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Blackthorn Perfume Review: Fille en Aiguilles edp - Serge Lutens

13/5/2015

 
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A Girl in Needles:while Fille en Aiguilles may allude obliquely to the coniferous in its nomenclature, this hugely idiosyncratic scent effects direct and unambiguous transportation, setting you down on beaten brown needles heaped between the fluted boles and cones of afternoon pines.  If you cannot picture what that looks like, you can at least smell its every detail.  Commes des Garçons barrelled down a different road with their one-note wooden wonders and they were justly acclaimed but Serge built something far more symphonic in FeA.  I love it for a fistful of aesthetic and personal reasons and even if you don't, there’s little point in denying this fume’s savant-level expression of an ideal so often fumbled and belaboured.

The conifer note is such a tricky bitch to fold into a wearability and even more difficult to incorporate into a sophisticated composition, a hitch rooted in the distance between its material reality (harsh and often inorganic) and emotive northern expectation (holidays, jingle bells), to say nothing of its degradation in the bowels of toilet spray and cleaning products.

FeA wipes all this baggage off the table and presents us with xmas pine’s much hotter southern cousin, deeply tanned and slyly feral, embodied in the aged grove of Monterey Pines that lean out over the sunbaked bay across the road from my house.   

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From a sensory point of view they are most alive in summer, their volatiles tempered by a dose of dusty fundamental clay, blown brine and the sneaky green of the largely acrid weeds that survive their shade.  In warm weather FeA speaks their very particular dialect, breathing a blast of bright citronella, gouts of glutinous sap clogged with sugary crystals, sharply crushed bark and saline caramel that dries down in a shallow trajectory, arriving at a softer version of this spacious accord.  Wood, heat, still, sweet; FeA lures me time and again from the back of the perfume stand with this fourfold warmblooded promise.

While I wouldn't call it a difficult wear a la infamous stablemates Muscs Kublai Khan or Miel de Bois, like many things Lutensian this fume kicks hard in the wrong hands.  A hot wrist can ballon it into glorious simplification- just smoky honey rubbed hard into spiced green wood- but the wrong kind of sweat can turn it rank, sending the sweetness nasty and homolactic.  I'd caution against the Fille under damp cuffs or on an oily skin in summer.  It's also potent and rather tenacious, one spray lasting all day and three turning it into a throat-wringing, Poison-level thug- please don't be tempted.

FeA shows another face when autumn lapses into winter, offering meaningful consolation to those who might despair of their ability to do it justice in warmer weather.  I love how it speaks for the neighbouring grove when the trees themselves fall silent, becoming dry to the point of austerity, substituting all that expansive vernal sucre for weathered, ghosting cedar that somehow swings wide of incense, attenuate vanilla and a suggestion of wild thyme and iodine- in short, the smoke of summer’s brighter fire.  While there's no real change to the skin scent, colder days tamp that potentially monstrous sillage in an effect like smelling just the sleeping coat of some furred animal rather than the full suite of notes in its active presence.  I can’t decide which face I prefer, but am grateful for both. 

Fille en Aiguilles- 
50 ml edp  
available online

HOUSE  Serge Lutens/ Christopher Sheldrake
STYLE/FLAVOUR Wood/Oriental.  Unisex.
DATE OF ISSUE  2009
LISTED NOTES pine needles, vetiver, bay leaf, spices, fruit and incense
ENVIRONMENTAL STATEMENT none.

*   More perfume review   *   RubyHue lipstick review   *   Hostile Witness film review   *


Blackthorn Perfume Review: Fumerie Turque - Serge Lutens

25/8/2014

 
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Where scent is concerned, beauty sometimes keeps strange company.  It might lie all dewy and recumbent amongst petals- exactly where we might expect to find it- but more often than not it smiles at us from some oblique quarter, all the more welcome for such ambagious disclosure.  Such is Fumerie Turque, a juice that sits so pale and unassuming in the glass that the curious can find themselves chewing on a little more than they expected, in common with other Lutensian lovelies.  There's not much backwards in its forwards, but I'm not complaining; life's too short to tolerate equivocation.  

Turkish smoke implies a single dominating note, even to those with no knowledge of latakia tobacco or any other substance that might contribute to such a thing.  And that's what you get, to some extent; the fumes from a brazier fuelled with fragrant wood and maybe damped with sheaves of anise.  But that's not all, and it doesn't play out in the way you might expect.  Fumerie Turque divides into embellished halves and their expression is inverted away from natural expectation; the smoke is induced to curl up and cleave to the wrist, and it is the hearth's sweet, charred bones that are offered to the distant admirer, by way of scented woods and haunting resins.

My initial impression of the skin scent is that of burning rubber, a elderberry-purple acridity that cracks you in the face right off the wrist.  Don't let this deter you; a moment of force majeure is required to deliver the rest of its hefty payload, including the broken flesh of liquorice, that packet of Camels that breathed at you from his shirt pocket when you put your arm around his neck, and oil-stained, sunwarmed saddle.  Synaesthetic impressions lie a little further south of the Bosphorus than the title implies- I get the deep, inky-stained colours of Moroccan or Tuareg leatherwork, perhaps, or maybe lattice shadow in the alley outside a hammam if one is to draw a more literal inspiration.  Coincidentally it shares these gothic flavours with the subject of my last review, Norne (Slumberhouse), although it is a drier and more tasteful version of that potent nocturne, its laurels resting in cured leaves rather than on a green plant trampled by a must-wracked sasquatch.

As far as the listed notes go, suede and tobacco are plain enough, providing the scuffed matte warmth of leather and the delicious little stink of unborn smoke.  It's sometimes possible to detect dusty old camphor, as when the lid is lifted on a fabric stash; there is even that faintest suggestion of the parched and weary fibres of the silk that's stored within.  If juniper, chamomile, patchouli and currant were bound together and sharply compressed you would doubtlessly end up with the aniseed and liquorice accord, something faintly disturbing and boiled-down into a witchy black compound.  Tonka, styrax and honey align with true vanilla to form a sort of vanille chimérique, so much more brown, like the wizened titular pod, than anything you would scoop from a tub; Medjoul dates might be a bridge too far in regard to this element, but you get the idea.  

As I've already said, don't worry that everyone around you is being subjected to smouldering tyres or bossy sassafras.  FT proffers this lazy, sinuous sweetness to the bystander, my partner identifying aniseedy Smokers lollies and dried cherries in the sillage, going on to mention sweet leaves on a fire or perhaps a room fumigated with scented greenery- all surprisingly divergent from the more proximate experience. 
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Emphatic it may be, but not bereft of surprises.  I've been wearing Fumerie Turque for a couple of years now and the other day was I startled by a novel burst of incense, similar to that so boldly expressed in Sonoma Scents Incense Pure; FT let go of its leather and lay back like an opium belle, breathing purring resins for two hours before stepping down again into liquorice and firesides.  Could it have been a change in my personal chemistry?  Bottle ageing?  Who knows, but I had never struck it before.  

FT favours cooler weather and a dry skin, so think twice about dousing yourself if you're likely to sweat.  Nor is it really for the meek and it would behove the uncertain to invest in a sample before going to the effort of sourcing a bottle, now that it's been made a Salon Exclusive (ie. more obscure and expensive.)  On the Lutens strength and projection scale I'd give it a 7.5, a little behind 10-monsters like Chergui.  As far as gender suitability is concerned, it's perfectly, perfectly androgynous.  

Perhaps the thing I enjoy most in Fumerie Turque is its transportive quality.  Unless, by some anomaly in the space-time continuum you are already standing in a somewhat romanticised 19th C bazaar, chewing the butt of a cigar and scowling at a dodgy syce while haggling for a brace of blood mares, FT is pretty much guaranteed to take you there.  If you know what I mean.

Fumerie Turque is still available from a few retailers online as a 50ml epd 
- or -
 in a 75ml bell jar as a Salon Exclusive.

HOUSE  Serge Lutens/Christopher Sheldrake
STYLE/FLAVOUR Oriental/leather.  Unisex. 
DATE OF ISSUE  2003

NOTES Tobacco, honey, rose, juniper, tonka, chamomile, patchouli, vanilla, red currant, styrax, suede. 

*   More perfume review Here   *   Makeup review Here   *


Blackthorn Perfume Review: Norne - Slumberhouse

2/6/2014

 
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While I know what I like, I also enjoy being blindsided by abject and complicated strangeness.  When ordering from somewhere like Indiescents, I trawl the sample options like a perverted maniac, looking for something that'll piss me off or prompt me to abandon a long-standing olfactory relationship in its rakish favour.  Slumberhouse had me at slumberhouse and I picked two enfants terrible from its contentious archives, prised Norne from the package, blew it onto my wrist, toughed it out for an hour and then ran to the bathroom like a little bitch to scrub it off.  A week later I tried it again and came back with nope.  Another attempt brought me round a small distance and got me questioning the depth of my own reaction.  Was I really mad at Norne for being a tall dark fucked-up stranger?  Who am I?  So I went a few more rounds.

Like many good things, Norne is immensely aberrant, especially at first.  It yawns wide open like a lifted slab, full of latent, moonless lycanthropy, offering up a richly phenolic bucket of neat liquorice, damp saddle, black tar something, peaty malt, signal fire and refrigerator vegetable bin feat. celery.  Scraped-up moss and shovel handle, distant aniseed and molasses tins drift in and out of that dense equation.  After half an hour fresh white sawdust creeps under the door as the aggressive tar and vegetable elements collapse, and this develops further into the smell of dressed timber, roasted, savoury caramels and brown liquor and cola-breath huffed against a neck.  When taxed for his opinion of the surprisingly moderate silage, my partner muttered dried fruit and cinnamon, which confused me, but maybe there is an analogue in the molasses note.  Then he said warm horse.  Writing this an hour later leads me to reassess the tail which is both lengthy and indeed a lot more aromatic than I remembered, with lowball powdered cinnamon, maybe sandalwood and the ghosts of nameless conifers emerging.

Every time I consult Norne in its first half hour I am enclosed in a beetling ring of old-growth trees that exclude the sun and stand buried up to their titan waists in a thousand years of moss and lichen. The visual association is immensely powerful; I can't lift my wrist to my nose without seeing tannic forest colours, feeling water around my ankles and being reminded both of the sound of an approach and my own breathing.  To me, that is pagan, deeply erotic and very welcome.  These mental and emotional transports are rare, their value completely distinct from that of a scent's aesthetic worth.  Full marks to Norne in this respect, and also to its aforementioned depravity; it is almost autoerotic, inverted and careless of spectators and if it was devised as some sort of upskirt voodoo delivery system, it certainly rings the dirty bell in my Pavlovian experience.  

Is it perfect?  No.  I'm not averse to gritting my teeth and dousing myself in something completely fucked for the sake of art and/or pretension.  But I feel there are some flies in this ointment and that they are not just questions of personal taste.  Volume is one; Norne is too fucking loud on the skin.  Even on a half-squirt this juice shouts I am Norne in my face like someone with tuna stuck in their teeth.  This may be the extrait strength talking and while I wonder if another, more volatile embodiment might help, I also suspect this scent would lose too much to alcohol.  As it is, it makes no constructive concessions to your personal chemistry, getting up to buy you a drink and coming back with a huge neat Pernod.  Sometimes sarcastic generosity gives you all kinds of wood and sometimes it just engages your headbutting impulse; the chasm between wrist-experience and sillage is problematic in my humble opinion.  And on a hot day it can sour and turn horribly green- I mean horribly- and this comes from someone with dry and annoyingly sweet skin.  Under these circumstances Norne can morph toward that dread strain of smell that I feel many men are anosmic to, namely the low, pungent mouldy scent of stinky towels hung too long in a damp place, of cotton Tshirts not completely dry when they were stuffed into a drawer.  In my opinion, while Norne is hotly courageous and deeply creative, it would flower into perfection given a modest technical revision.  Apparently the dark juice stains, but that depends on your wardrobe.

For some, this fume will possess more than enough questionable charm.  Of something this subjective I can speak only for my own nose; we didn't hit it off initially, but it does wrestle me onto the ground more often than not these days and my appreciation of it has grown exponentially in the course of constructing this review.  Norne can be that someone in the darkness of a bar at 3 am whom you'd ride hard and put away wet, especially if he kept that coat on.  But it can sometimes makes me feel like I'm floundering in a peat bog with a rubber gumboot wedged over my head while a stranger masturbates, wafting the smell of his damp army surplus jacket toward me.  Dried fruit and cinnamon said my partner.  You be the judge.  

Norne is not for everyone or all the time, but that is more a recommendation than an aspersion. 
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Norne is available internationally at Indiescents, sample or 30ml bottle.  
Visit the Slumberhouse site here.

HOUSE  Slumberhouse/Josh Lobb
STYLE/FLAVOUR Wooded aromatic.  Unisex.  Extrait.
DATE OF ISSUE  2012
LISTED NOTES Fir, incense, spice.
ENVIRONMENTAL STATEMENT none.

*   More Perfume Review Here   *


Blackthorn Perfume Review: Muscs Koublai Khan edp - Serge Lutens.

4/11/2013

 
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Muscs Koublai Khan.  Prrrrrrr.  Some say eeeek, but then there are two sorts of people in the world when you think about it; those who embrace their own biology, and those who find our mammalian reality discomforting and even repugnant.  The latter haven't been backward in coming forward in regard to that repugnance, which annoys me; as with Miel de Bois, Muscs Koublai Khan has been unfairly and rather childishly slated as some kind of stinky poopoo monster.  I stand firmly in the former camp; it's not that there's nothing funky about a hot day on a crowded bus, but I just can't throw out the baby with the bathwater- the smell of an agreeable member of my own species delights my sensibilities.  The memory of someone with skin that smelled of gently-warmed beeswax, a buttery, rolled-gold scent that rose from his hair and neck when he sat in the sun and loitered in his clothing like some sort of plush phantom; more beautiful to me than any champaca absolute.  My partner's sweat is redolent of his indelibly personalized masculinity and I would not be without that intimate reminder.  So yes, to cut that shit short- I am a musk-rat.  A skank bunny.  A pit-sniffer.  And I love Muscs Koublai Khan.    

Which is ironic, really, since I don't find it animalic.  If I was looking forward to smelling like three hours with two guys in a yurt, I found only traces of any glandular/mustelid element, and am by no means anosmic in that direction.  MKK opens in a brief kick of sharp, vaporous aromatics that soon loft its buxom substance into a surprisingly modest projection.  The minky civet, castoneum, cistus and ambergis unfurl together, worked into something fat, silky and deeply luxurious, slapped hard and flushed pink by the rose notes and lazy, recessive patchouli.

Some find only skunk after this point; I think they might be sniffing too hard at the wrist, mistaking the skin scent for the sillage in its sophisticated and quite divergent actuality, but here we come to something everyone should know about perfume- your skin is no passive receptor.  If you're a hottie, a sweater, one of those dewy, slightly moistened creatures, expect MKK to turn dirty and head for the stables.  My own personal upholstery converts the darkest, rankest raunch to powder puff faster than you can say doh I was hoping for sex, strongly favouring the pink, silvery fur aspect of musk and the grubbier flowers; thus I am treated to rosy/lolly/fox collar rather than any triple X throwdown.  Quel dommage.

Another quarter of an hour passes before something almost arcane occurs, the compound sweetness morphing to almost exactly resemble the scent of batik application, sere notes of scorched cotton and hot wax supported by the increasingly ghostly musk.  This accord rolls slowly onto its side to reveal what is to me the hidden heart of MKK- a whispered, mythic analogue of a lover's scent, memorialized, hung with flowers, framed in the doting, mote-flecked gold of a late summer afternoon, incarnate at long last, but private and intimate.  All the best fumes have this quality of intimacy, of personal relevance; the ability to move and remind, and MKK is the queen of them all in that respect.

I'm finding it difficult to imagine a more unisex scent and perhaps this will provide a clearer picture of its comprehensive organic affinities.  I get four to five decent hours before it settles down and closes its eyes, but it lingers for weeks on your clothing.  Don't let anyone talk you out of Muscs Koublai Khan.  Its beauty is a rarity in commercial perfumery- a substance verging on the personal.  If you can appreciate McQueen's Kingdom, Kiel's Musk and some of Serge's dirty girls like El Attarine or even Arabie, you'll be wondering what all the hot fuss was about. 
Images my own- please do not reproduce.

Muscs Koublai Khan- 50 ml edp.  
Palais Royal exclusive,
but still available online as a limited release.     

HOUSE  Serge Lutens/ Christopher Sheldrake
STYLE/FLAVOUR Musk/Oriental.  Unisex.
DATE OF ISSUE  1998
LISTED NOTES Civet, cistus labdanum, ambergris, Moroccan rose, cumin, ambrette seed, costus root, patchouli.
ENVIRONMENTAL STATEMENT none.

*   More niche perfume review Here   *   Makeup review Here   *


Perfume Review: Pulp edp - Byredo

3/10/2013

 
Pictureafter Picasso: Compotier, fruit and glass (1909)
When I'm looking for a new fume, either I research the thing with pathetic, almost pitiful caution, consulting the experts, prodding the hivemind, stalking it for months before even comparing prices and actually breaking out the plastic, or just shrug nihilistically and dump it in my online cart, hands in the air like I just don't care.  The idea of Byredo Pulp as some sort of semi-literal fruit-based facehug really appealed to my grabby inner impulse monkey, gorged as I was on the Lutensian stewed and dried compotes and hankering for something a little more jeune, something weird, fresh and immediate.  But I'd never (well, hardly) heard of Byredo as a house except to have osmotically noted the exorbitant price point- down here, $250 NZ for (admittedly) 100mls; I don't know about you, but that bites my arse like some sort of perverted hornet, ladies and gemmen.

What to do?  Sounds great... costs far too much... might be absolutely horrible... remember the last time you fell for the fructose fairy?  Fate intervened in the shape of a small decant, so I took the plunge anyway.

If I had imagined I would enjoy a squished mess of fresh fruit notes, I was dead right, though for reasons oblique to my vague expectations.  Pulp opens for me in a suckerpunch of sliced red capsicum and wooden chopping board, a bristling vegetal ambush.  I presume that is the slightly pissy combination of the bergamot and blackcurrant dicing with the lurking cedar; this little contretemps goes on for around ten minutes on my hand before taking it outside and settling in behind what is for me a buxom conjugation of juicy tropical notes, both compressed and broken open.  Instead of the nominated figs and pommes I get mangosteens, sunwarmed pineapple and even funky jackfruit (distant jackfruit, luckily).  Lychee ducks in and out according to ambient temperature.  The space between your wrist and nose quivers with this louche, pale-fleshed orchestration though there is an abstract quality that almost fends off a gourmand designation.  Some have accused Pulp of plastic fruitbowl syndrome and while it flirts with this idea in an almost ironic fashion, I find nothing truly unlickable.  (In an interesting coincidence that might explain this division of opinion, I was in a local museum today rubbing and sniffing a piece of kauri gum (sub-fossil podocarp tree resin); as it released its volatiles, I smelled incense and balsam while a friend found only the sharp stink of early plastics.  And we were probably both right.)

There is some morphing over the next few hours with the various characters hoving and bulging in a slow and pretty lateral progression but generally speaking, Pulp delivers on its promise of mingled drupe, syncarpet, pepo and hesperidium, shot through with shards of greenish savoury goodness and favoured with a bottom rounded outward by backstage caramel.  The tail is lighter, settling into a respectable stony, monotonal peachiness.

As a whole, it is a fat, persistent (5 hours intact) scent that offers moderate projection/silage, though this is very dependent on the number of sprays applied.  Pulp is a notional, modernist fruit arrangement, more at home in the collective unconscious than the breakfast bowl and make no mistake, there is ugliness buried in the squishy depths of its screwed-up, almost visceral expression.  I enjoyed both this explicit counterpoint and its diagonal revision of a played-out genre and will most likely invest in a larger decant or 50ml some time soon, $$$ notwithstanding.  But if you prefer your fumes pretty, traditional and right-thinking, it's probably best if you allow the price point to deter you.

Byredo Pulp edp 50 & 100ml 

Available online Here

HOUSE  Byredo/Ben Gorham
STYLE/FLAVOUR Fruit/gourmand.  Unisex tending toward femme.
DATE OF ISSUE  2008
LISTED NOTES Bergamot, cardamom, blackcurrant, fig, red apple, tiare, cedar wood, praline, peach flower
ENVIRONMENTAL STATEMENT None.

*   More Independent Perfume Review Here   *


Review: Miel de Bois edp- Serge Lutens.   La Sorcière

31/7/2013

 
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HOUSE  Serge Lutens/ Christopher Sheldrake
STYLE/FLAVOUR floral.  Unisex tending toward femme.
DATE OF ISSUE  2005
LISTED NOTES Wood, honey, iris, hawthorn.

ENVIRONMENTAL STATEMENT none.

The psychology of disgust and rejection is an interesting subtext in perfumery.  It is beauty's shadow, the necessary companion of any allusion to desire or allure, and I'm always perplexed by the unquenchable need of so many to uncouple them.  What is one without the other, after all?  
Having spent five long years on a professional sensory panel, I can tell you a thing or two about pungency, overload, anosmia and characterization; this experience, coupled with wide culinary and environmental exposure, means that my spectrum of tolerance and active inquiry is possibly broader than most.  When I became interested in the idea of Miel De Bois and began to peruse the reviews, I was intrigued by the violence of the language and reaction it seemed to inspire, but then I'm always surprised at the space disgust occupies in peoples' personal real estate.  Vomit, they cried.  Cat piss!  Quel horreur!  The only scent that disgusts me to any real degree is putrefaction, and say what you like about Etat Libre d'Orange Sécrétions Magnifiques or even Charogne, it really does not exist in any perfume that springs to mind.  Nor does any substantive fecal or urinous element, unless your personal evacuations have something extraordinary to declare.  References to ammonia are not the smell of urine, any more than indole is of scat.  That some wrote of needing to flee the room and being provoked to nausea upon exposure to Miel de Bois spoke more to me of sheltered lives than golden showers.  There is really nothing to be afraid of in modern perfumery, except bad taste, and scurrying off to artfully recount your slump onto the fainting couch in a dozen different forums is, in my opinion, inimical to the innovation and adventure we all desire.

That's not to say I'd give a bad perfume a break, no matter how inventive, but in this case that's hardly required.  Miel de Bois is wonderful, in every sense of that capacious word.

Last summer I stood in the absolute shade of an enormous Prunus Lusitanica, the Portuguese Laurel, its roots lifting and cracking the black tar of the path underfoot, its monstrous canopy thickly decked with filimented blooms of cool, imperfect white.  The sombre leather-green leaves of this tree are full of cyanide, the fruit unbearably bitter and quite poisonous in this unripe state.  You can smell it in the air around you, a murmured darkness, something pagan that surpasses shade and becomes a quality worthy of recording in a grimoire.  It brought to mind Helaine, the pale, laconic witch who is such a buried thread within The Blackthorn Orphans, and I saw her standing in the narrow doorway of her farmhouse while the hedgerows breathed their scent in silent, worshipful acclaim.  Miel de Bois is a spell written in the same ink.

On the skin and in the air MdB opens with blading green notes; the pyrethrum burned in the mosquito coils of my childhood, and sometimes, in warmer weather, the rounder forms of a distant citronella.  And neem, as a soap, or as a fistful of its leaves.  An element of bitter briar skunk is revealed as hawthorn, as familiar to me as the pollen dusted onto my shoulders in early summer from the wilding hedges bordering our land, doubling up the references to honey in the nectar fermenting in the sprays of pointilist blossom that dress its spiny branches.  Some people do not care for it, and it is complex, the precise nature of its challenges altering in accordance with distance and temperature, held in some reserve by cold but nourished into almost sinister luxuriance on a warm night.  Loathsome, perhaps, in its deliciousness?  I cannot personally object to anything so evocative or unreconstructed.  You can even smell thorns in Miel de Bois, a pared-wood or green bark note that accompanies the paler volatiles.

It's hard to assign any reliable progression to this fume.  The silage is often strong initially, perhaps for an hour, before it settles into your personal space, but this is heavily dependent on ambient conditions.  It is sometimes lineal, sometimes full of crossroad kinks.  Last night its vixen flowers predominated, but the day before the weight and radiance of honey draped me like a satin-lined coat.  Many have commented on the authenticity of this difficult note but I find it more fabled than literal, more akin to the golden fleece than sheepskin.  The closest I have come to it in life would possibly be a new pot of nodding thistle honey, with a dab of clover or pohutukawa and an ounce of creamy beeswax.  Here in New Zealand honey is often insanely animalic, rank with gummy, debauched sugars, tannins, broken foliage, sweaty bee toil and dark bush propolis.  There is really nothing like this in MdB, no matter what the hysterics have proclaimed.

This morning I am left with a lovely skin-sccent, like a little curl of buttered honey on the back of my hand, perfect and blameless, and I once again feel deeply sorry for the people who can smell only subways and vagrants in its place.  Miel de Bois is certainly strange and faintly disturbing, but also impossibly beautiful, filled with all the promise of its eloquent nomenclature.  Sadly, it has been withdrawn from international distribution and is now available only as an expensive Palais Royal exclusive, but I scored my precious bottle via online horsetrading and you might too.  
75ml available here.  If you're in the EU, dammit.

Review: Sa Majesté la Rose edp- Serge Lutens.  Infinite pink wisdom.

10/7/2013

 
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HOUSE  Serge Lutens
STYLE/FLAVOUR floral/soliflore
DATE OF ISSUE  2000
LISTED NOTES 
rose, geranium, clove, vanilla, gaiac, honey, musk.

Rose soliflores, in fact soliflores in general, do not speak to the very core of my being.  Perhaps I can make an exception for A La Nuit, that soporific, sloe-eyed jasmine, and for a good champaca- if I am ever to find an example of that elusive paragon, since it seems doomed to cloying, pandering adulteration.
  What is a freaking soliflore anyway, you might well ask; literally, it is a scent based on or consisting wholly of a single nominated flower, a conceit that many find tiresome given the fact that virtually nothing smells exclusively of itself.  You might conclude that this endeavour often ends in gakky disaster, and you would be right- tuberose (it burns!) and vanilla being much abused in the tortuous pursuit of simplicity.

Having just qualified my initial statement into oblivion, I might as well go the whole hog and admit to enjoying Sa Majesté la Rose, if not to the same extent as, say… Muscs Koublai Khan or… quite a few other things.  Equivocation is annoying, isn't it?  I agree, wholeheartedly.  But I just don't know if I can love a simple singleton; I need layers, enigmas, imponderables.  Should my exorbitant requirements colour your own opinion of such an expertly composed and well-executed scent?  Probably not.

Sa Majesté opens with the best of all possible roses.  Serge himself references Turkish, Bulgarian and Moroccan sources which suggests the inclusion of both rosa damascena (heavy, fat, fruity) and rosa centifolia (bright, sweet), the basis of those respective harvests.  The scent is truly a thing of hybrid perfection, collating all those narrow, fractionated ideas that we have gathered and stowed and arranging them in an authentic sequence.  
We are greeted with cloudy dawn pink and feather-grey top notes that express the first taste of a new flower still quartered in its native thorns.  There is bloomy purple fruit threaded with a notional honey, more like deliquescent sweetness than the mellifluous substance itself, devoid of any skunky complexity.  Clasping this central emphasis is a cold, limpid note of dew supported by the fibrous, wooded bitterness of fresh sap, the shaded green of leaves and the ghost of the cool dirt at the feet of it all, a loamy darkness anchoring the velvet hum.  The rose is the story and there is not too much else to report; I find that any flanking notes owe much of their presence or absence to temperature and detect a nip of carnation and a smudge of white musk on a warm day.  Honey and sleepy clove fire up slowly in the tail.

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Sa Majesté's appeal, even to girning skeptics like myself, lies in the fact that it is a rose dans le jardin, possessed of brilliant dimensionality and precious, organic context.  So many rose-based fumes wrench the poor thing off the bush and stuff it in a cloudy vase with violets and jasmine, becoming what porn is to sex- the dance without the music.  Down that road lies toilet duck and nana soap and Stella and all their dreadful kin, but here we are smelling more than boiled petals, skirting the droopy glass-bound exiles and stepping outside into the parterre.  Vive la différence.  Trust Uncle Serge to deliver the good stuff.

Sa Majesté la Rose has a half-life of twenty thousand earth years on my (very fixative) skin; be prepared for that.  As with Chergui I always spray it low to combat the rogue-volitile element that can ambush you on a hot day.  I find it clean-wearing but others have reported souring in short order, so if you're a sweaty little number apply it somewhere cool and dry.  It plays well with others; I've layered it with Sonoma Ambre Noir, SL Louve, Santal Majuscule and Arabie (lol- try it!) with pleasing results.  A brave male could certainly pull this off (with discretion, on a nice cool day) but that is highly dependent on personal chemistry and intestinal fortitude.


Receiving more compliments on Sa Majesté la Rose than all of my other scents put together points to two things; that it's perdy, and that my tastes are generally perverse.  I tend to prefer smelling like I just sat on tropical fruit or got some jungle stuck in my hair or defiled some place of worship or recently wrestled a hermetic Taoist to the ground; that I like Sa Majesté says a lot in its favour.  Do try before you buy, though.
50ml edp.  Available online.
Céili O'Keefe.


Review: Hermès Elixir des Merveilles edp - disco citrus

14/6/2013

2 Comments

 
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Regrets- I've had a few.
HOUSE  Hermès
STYLE/FLAVOUR oriental fougere.
DATE OF ISSUE  2006
LISTED NOTES peru balsam, vanilla sugar, amber, sandalwood, tonka bean, patchouli, siam resin, caramel, oak, incense, orange peel, cedar.

I often only glance at one or two reviews before buying a new fume, since, as I might have already mentioned, I prefer not to load myself with other peoples' expectations and disappointments.  Thus I came to Elixir des Merveilles without any preconceptions, apart from the side-eye I reserve for Hermès as a house in the round; they have never impressed me beyond their ability to induce certain people to pay alarming sums of money for possibly the ugliest bags on the planet.  Slow clap for that, I suppose.  I mean, Ambre Narguile is solid enough without being distinguished; there are a few others that were... pleasant... inoffensive... but that's part of the problem, is it not?  Their fragrances tend to not even bother me and that is almost incontrovertible evidence of mediocrity, no matter where your tastes happen to lie.  All this fuss is of course ephemeral to consideration of the perfume in itself and was something that merely confirmed my impression after the fact anyway.

Elixir des Merveilles is a pungent detonation from the moment it escapes the glass and wraps around your head, a spongy wad of dirty, syrupy, slightly decomposed citrus; rubbed kaffir lime, bruised lemon blossom, the last mandarin in the bowl - you get the idea.  Accompanying this dubious melange is an almost aged if not decrepit vanilla, battered with a plank of splintery sunbaked resin.  This fume is thick in almost every possible sense of the word; something to choke on- something to get both hands around- something that might need help finding its way home, and while it hoes the same row as other monster scents like Lutens' Chergui and the original Poison, it doesn't share their IQ, having more in spiritual common with Clinique's Aromatics Elixir, that drooling sleeper-hold of a thing, that infant migraine in a bottle.  It doesn't so much smell like the former pair as possess their frightening tenacity and penetration, so keep that in mind when considering a second spray.

Along with all this fuzzy, dense citrus comes something grey and I can't quite put my finger on its origins since I'm still pretty much smelling what I did half an hour ago.  Yes, Elixir is what you might call linear, so much so that it really just oozes slowly forward in a spineless kind of way, banging on the jellied orange like a favourite toy until you want to crawl out of the window or at least hit the mute button.  Wherefore art thou, alleged cedar, because I'm gagging for you at this point.  After half an hour or so the fruit bowl starts to sag and you're permitted a small peep of something drier, a flat amberous resin struggling through a vanilla turned both lactic and melon-y (yes, ew), a smothering toffee and something resembling bad rum and raisin icecream (I'm picking fake sandal and budget tonka) that have squeezed into a world that's starting to feel like the satin-lined interior of a white stretch limousine.  Possibly not the intended destination.  The whole thing settles into a decidedly MOR fly-spray amber in the end, the orange rising, undead, in dried peel form like a piece plucked out of a chai blend and wedged forcibly into one nostril.

So to summarize, Elixir des Merveilles is inorganic, asphyxiating and inarticulate.  There, I've said it, and I feel much better.  And for the price ($100+ 50ml) you can do so much better that I don't even know where to begin.  That's not a popular opinion; the darn thing scores 100% on Basenotes, but I'd rather swallow the bottle than spray it on my wrist.  Yes that is an exaggeration, but the sentiment remains.
Available online, if you insist.
© céili o'keefe.  

2 Comments

Review: Sonoma Scent Studio Incense Pure edp.

25/5/2013

1 Comment

 
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HOUSE  Sonoma Scent Studio  (I've decided to abandon the star-rating system; it's too blunt a tool and personal preference isn't a measurable quantity anyway.)

STYLE/FLAVOUR incense/oriental

DATE OF ISSUE  March 2010

LISTED NOTES  frankincense CO2, myrrh EO, labdanum absolute, cistus oil, natural oakmoss absolute, aged Indian patchouli heartnote fraction, sandalwood, cedar, ambergris, orris, angelica root absolute, elemi EO, vanilla absolute. 

ENVIRONMENTAL & ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Recycled packaging elements, synthetic instead of animal musks/civet/castoreum, no sunscreens, preservatives, colourants, parabens.  Sources sustainably grown ingredients where possible.  Close attention to batch freshness.

My beloved is unto me as a bundle of myrrh, that lieth between my breasts.

(The Song of Solomon)

No one would have trouble perceiving the fact that I use incense almost daily upon walking into our house, but it's always seemed strange to me how few of us can name the components of this most evocative aroma.  Smoke?  Prayer?  It's a whole lot of wood, when you think about it, but why are ligneous essences so closely associated with the divine across so many cultures and practices?  I had never really questioned the ancient conventions surrounding incense until I began exploring scent in a concerted manner.

In the process I've been endlessly frustrated in my search for a true or even adequate rendition of the substance in wearable form.  It's always, always a timid little dash of smoke or spice and then a giant whack of  P E R F U M E, the two often diametrically opposed but chained together for some ungodly purpose, pleasing devotees of neither.  I'd hear rumours of success and in their innovative Series, Commes de Garçons came so achingly close; I disliked the dull, flat choke of Avignon and thought Kyoto cheap and cheerless, but Jaisalmer and Ouarzazate transported me in two very welcome directions and I would have loved them unreservedly if they had stayed beyond an hour.  Tragically, they do not and after that I did despair.  I scowled down at my little Sonoma Scents vial and thought you're lying to me, Incense Pure... you're just like all the others.

I was wrong about that.  Incense Pure is, at long last, pure incense.  No flowery excuses, no concessions to the uninitiated, just smooth and bronzy goodness for those of us who like to see a thin blue haze.   
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The first thing to strike you about I P is the hit of white, curling wood, the kind of punch that rises from a handful of dry timber shavings and hovers in the air over a nip of Islay single malt.  Almost-but-neither iodine or alcohol.  Perhaps it is the cedar and the highest notes within the elemi, a pungent resin, that flap past us in this moment but it's gone almost before you can name it, swept out of the way by a broad guard of more central components.  If IP was a shape, or more importantly a texture, to me it would be something like shagreen, the enlisted notes overlapped so closely that they almost disguise each other on their way to becoming the greater whole.  Frankincense, tart but generous as ever, forms the spine.  Around this note wind two darker strains; laconic myrrh and damp, slightly oily oakmoss, the latter pushing through in the first hour to make this quite a dark rendition of the theme for me, suggesting the pitchy black deposits on the inside of an antique censer.  It is flanked by a chorus of recessed woods; a classic sandal, knotty labdanum and then a very austere patchouli, cousin to that found in Luten's Borneo with its distant, desiccated green.  More distant still is a suggestion of vanilla, though it is mellow and fractional, the temptation to offset the literal nature of the composition at this point thankfully resisted.

While my initial impressions suggested a very dense and lineal scent, so much so that I'd wondered if I could weigh or even discern the individual components, there is definitely space and progression, on a personal scale especially, its twists and reveals held close to the skin as the tail glides slowly downward until it loses itself in something soft and grayish.  I get the soapy, musky mauve of orris in the dying breaths.  With a generous application I expect four hours of moderate, coherent sillage, and perhaps another two in a more private form.  
Superb.

In considering notes like olibanum and sandal it becomes clear as to why woods and resins are so heavily used in reverential expression; when we still had a meaningful accord with nature these things were the voice of the Grove, the living temple that surrounded and sustained us as it did all other creatures.  Incense is the ghost of that regard, coded and remembered in the twining violet smoke.

Incense Pure EDP.  Purchase online at Sonoma Scent Studio and at selected retailers within the U.S.

Céili O'Keefe


1 Comment

Review: Serge Lutens Borneo 1834 Eau de Parfum - Une jungle de plaisirs.

2/5/2013

 
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Star rating:  * * * * *
House:  Serge Lutens, Christopher Sheldrake.
Style/Flavour: oriental
Date of issue: 2005

Listed notes: Indonesian patchouli, cocoa accord, galbanum, cistus labdanum, floral notes.
Enviromental/ethical statement:  None at this time; I have asked and will post if anything becomes available.

On the bookcase behind me stands a little wooden casket carved with an animal's image.  It is supposedly that of the Bhutanese thunder dragon, Druk, though I suspect it is Singha, the great lion of Thailand.  It might also be Barong, his Hindu incarnation.  When I slide back the lid and hold it to my face, I breathe the smell of dry, secluded teak.  It sets my feet back down on the pitted basalt of Pura Besakih and the many Balinese shrines that convey so deep an appreciation of the divine within nature.  The direction of this evocation and the sacred, complex elements of its expression so often prompt me to get up and put on Borneo that they're inextricable to me.  I love this scent with such a passion that conveying my impression gives me the jitters.  

Expect to be assaulted, even offended by Borneo if you live an exclusively metropolitan existence.  Take a deep breath and put aside the associations that might rush at you; mothballs, wardrobes, the old, the unfamiliar, that atavistic suggestion of danger troubling the part of your brain that used to creep down from trees to gather up fruit when we still wore our own fur.  New things will alight and replace them if you persist.  Borneo describes the distance between you and the exotic; close enough to grasp but necessarily removed.


The first hit is green.  So many people revile an inaccurate perception of patchouli that they dismiss this scent before experiencing its development, but as many have observed, this is not the patchouli you know.  Forget bong shops and the dready girl who sat behind you while you ate Hari Krishna tarka dahl; that was probably ylang ylang anyway.  The smell of quality patchouli leaves is a parched equatorial khaki, an errant, curling, powdered green enjoying polyamory with polished rosewood and the aforementioned temple teak.  Wed this to the damp hay and low incense of smouldering opium gum and that's as close as I can take you.  This note has a peculiar molecular weight and floats at head height in a warmed room.  You rise from your chair to stand amongst its unsuspected largesse.

Next comes the cacao accord and this is where we lose more of you; the wtf of chocolate and leaves can be a deal breaker but the more you know of chocolate, the faster you will recognize the broad relationship.  The cacao reveals itself as a construct over time, collapsing into its components then rolling back up into something you'd call chocolat in a process like the ponderous breathing of some enormous animal.  Alongside it I find summer beating down on eucalyptus, cut tobacco, sun-warmed grain sacks, molasses, and even a small spike of that tarry licorice blackness at the heart of Fumerie Turque, another Sheldake prodigy.  I also find stirrup leather, specifically because it wears the polish gleaned from riding boots.  These leather and tobacco notes settle in, recalling the rubbed skin of a deeply-buttoned club chair and partnering the patchouli spine into a solid tail.  Camphor and sometimes cardamon emerge late in the day, leaving you wondering why you didn't suspect their presence immediately, chocolate returning in a sweeter guise as things slow down.  

Borneo is incredibly persistent on the skin; I find it a little less so on fabric in a reversal of the usual scenario.  Put it on at night and in the morning you will be greeted with the same, sans maybe one third of its volume.  I have made the mistake of wearing it alongside Chanel's Coromandel and was struck by the latter's heavy, sickly bourgeoise mass, its squat, pinky-yellow patchouli like something inflated with a bicycle pump and lodged in my throat.  I now shudder at the thought of it. 



In short, you enjoy Borneo or you do not.  Moderate and indifferent don't often feature in the Lutens language.  It is Eastern without bowing to cliché.  Instead of fans and incense we are given otherness encapsulated; a green that lies over a darkness, the dry, singing shade of a forest awaiting monsoon.  Oscillated animals slink by between the buttressed trunks, and in the unseen distance lies some flowering aboreal paragon, its blooms already on their way to becoming something more.
Available- online.

Review: Sonoma Scent Studio Ambre Noir eau de parfum- the golden delicious.

24/4/2013

 
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STAR RATING *****
HOUSE  Sonoma Scent Studio
STYLE/FLAVOUR amber/ unisex.
DATE OF ISSUE  Aug 2008
LISTED NOTES  labdanum absolute, amber, rose, olibanum, myrrh, vetiver codistilled with mitti, oakmoss absolute, aged Indian patchouli, Texas cedarwood, sandalwood, clove, castoreum.
ENVIRONMENTAL & ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Recycled packaging elements, synthetic instead of animal musks/civet/castoreum, no sunscreens, preservatives, colourants, parabens.  Sources sustainably grown ingredients where possible.  Close attention to batch freshness.



Like many of the best things in life, I discovered Sonoma Scent Studio at random via a sample of Ambre Noir, bought stone-cold online.  I've been getting into niche-ish fumes for a few years now, gorging on Lutens' epic back catalogue and snuffling around various other houses largely without prejudice, having known nothing of their reputations or the degree to which they were esteemed or execrated, and not really caring about those things anyway.  

I do remember gazing at that little gold vial of Ambre Noir and thinking it looked special.  But haven't we all thought that as a prelude to disappointment?  In my native cynicism I expected something… polite, if not pedestrian, another of the many homely MOR ambers milling about of late, possessing neither the lofty, piercing austerity of Serge Luten's Ambre Sultan nor the lolling, open-robe cornucopia of Parfum d'Empire's Ambre Russe, or even the bitchy smokers' croak of that hoary ashtray amber still padding the shoulders of good old Opium.  

Instead it was amber, but not as I knew it, and I was more than happy to be slapped out of my preconceptions.  AN's point of difference is both positive and negative; the convex mass of its strengths and its judicious exclusions.  I adore it for both.  It is polite; it has the perfect manners of a heavily-replete tiger lying with its head in the shade.  Always a good thing.

To my nose, labdanum and a dense contralto rose step out together in almost chivalric mutuality.  They float patiently over your wrist while you ponder their balance; visually I find them merged into a limpid golden orb, and sliding past this full-blown lustre come the first reports of smoke, muslin-white and humming notes learned in the spice isles, arranging them in the same low key instead of barking them into your face.  I was charmed by this restraint; there is something about amber that seems to prompt such shrill excesses from those attempting to kick it in some new direction at the expense of its inherent values.  Thankfully AN does not suffer this unlovely syndrome.

At this point I instinctively brace for the banality of synth vanilla, that gloopy moderator, that dimwitted olfactory debutante smothering development with her triple spanx and polyester.  (Full disclosure- I love vanilla as it really is, that parasol flower smiling over a twisty, sticky gack that shares its roots with vinegar or cyanide.  I own a jar full of primo island pods and I huff it on the regular.  But I do not love the 'soft serve curdling in a rum puddle on a hot footpath' accord of say, Spiriteuse Double Vanille.  That stuff is whack.)  Never mind about the vanille horreur; she never really shows.  Instead we are treated to a waft of myrrh and arid cedar, their sere assurance ushering us past the prospect of vulgarity.

Next come a small detachment of those green and bitter creatures crowding A Sultan, turned way down so that they merely twist about your ankles instead of fuming round your ears.  Forest-floor allusions, a small black taste of broken marigold and the stringent end of sandalwood.  For me, the ride ends here; the tail goes on in the same alluring vein.

Beauty should never pander and AN does not; from unfolding and revealing, it persists without apology or meaningful degradation for the best part of the day- expect 6 hours intact, 12 hours of residual goodness, a good month on your clothing.  Presentation is tasteful and utile; a black embossed box and heavy, stable bottle that has so far resisted all my fumblings.  If like me you shudder at the fiscal prospect of your next acquisition and wonder how much longer you can defer those boring essential domestic repairs or elective surgeries, you may be pleasantly surprised by AN's price tag.

I will be reviewing Incense Pure from the same house in the near future.  Another stunner.

Get it- online outside the US.  See site link below for retail outlets.
Sonoma Scent Studio

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