neroli that I love but are usually zipped through too quickly, like the dark green freshness of crushed leaves and twigs. The brief flashes of fleshy, orangey sweetness make me think that a handful of errant orange blossom petals have made it into the distilling pot. A soft, waxy amber cusps the neroli, making me nod my head when I look at the copy, which for once is completely accurate when it describes Tanger as a “sunny, golden perfume, joyful and entirely lovable”. I’d rank this as the flanker to Hermes Eau de Néroli Doré, which means that, although nice, it is a little too simple and straight forward for an Ormonde Jayne fragrance.
Source of Samples: Press samples from Ormonde Jayne PR, provided with no pressure or expectation of a review. My opinions are my own.
I write a lot about indie
perfumes. Partly because that’s where most of the derring-do of OG niche went
once niche plumped for sales over ‘art’ (God, that sounds pretentious even to me,
sorry), and partly because if you’re a writer, then writing about small
artisans is a way to show support.
But I’ll be honest; I don’t own a
whole lot of indie perfumes. Because most of my collection was built in 2014-2016,
by the time I’d discovered the excitement and pleasure of the indie perfume sector,
I’d run out of both money and appetite. These days, therefore, while I’m happy
to sample indies and shine a light on them through reviews – for what that’s
worth – I am rarely moved beyond admiration to shell out for them.
What I’ve found is that the older I get the more importance I place on polish. I am also increasingly aware of time and place. The fire in my belly for the grungiest of leathers, the nastiest of smoke bombs, and the swampiest of aquatics has abated in step with my dawning realization that it’s not nice to alienate your colleagues or family with all that raw-edged, ‘experimental’ stuff just because it’s your right to wear it. There are more important hills to die on than scent suffrage.
Therefore, when I know that I’m going to be out in ‘polite’ society and not just ruminating in my own 4-day old funk (working from home mid-COVID-19 in a Northern country has its benefits, one of which is that no one can smell me through Zoom), I turn to the predictable elegance of group of houses that never lets me down, namely Chanel, Guerlain, Hermes, and, in niche, brands like Ormonde Jayne, Heeley, and Papillon (though the latter is actually artisanal, it possesses the elegant, no-brainer smoothness I’m after here).
I’ve written about Ormonde Jayne before here. As the years passed, the brand branched out from their original core market (reassuringly expensive, classical but with a twist, always elegant) to exclusivity marketing (country or city exclusives) and an ever more aspirational audience (roughly the same target market as for Roja Dove and Clive Christian).
Correspondingly, though my appreciation for their perfumes continues unabated, I find myself a little out-priced by the brand. My pain level hovers around the pricing of the original collection: with a bit of saving and strategic Black Friday shopping, I have allowed myself to buy and own Champaca, Orris Noir, Ormonde Woman, and Tolu. But I can’t afford to buy two big loves of mine, which are Black Gold and Nawab al Oudh – both more aspirationally-priced than the core collection. And I’m totally fine with that. I don’t have to own everything I love.
Anyway, despite me ‘ageing out’ of the original target market for Ormonde Jayne, I am still almost irrationally fond of the brand. Actually, I love Ormonde Jayne, I’m not going to lie. I’m going to spend the next couple of blog posts talking about fragrances they released after their core collection, so if there’s anyone out there like me who loved the original line-up but find their noses pressed against the store window of the brand’s now higher-than-one-would-like-to-pay prices, then read on.
Let’s start with the Love trio of fragrances released in 2016: Passionate Love, True Love, and Sensual Love. I know nothing about these new releases, but given that Ormonde Jayne gets a lot of walk-in traffic from people who are not necessarily into perfume but are ready to invest in that one special fragrance to mark a special occasion or to gift to a special person, it’s safe to assume that this trio was designed to capture a portion of the bridal or just-engaged market.
This makes perfect sense. Special, privé, bespoke -all words you see over and over again in Ormonde Jayne’s marketing and perfume; all reinforcing the image of gently English exclusivity, the sort of velvety inner sanctum hush of a Saville Row tailor that seems to embody the Ormonde Jayne experience. And this is exactly what you want when you’re getting married. The Love perfumes are expensive enough to elicit a sharp intake of breath but not so expensive that you feel like the money would be better spent on a holiday.
Sensual Love is an 100% embodiment
of the Ormonde Jayne house style. It hits that sweet spot between novelty and beauty
– i.e., exciting enough to make you think about the ideas that went into it,
yet smooth enough to enjoy in an almost mindless manner. Something about the
combination of tart citrus, micro-explosions of pink pepper, green leaves, and the
misted spray of (largely indeterminate) fruits and flowers bypasses the ‘perfume’
signal in my brain and short-circuits to the fizz of freshly-poured rosé champagne.
Spraying again and again, I try to focus. What’s here, really? It’s so abstract it’s hard to tell. There is the sharp purple pop of cassis and a suggestion of something fruity that might be osmanthus, but really, to me the overall impression is of a fizzy cloud of crushed green leaves, pepper, and grapefruit. Grapefruit is, of course, not listed. But maybe I’m smelling grapefruit because it shares with cassis a fruity urinous quality.
The peppery, peachy rose note that appears briefly reminds me very much of Ta’if, and you know, perhaps it is Ta’if – but dipped in a sherbety lime powder and acid pink grapefruit. Something about the cool, tannic element here also makes me think of green tea, which of course makes me think of Champaca. But these perfumes are old friends, and I’m certainly not complaining about seeing their familiar faces round this joint.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but every time I smell the opening of an Ormonde Jayne fragrance, I feel first an intense upwards lift of my spirits (hesitate to call it joy, but it’s in that general direction). Then, once the effervescence of the more volatile notes have settled, I almost always get to thinking that Ormonde Jayne is the one of a tiny group of ‘commercial niche’ or ‘luxe niche’ houses whose perfumes consistently highlight the value of the perfumer’s talent in translating a brief over the value of the raw materials that go into them.
Sensual Love is good because Linda Pilkington asked for it to be made in a certain way and Geza Schoen has the talent to execute her vision, rather than because of any qualities intrinsic to the raw materials used.
Sensual Love doesn’t do anything else much other than sparkle hard in that upliftingly tart grapefruity-berry-leafy way, but that’s ok, because she’s gorgeous and she knows it. It’s a June morning of a scent. A radiant bride’s face when the veil is lifted. The ‘white’ fruity effervescence of Sensual Love is no doubt shored up by the Iso E Super that Geza Schoen is so fond of, but honestly, in his hands, for Ormonde Jayne, it rarely gives the finished perfume a chemical feel. There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb, even within the Ormonde Jayne line-up, but in general, Schoen has been carefully directed by Linda Pilkington to keep the Iso E Super at a classy and unobtrusive level. The effect is radiance, but never at the cost of naturalness.
Sensual Love would be great for a summer bride, or indeed for a summer bridegroom. If you like Escentric 04 (also by Schoen), but would like a softer, slightly more floral take, then Sensual Love is worth looking into. I also can’t help feeling if that if you like Chanel Paris-Deauville, especially as a fresh, leafy ‘drencher’ in summer (I do), then Sensual Love would perform much the same function.
True Love is a quirky gourmand floral that is nonetheless so flawlessly put together that it never feels less than grown-up. At the beginning, there’s an interesting tarragon note to hold our attention – sort of woody, not hyper clean-smelling, more of a sludge grey-green than bright herby green – welded to a pink pepper and citrus framework that freshens its breath.
But underneath this, up swells a wonderfully stretchy bubble of something between honey-flavored Hubba Bubba and strawberry marshmallow whip. This very thick, chewy note elasticizes the fragrance, stretching it out in all directions like Elastigirl from The Incredibles. This is far more sophisticated than it sounds. It smells pink and tangy with strawberry gum, but also peppery and herbal. This is a very interesting way to bring what would normally be very girlish notes into the realm of adulthood.
And then! Oh boy, oh boy. The banana-flavored milk of my dreams. This is the oft-promised but rarely delivered banana pudding facet of ylang, present and correct. I am very excited to finally experience this in scent form. I have only glimpsed it once or twice in Tasnim (Abdes Salaam al Attar), though even that is more a delicate egg yolk custard faintly aromatized with nutmeg and ground almond flour than the full-on artificial banana custard or milk thing that I’m looking for. I quite like Felanilla(Parfumerie Generale) too, but with its gippy-textured saffron and starchy iris, that is far more the woody, inedible banana stem you accidentally get in your moth and spit right back out again than the lush fake banana of my dreams.
I am making this sound juvenile and trashy, but it’s really quite elegant. Let me be explicit: there is indeed a yellow banana-flavored milk accord in the midsection of True Love, but it’s been mellowed out with silky, spacey musks and florals to such a degree that anyone from a bride to a businesswoman could pull it off.
The wearer might think ‘banana milk’ and luxuriate secretly in this knowledge, but to everyone else, this will smell vaguely like a warm milky cloud of rosy, fluffy lokhoum (Turkish delight). Although the sweetness and white-muskiness of drydown is ultimately a little generic for me, I enjoy True Love as much as I enjoy Traversée du Bosphore (L’Artisan Parfumeur) orNiral(Neela Vermeire), which is a lot. If you love the idea of a fluffy pink cloud of marshmallowy loukhoum buffering against the harshness of the world like a force-field, then add True Love to your list. It’s exactly the kind of thing I want to wear when I’m feeling delicate or in danger of eating my feelings.
If you’re curious about osmanthus
in general, or you Googled Passionate Love and came across this review, then
let me tell you that (a) Passionate Love is all about the osmanthus, and (b) if
you’re not sure what osmanthus is supposed to smell like, then smell this
because it’s quite true to the scent of osmanthus absolute.
After an odd start composed of gin and tonic, and rickety old garden furniture, Passionate Love explodes into a gorgeously rubbery, pungent apricot-skin suede with the whiff of fermentation that both oud and osmanthus carry in their bones. It is not sweet, really, but somehow in the opening it manages to smell quite densely syrupy and full-on, kind of like the cheesy fruit leather of Miyako (Auphorie). In fact, Passionate Love is very like the other osmanthus perfume in the line, Qi (I don’t really count Osmanthus itself, as that is more of a citrusy white tea kind of thing), but its atmosphere is far thicker and throatier. It’s Qi with the lights turned down.
Soon, however, the fleshy assault of the osmanthus lightens up and dries out until you could (almost) call this fragrance airy or ethereal. Most osmanthus accords are accompanied by an undertone of black tea, a facet that is naturally present in osmanthus absolute (think dark, strongly brewed Chinese tea left to grow cold), and Passionate Love is no exception. The tangy, tannic tea in Passionate Love is not the milky-green tea or brown rice of Champaca, yet there is something similarly nutritious, like the wholesome cloudiness from washing pearl barley. Threaded throughout this singular accord is a nubbin of spice, perhaps something fiery and nutmeggy, like white pepper.
Passionate Love manages to hold
up in this osmanthus soliflore track for most of its midsection, and if we were
to dwell here, I’d rank this and Qi up alongside the osmanthus greats, which
for me include the minimalist tea-apricot of Osmanthe Yunann (Hermès),
the civet-soaked, creamy-desiccated leather of Oud Osmanthus (Mona di
Orio) and the gigglier, freshly-washed hair of Osmanthe Interdite
(Parfums d’Empire).
However, Passionate Love unravels a bit in the drydown, flattening out into that mineralic vetiver-and-Iso E Super-woods base familiar to me from many classic freshies, most notably Terre d’Hermès (Hermès) and Grey Vetiver (Tom Ford). Don’t get me wrong – there’s definitely a time and a place for this grassy, earthy-salty accord, but when it’s tacked onto the tail end of a glorious osmanthus soliflore, it feels a bit incongruous. But all in all, Passionate Love manages to really do it for this osmanthus lover, as least for two thirds of its useful life. Apply half an hour before walking up the aisle, and the bouquet will bloom right as the veil is lifted.
Source of samples: Very kindly gifted to me by the Ormonde Jayne PR way back in 2017, with no obligation or pressure to review them. However, the fact that I’m reviewing these samples in 2020 is probably why brands don’t usually send me samples. I am absolutely terrible. I’m sorry!
