Le Labo Aldehyde 44

Sometime last year, Abigail started raving about Aldehyde 44.  At the time, I was just dipping into Oud 27and Rose 31, a few other Le Labo fragrances I'd been curious about.  I was pretty thrilled with both of those, and I'm sure I'll review them at some point.  I think I'll also revisit Patchouli 24, as I've realized, spending a few years with it now, how truly fantastic it is, and how little there is like it.  Despite all this--and the fact that Iris 39 is truly the holy grail of iris fragrances for me--Le Labo doesn't always thrill me, and comparisons with Muriella Burani didn't do Aldehyde 44 any favors, as I'd tried Burani, on Abigail's recommendation, and found it disappointing, so I didn't feel an urgency to trot on over to Dallas and look into Aldehyde 44, which is a city-exclusive at Barney's there.  It's not the first time I've been wrong.

More on Eau Du Fier

What I love most about Fier, I think, is its oddball piquancy, a totally unexpected spark of citrus which makes no rational sense but smells so good--and so right--that it seems practically inevitable. It also endows Fier with the effervescent booziness of a bubbly gin fizz. Fier reminds me of other favorites--Kolnisch Juchten, Etro's Palais Jamais, Le Labo's Patchouli 24, and Santa Maria Novella's Nostalgia among them--all of which have something to do with tea and/or birch tar. The associations are vehicular: I get leather upholstery, petrol fumes, and rubber, primarily. But Fier doesn't shock me much. A friend of mine smelled it, smiled, obviously pleased, then screwed up his face and asked why someone would want to smell that way. Why do people want to have sex, I answered. Because it feels good. It certainly isn't pretty, or comfortable. Maybe it's the company I keep, and for others sex is something like a Lazy-Boy recliner, worn in all the right places. I smell Fier, and other birch-centric fragrances for that matter, and my mind goes somewhat sybaritic. It conjures complicated pleasures, not all of them sexual, though some are decidedly base.

Spending a few days with Fier, I decided that what at first seems like an unlikely addition to the Annick Goutal line-up isn't really all that out of character. Goutal's masculines have always been pretty unusual. Think of Sables, which smells of sugared burned leaves and woods. "Vetiver" takes a rustic approach to its signature note. Even Eau de Monsieur slants further away from a traditional masculine than its opening notes lead you to believe. Those fragrances date from the eighties. In the last several years, Ambre Fetiche , Myrrhe Ardente, Encens Flamboyant, and Musc Nomade have continued that trend toward the slightly unconventional. More unusual are the distinct differences between Goutal's male and female sensibilities.

I find Fier a more realistic day to day wear than Nostalgia and Palais Jamais, both of which are a little too robust for the polite society of office cubicle and water cooler. Nothing too shocking here. Just pure pleasure. That citrus really tempers the birch in unexpected ways. I imagine this is what Bond No.9's Wall Street was meant to be, and might have been, if cucumber and seaweed hadn't talked pretty to it.

The attached picture is from an article on neolithic birch tar bark once used as chewing gum.

Black Annis

I've fallen so hard for so many of the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab fragrance oils that it will take me at east a month to really dig into the nature of their appeal. It's a curious line, and I'm sure more than a few fragrance lovers have dismissed them out of hand. How do you classify what they're doing? The volume of their product inevitably seems suspect. The oils themselves often smell crude in the bottle, giving very little if any indication what stories they'll tell on the skin. The image is decidedly Goth, and those who don't view that sub-culture as a harmless, even quaint relic of pre-internet suburban disconnection suspect that its exclusivity isn't imposed but self-ordained, implying an active hostility toward outsiders. For various reasons, Black Phoenix is approached with a preconceived set of dismissals, a phenomenon which can be felt on makeupalley, the pink hues and girly splendor of which would seem diametrically opposed to BPAL's sensibility, like the jock's girlfriend bewildered by a goth peer's heavy eyeliner.

Go to the Black Phoenix forum and you get a totally different impression. Every BPAL release is discussed there, sometimes passionately, often heatedly. Far from sycophantic, the reviews display a wealth of opinion which quickly dispels the stereotype of the Goth as conforming nonconformist. The people who (sometimes lazily) get grouped under Goth aren't a select few--but as author Poppy Brite might tell you, they're a fantastic audience, often as discerning, committed, and articulate as the majority is fickle and indifferent. Part of what bonds them together is the ability to look beneath surface impressions. One way of looking at heavy black eyeliner is to view it as a shorthand. Dismissing the person underneath without going much deeper saves the wearer a lot of time.

But this is all sort of philosophical, suggesting that the Goth sensibility is purely cosmetic and, ironically, superficial, a theoretical exercise. Another way of looking at black eyeliner is: it's gorgeous. Bands like This Mortal Coil aren't thesis papers. They make fantastic music, rich in sensory detail, a sonic gift to the listener. To say they're not for everyone is kind of beside the point, really. As much as I love so many BPAL scents, there are those I can't get behind (March Hare comes to mind). What exactly is for everyone? Certainly not Black Annis, and I won't waste time trying to convince fans of the department store fruity floral to give it a whirl (instead, I recommend Jezebel or Sacred Whore of Babylon) but I do want to bring it to the attention of those who might just truly love it, as I do.

Black Annis is as interesting as just about anything I've smelled from a niche line. Maybe more so. Its challenges are more viscerally palpable than those supposedly presented by more widely known fragrances like Oud 27, Pathcouli 24, Boadicea Complex, Parfum d'Habit, and Rien, to name just a handful off the top of my head, while, for all that, going nowhere near the assault which is Secretions Magnifiques. Black Annis takes something of an adjustment. Like the majority of BPAL fragrances, the smell given off of the bottle is no real indication of where this scent will go; likewise, the list of notes. Try to wrap your mind around damp cave lichen, vetiver, civet, and annis. The combination is something you can only really experience.

On skin, the initial impression isn't much easier to describe. What starts to emerge for me immediately is a fantastic interplay of opposites, what I call barnyard gourmand. I get chocolate and hay, particularly, with a leathery anise chaser. In the spirit of concision, the nearest analogues to this effect are Heeley's Cuir Pleine Fleur and Molinard's Habanita. Black Annis is at first much darker than the former, but they dovetail at certain stages of development, chiefly around this sweetened hay aroma. Habanita is powdery par none, but it too adjusts more gourmand influences with something smokier, resulting in a peculiar density unique to these two scents. After a heady intro, Black Annis softens down to something above a skin scent. Not all of BPAL's fragrances do. Many retain that early vigor.

Though there are comparisons to be made, I've never smelled anything quite like Black Annis. The first several times I smelled it I alternated between disliking it and loving it. Mostly I disliked it. I think that's because it doesn't operate the way most fragrances do, the way I'm conditioned to believe they should. I wasn't looking past the black eyeliner, maybe. I highly recommend getting to know this stuff. All of the BPAL oils come in 5ml apothecary bottles and can be ordered from the website. They're also available as testers.

Patchouli 24 (and J'ai Ose)

I stared at the description of Patchouli 24 on the Le Labo website for almost a year before purchasing a bottle. I love patchouli, though I understood from various reviews and customer comments that it was hardly the most pronounced note in the composition. I love birch tar even more, and 24 was said to be an overload of the note, so stinky strong that its inclusion forbid anything but a love or hate reaction. People talked of scaring their co-workers out of the room, then out of the building. Relationships ended. Dinner plans were canceled. Mother-in-laws got off the fence. By all accounts, it seemed like something for which I would definitely fall on the side of love.

The problem for me was complicated. The perfumer behind 24 is Annick Menardo, and, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I'm a fan. Her fragrances tend to have good lasting power, and some of them approach greatness on a level that many modern perfumers don't even seem to know exists. Here's the thing. The lady loves vanilla. Bulgari Black is worshiped in certain circles for its tea note and a pronounced rubbery splendor, but on me it smells, after an initial impression of complexity, like one of those skimpy deserts they put on your plate in aggressively expensive restaurants, daring you to complain (thereby declaring, when you do, for all the world to hear, "I am determined to be gluttonously obese and must balk at the tiny little piece of whatnot you're trying to pass off as a proper sugar fix. Hit me!).

I'd also read on many of the blogs that after its outlandish birch tar opening, 24 simmered down into a smoky vanilla, lasting the duration. I had problems reconciling all these descriptions, but I wasn't about to slap down 135 bucks for another jar of refined vanillic goodness. That I was ultimately willing to take a chance is a testament not to my resignation but to my irrational, logic defying love of birch tar.

I was hoping for something along the lines of J'ai Ose, a relatively cheapo, probably majorly reformulated bastardization of a possibly once great perfume. I can't help it. I love J'ai Ose. I'd bathe in it if I could. It's a wonderfully attractive composition that I couldn't at all figure out for the first several months I owned it. What was it--a chypre? A leather? A wood? Doubt kept me from wearing it, worried what kind of impression I would give off with something I couldn't even figure out myself.

24 was a massive disappointment, and I say this with all due respect to Menardo, because I recognize that it is essentially a wonderful fragrance. It's just not what I wanted, nor anything for which I particularly feel a need. It does in fact dry down to an abundance of vanilla--smoky, to be sure, but vanillic. The birch tar is still there, but so sublimated to the vanilla that it simply feels like a new slant on the note. "Burned vanilla!" And wonder of wonders, it at first didn't seem to last all that impressively. Maybe, I thought, le Labo actually just sucks. (Please don't write me nasty letters. I've since tried Iris 39 and put that unfair suspicion to rest).

One conclusion I drew from the experience is that, bad reformulation or no, J'ai Ose is hands down the best smoke leather I've come across. After spending a week with Patchouli 24, I went online to buy a quarter ounce of J'ai Ose pure parfum, which, in J'ai Ose world, goes for as little as 35, and feels like a million bucks. J'ai Ose ("I dared") was created in 1977 for the house of Guy Laroche, whose first perfume was Fidji. The fragrance feels much older than it is. It has a lot in common with floral leathers like Chanel's Cuir de Russie and Jolie Madame, though it smells smokier than either (and by smokier I mean blackened, i.e. charred) and less floral by far. Supposedly, the notes for J'ai Ose are jasmine, bergamot, vanilla, vetiver, musk, and sandalwood. I don't smell any of that, and find it very hard to believe there isn't birch tar in the mix playing a pronounced, even presiding, part. One never knows where these pyramids are coming from, or how figurative they are. Out of whose ass do these things get pulled?

I now realize that I had Le Labo Patchouli 24 all along. I had what I hoped it would be, anyway. Had I known that J'ai Ose was my holy grail birch tar fragrance, that much sought after burnt wood, I would have stocked up on it and saved myself much money. I should also add that, trying Patchouli 24 again last night, I was surprised by how long it stuck around on my skin. It's perfectly lovely, but not my cup of smoke.