Thoroughly Investigated, Found Wanting, Can Probably Go

I notice I own quite a few perfumes that I either disliked or was underwhelmed by on first sniff but bought anyway because I was convinced that everyone else who adores them must be right and I must be wrong. This is what happens when you don’t trust your own taste. Not that I’m giving myself too much grief about it – surety only comes after years of curation and self-learning. Until then, we’re all pinheads in one way or another.

Just to be clear, this is a different category from the perfumes I blind bought and then hated, and from the perfumes I find meh but nonetheless love wearing.

Rather, these are perfumes whose every angle has been inspected and held up to the light, and repeatedly, in case I’d missed something the first twenty times. In fairness, I don’t hate these perfumes. It’s just that they have failed to improve upon deeper acquaintance. And I have grown too old to continue second guessing my own taste.

L’Ambre des Merveilles by Hermes

A smooth butterscotch amber with the texture of a hair gloss. Its ‘all slip and no grit’ texture would be much improved with a heavier hand on the saltshaker. Wearing it is like sucking on a Werther’s Original that gives way in the mouth almost immediately. But there’s no depth to it at all, no gradient. Given it’s essentially the scented equivalent of mall music, I can’t justify keeping it in what I hope will one day become a well-edited collection. 

Memoir Woman by Amouage

I originally sampled Memoir Woman because I’d heard it described as a leather-floral chypre and found it, instead, to be a boozy-smoky jasmine along the lines of Poison, a big flouncy 80s number hell bent on exactly the hackneyed idea of female sensuality that ties itself to big hair, enough eyeliner to make your eyes disappear, and the cheap smell of incense sticks lit to cover the smell of cigarettes. A Robert Palmer girl, or Michelle Pfeiffer in that mob movie. The idea that cigarettes and moxie alone can carry a girl.

Then I engaged in an inexplicable habit of mine, which is to retroactively mythologise the by-now-drained sample, reading reviews and convincing myself that I’d misunderstood my own experience. After all, there was that bitter, camphoric edge that made the white flowers sing, right? That dark green, moody aspect that I knew must mean it was a special creature and therefore a million miles away from Fendi Donna and Poison and Nights in White Satin. Memoir Woman was a sulky, slutty Gothic masterpiece and I was Missing Out. 

So, I bought a full bottle of it (albeit second hand), just to compound my self-delusion. Naturally, it never clicked with me. And why would it? This is a perfume that suits a specific type of person that definitely isn’t me. Every time I wore it – and I wore it a lot because I spent serious money on it – I felt like I was putting on the discarded fur coat of a 60-year-old smoker who’d doused it in cheap tuberose and jasmine perfume to mask the smell. It smelled like bad, or at least morally dubious, decisions made and then re-examined in the cold, harsh light of the morning after the night before.

The only time it has ever worked for me was part of a Christmas set-up where the house was such a cacophony of rich, buzzy, overworked scents and textures that I smelled like I fit right in. Outside of this one occasion, I have come to the realisation that I am just not femme fatale enough for Memoir Woman, it doesn’t fit with my lifestyle, and it is far too maximalist for my pared down, minimalist sense of style.    

Collection 34: Benjoin Bohéme by Diptyque

A sticky sweet brown smell, like the stuff that glues your liquor glass to the bar if you leave it sit too long – a brown sugar amber with big, crackly crystals made of calcified Cola concentrate and a fine dusting of something dark, like cocoa powder or freshly ground coffee.

Attractive and warming, of course, especially in winter. But considering this is, essentially, one long basenote made up of naturally occurring warm-sweet-brown-resinous things, there’s no way that this doesn’t clear the very low bar it has set itself. It might therefore be accused of doing little more than ‘meets expectations’ on its annual performance review.

After years of wearing this, my final assessment is that I like it, but it doesn’t set my world on fire. It is also, to my nose at least, a watered down (read: Diptyque-ish) version of the far richer and patchouli-forward Taklamakan by Stéphane Humbert Lucas 777, which I slightly prefer if I am going to wear this kind of thing. 

Indochine by Parfumerie Generale

I bought a bottle of Indochine for two equally silly reasons, first, because I thought I had secured a job in Myanmar (I hadn’t) and second, I was drawn to the idea of trying to shoehorn the scent of Tanaka wood paste, commonly used in Burmese cosmetics, into perfume form. But sadly, outside of a very attractive and fleeting whoosh of café latte in the topnotes, I don’t love Indochine. Mostly because the promised exoticism is never quite delivered. It smells doughy and peppery at once, a pale rosewood paste mashed into a fine powder with grit from a honey that has crystalised with age.

It is far too sweet and honey-milky for me and yet has a sharp resinousness that takes it in an aged, bitter direction that makes it unpalatable. I sense Pierre Guillaume’s familiar pattern at work – he tends to counterpoint everything that is sweet with a note that is sharp or woody. It’s just that here, the benzoin-honey-wood mixture takes on a layer of artificiality that I don’t like. I can’t shake the impression of one of those little packets of instant mocha or caramel cappuccino you get in European motels – powdery, sweet, achingly fake flavour profile, etc.

Listen, it’s fine, it’s fine. It’s just that it’s giving Starbucks when I was promised the Mekong Delta.

Cover Image: Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash