Interesting piece on Avery Gilbert's blog

Interesting read: Avery Gilbert’s blog piece.



Photo credit: above is a Roberto Cavalli ad where the model apparently has no spine.

Tinkering with the Top 10 List

Turin/Sanchez Top 10 Perfumes
Amouage Gold
Bulgari Black
Chanel No. 5
Guerlain Apres L’Ondee
Guerlain L’Heure Bleue
Guerlain Shalimar
Jean Patou Joy
Serge Lutens Bois de Violette
Thierry Mugler Angel
Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche

My Revised List
instead of Amouage Gold (Givenchy Amarige)
instead of Bulgari Black (Frederic Malle Carnal Flower)
instead of Chanel No. 5 (Chanel No. 22)
instead of Guerlain Apres L’Ondee (Robert Piguet Fracas)
instead of Guerlain L’Heure Bleue (Guerlain Mitsouko)
Guerlain Shalimar, agreement
Jean Patou Joy, agreement
instead of Serge Lutens Bois de Violette (Serge Lutens Fleurs d’Oranger)
Thierry Mugler Angel, agreement
instead of Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche (Yves Saint Laurent Opium)

Here’s my thought process:
Amouage Gold may be beautiful but it’s so..so..I dunno..it's just so unapproachable and obscure. It's probably personal, I just wouldn't put Gold in the Top 10. If I am to choose another humongous floral – with uniqueness and classical tendencies – it will have to be Amarige. Sorry to all the haters. Amarige is classic.

Bulgari Black. I think the Turin/Sanchez team are trying to give a nod to something new (ish) – from the last 10+ years as opposed to all the classics on this list which are well over 25+ years old. In this category, I’m picking Frederic Malle Carnal Flower. It’s breathtaking.

Chanel No. 5 – oh please, I just never understood the No. 5 fascination, maybe that’s my loss. I think Chanel No. 22 is so much better.

Guerlain Apres L’Ondee – I think another house is deserving besides Guerlain. For me, Shalimar and Mitsouko are enough recognition for Guerlain in the top 10. Here I would like to include Piguet’s Fracas. Fracas is still a sought after classic to this day.

Guerlain L’Heure Bleue, Mitsouko is just more mind-bogglingly- cool.

Guerlain Shalimar – I agree.

Jean Patou Joy – I agree.

Serge Lutens Bois de Violette, well, while I do agree that Lutens deserves a spot in the top 10, instead I’d nominate Fleurs d’Oranger.

Thierry Mugler Angel – I agree.

Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche – for YSL I think Opium deserves recognition over Rive Gauche.

Obviously I have thoroughly bought in/used the Turin/Sanchez model for this list, accepting their logic entirely and substituting where I deemed necessary. If I were to create a top 10 list from scratch, aside from it taking me a full year, 365 days of nonstop revisions and perhaps never concluding; it might also be completely different. Who knows? For instance, it pains me that Tabac Blond, Chinatown, something from Hermes and Teo Cabanel Alahine are not in my top 10.

(I think this could be fun….What say YOU?)


photo credit: above pic is from Fiordiligi's own private stash. Fiordiligi is her user name on Perfume of Life. this photo makes me drool.

Parfums MDCI Un Coeur en Mai

Parfums MDCI is a perfume house for fragrance fanatics. They are making brilliantly beautiful, classically styled perfumes that smell as if they’re using the highest quality ingredients. Parfums MDCI may be expensive, but rest assured, if you fall for one of their gems, you’ll probably overcome the sticker shock. Plus, you can always choose the less expensive bottle, the refill without the bisque stopper. I purchased one of their sampler sets (directly from Parfums MDCI in France, an amazingly good deal) and am working my way through all of their scents. I fell really hard for Un Coeur en Mai, one of their newest creations, composed by Patricia Nicolaï. It’s simply breathtaking, in a beautiful, flawlessly executed manner.

Un Coeur en Mai is strongly reminiscent of Guerlain’s Chamade. I’m actually surprised LT didn’t point this out in Perfumes: The Guide, suggesting that Chamade has already been done, and done better, so why bother with Un Coeur en Mai? Un Coeur en Mai is a greenish floral, also a bit similar to Patricia Nicolaï’s Le Temps d’une Fete, from Parfums de Nicolaï. Yes, its obvious Un Coeur en Mai has some predecessors, so it’s not groundbreaking or unusual, but boy, oh, boy is it gorgeous. For the past three days I’ve been wearing three perfumes; Un Coeur en Mai, Chamade and Le Temps d’une Fete (on separate spots to compare). Hopefully these three fragrances are similar enough to those around me so they don’t think I smell like a fragrance disaster.

My take is this: Un Coeur en Mai is essentially a modern flanker to Chamade. It’s like Eau Premier or Mitsouko Fleur de Lotus, both well done modern versions of their original fragrances. I realize Un Coeur en Mai is from the house of Parfums MDCI so it cannot be considered a flanker to Chamade, but it most certainly is an homage or tribute to the classic Chamade. As far as similarity between Un Coeur en Mai and Le Temps d’une Fete, while I do love Le Temps, I’m now finding Le Temps unkempt and rustic (while more appealing for some) in comparison to the flawlessly beautiful Un Coeur en Mai.

For the record, I like the beginning of Chamade better than Un Coeur en Mai. The initial aldehydic-galbanum blast of Chamade can’t be beat. But, like the story of the tortoise and the hare, Un Coeur en Mai is the tortoise, slowly winning me over, and especially by the end (the dry down) Un Coeur wins.

Un Coeur is a sweeter and gentler Chamade. The start is rather fruity floral and full of hyacinth and lily of the valley. Beyond this, I don’t find the specific notes detectable, aside from being able to label Un Coeur a fresh, green, slightly sweetly white floral. It is not too sweet by any means, and also don’t be afraid of the lily of the valley note, it’s not sickening or pungent or too innocent, as some lily of the valley scents can be. There may be some among us who don’t find Un Coeur interesting enough or may call it “boring.” I definitely have days when I crave an interesting fragrance, something edgy and unusual, but I also have just as many days when I want to wear something simply gorgeous, and Un Coeur en Mai is just that, flawlessly perfect, especially for spring and summer.

I’m enjoying every moment of Un Coeur en Mai and am now having a heck of a time deciding being purchasing a full bottle of it or Enlevement au Serail...or others from MDCI as I work my way through their fragrances.

Notes: Hyacinth, lily of the valley, petitgrain, bergamot, Bulgarian rose, galbanum, black currant, melon, Moroccan mimosa, Bourbon geranium, black pepper, coriander, musk, precious woods

Tomato, Tomawto: The Many Faces of a Perfume (or, Just Who Do You Think You're Talking To?)

You never know what you're going to get when you order perfume off the internet these days.  Everyone knows you take your chances with Ebay (will it be the right formulation, or even the real thing?) but many of the other fragrance vendors can be just as inconsistent.  Back when I ordered Bandit, for instance (from I don't remember where), I received what I imagined must be the latest iteration.  In Seattle, months later, I smelled from a bottle in an off-the-path perfume store and it seemed to be the same.  I'd never smelled Bandit before purchasing it so had nothing to go by, but I'd read Lucca Turin's review of the fragrance in Perfume: The Guide, which reports that the modern reformulation is pretty faithful to the original(s).  The bottle at the perfume shop in Seattle looked like it had been on the shelf for a good many years.  The box had that beat up quality.  The one I'd purchased online seemed a little newer.  After all this, I found two quarter ounce bottles of Bandit pure parfum.  They smelled heavenly, much better than the others I'd come across, but the bone structure was there, and the difference was no more than the one between most EDP and parfum extrait concentrations.

I was excited to get back to Perfume House this year because they carry the Robert Piguet line.  Looking back, I couldn't understand why I would have ignored Bandit my first time there.  Wouldn't I have snatched it up immediately, such an arresting perfume?  I can't even remember smelling it.  Maybe, I thought, I just wasn't yet evolved enough and didn't recognize its greatness.  Maybe my tastes needed to mature a little.  I'd been much more attracted to Visa during that first visit to Perfume House.  Because I have Bandit now, I wasn't interested in getting any more this time.  But I was very interested in picking up a bottle of Baghari, which I'd seen at the Los Angeles Barney's months ago and liked.  I'd been given a sample of it during my visit and ultimately decided against buying any; since then, having spent more time with the Baghari, I realized I wanted some, and planned on buying it at the Perfume House.

This is where it gets confusing.  In December, a friend from Portland visited.  She agreed to pick up a bottle of Visa for me at the Perfume House.  I figured I should resume my exploration of Piguet there, since Visa was the one I'd initially found most compelling, but when my friend/courier arrived with said merchandise, I didn't really recognize the smell.  I did and I didn't.  It seemed less interesting at first and I had to adjust my expectations.  In my head, "Visa" had become something else, richer, more visceral.  By comparison, this here was plain old fruity gourmand.  Fast foward to my recent return to the Perfume House.  Another customer came in, looking for something special.  She'd just been initiated into niche perfumery and the world of fragrance teeming just under the surface of the face mainstream  fragrance shows to the world.  I couldn't resist making suggestions, and went directly to Bandit, excited by the prospect of blowing someone's mind--but when we sprayed it on a cotton ball, it smelled nothing like the Bandit I know.  It bore no similarity, even, that I could tell.  Gone was the grassy splendor; gone the strange, perversely au contraire base.  This was powdery and prissy, a stuffy society lady to old Bandit's Sartre-reading, gender-bending, chiffon and leather streetwalker.  Perfume House is reliable and I trust these are the latest versions of Piguet, as they say, so what's up?  Are THEY being lied to?

Complicating things, Baghari smelled nothing like the tester I'd been given at Barney's.  I could see about as much relation between the one and the other as I could between Bandits Now and Then.  Did I mix u all my testers?  Did Barney's have a different version of Baghari?  The tester was a wonder of jasmine and rose under a fizzy layer of citrus aldehyde.  I could see, smelling it, the perfume Turin seemed to be talking about in The Guide.  The one at Perfume House was equally lovely but in an entirely different direction, distorting my ability to immediately appreciate it on its own merits.  And while I'm thinking about it, why did Barney's even have Baghari?  Why Baghari but not Bandit, when both are about as obscure to the average consumer?  Why Baghari but not Fracas, for that matter, which is recognizable enough to have put Baghari in some kind of useful context for the uninitiated?  Was the tester I was given at Barney's LA even Baghari in the first place, or did I simply remember it that way?

The virgin buyer of Bandit might be getting any one of several versions, whether he walks into a store or shops online.  Add to this the fact that some retailers are no better than the sales force at Sephora when it comes to knowing what they have in stock and what it should smell like.  My first bottle of Bandit was opened and partially used.  I sent it back and got another, equally beaten but at least unopened.  I was lucky and got an older version.  How many others aren't so lucky, and think we're smelling the same thing when they sound in on makeupalley.com?  It isn't just Piguet and a classic like Bandit, known by many without, more often than not, actually having been smelled (after all, I heard about Bandit and many other perfumes long before I actually got my hands on them).  It's any old perfume, no pun intended.

It's Magie Noire, for instance.  The first time I smelled it was in a discount shop.  Do I need to tell you that the second time I smelled it I barely recognized the thing?  It's Anais Anais, which is said to be very much the same as always and I believed this, until I smelled a bottle from the eighties and had a very different impression.  Is Lou Lou the same old Lou Lou?  Is Coco the same old Coco my sister wore in high school?  How much of the perceived changes between one and the other has to do with the passage of time and the distortions of memory?  How much is someone else's tinkering around?  We all know that natural musks have gone the way of the Studebaker, changing the face of nearly every perfume in some minimal to profound way, and that various other ingredients have been outlawed as if they were crack cocaine or hashish and the public must be protected from them lest they serve as gateways to more insidious contraband.  Everybody knows that one perfume is repackaged as an entirely new thing using the same name, while another is presented as if an entirely new entity under a totally different name, and some of us catch these things, but how do you discuss perfume when you never know what you're dealing with from one to the next, or whether you're even talking about the same thing?  It's like discussing the color red with someone viewing things through rose-tinted glasses nobody told you or him he was wearing.  You both might as well be color blind.

Some Thoughts on the Year: All the World's a Bathroom

I'm a latecomer to perfume, and 2008 was my awakening, starting with Vetiver Extraordinaire. A friend wrote about Vetiver Extraordinaire in a French magazine, making it sound like the best thing in the world. The only thing in the world. I'd visited him in Atlanta several months before and was shocked and a little uneasy when, watching a play in a dark theater, he pulled out a bottle of Comme des Garçons 2, uncapped it with much drama, then sprayed himself, and everyone around us, profusely.

It seemed hostile and generous at the same time, part assault, part act of mercy. When I asked him about 2 he mentioned he'd been writing about perfume a lot. I was fascinated. Write about perfume? Here was a serious, well known writer, respected for his novels about the lower east side and the denizens of old Times Square. Was he doing it in secret? Later, he emailed me the copy of his article on Vetiver, showing his real name, right at the top. I asked for a bottle last Valentine's Day. It seemed appropriately extravagant for the occasion: it came from far away (I ordered from France, if you can believe it, which shows what I knew), was costly (or so it seemed, compared to the mall), and surely, I figured, it would be a special perfume for special occasions.

At the time, I had maybe four or five fragrances: an old bottle of Coriandre, a Fragonard, something by Aveda, the original Comme des Garçons. It wasn't that I hadn't bought scents in the past. I just didn't know where to look. I didn't even know anything like Vetiver Extraordinaire existed, the world of niche perfumery being subterranean territory to me. My bottle of Coriandre reminded me of high school. I used to sneak into my stepmother's bathroom to smell it.

I did a lot of sneaking into bathrooms back then. When my sister or stepmother emerged from their rooms, they smelled fantastic. Their scents had gravitational force, and everything around them collapsed into that central point of interest for me. I envied that power. More importantly, I envied them that pleasure; that drama and intrigue. There was even solace in that dynamic somehow. Scent was emotional armor and hypnotic allure. Buying Coriandre later was a bit of a defiance for me, but I treated it the way I always had: I kept it in the bathroom, smelling it every once in a while or even obsessively. I never wore it, unless getting into bed, where no one would catch me.

I still remember the day Vetiver Extraordinaire arrived in the mail. It was packaged beautifully, and the glass bottle and chunky cap had a heft to it which seemed important, even momentous. It smelled like nothing I'd ever experienced. Dry and wet simultaneously, grassy, sheer. What was this vetiver stuff? A plant--a grass, you say? I sprayed some on at work and the whole office shifted. It was so combustible. It engaged the people around me, altering their behavior, altering my mood, my attitude, my imagination. It truly was momentous, and in the weirdest possible way.

I started researching perfume. Here was my stepmother's bathroom, spread out all over the world. A little bathroom called Frederic Malle, in Paris, France; stark and sleek, black and red and dull green glass. Little bathrooms called The Different Company, Le Labo--and hey, what about that Comme des Garçons perfume the writer had employed to change the course of the play we were watching? What of number "2"?

The first part of this awakening for me was a systematic run through of all the perfumes which had ever secretly captured my imagination. First up was Angel. Years ago, when it came out, I'd smelled it as quickly as possible on the shelves. What would I do if a saleperson came over and started asking me questions? I wanted that smell for my own more than anything. This year, I bought it at the mall, where the saleswomen indeed hovered around me, sizing me up. What kind of husband or boyfriend was I, their eyes were asking? How big a dupe? They talked me into the most expensive bottle they had, deluding me somehow into believing my girlfriend (essentially myself in this scenario) deserved the very best. Hadn't she waited long enough?

A month or so later I visited Portland, wondering, "Do they have any interesting bathrooms?" They did! The Perfume House, my host said, but she didn't think it was much. It was closed the first few days of my trip and I passed the time in Nordstrom and Saks, where I got Declaration Essence and smelled Gucci pour Homme for the first time. When I was looking at Declaration Essence, I sprayed it ever so slightly on my wrist. No no, the saleswoman said, taking the bottle from me. "How will you enjoy THAT?" Before I could answer she'd sprayed more perfume than I'd ever dared, covering my wrist in a wet pool of smell. It was so strong that when I walked into the nail salon to let my host smell, it registered over the toxic stench of nail products. I walked around inside the dream of that aroma all day.

The Perfume House really did it for me. Located in an old home on the middle of a busy street, its curious effect on my outlook was incalculably transforming. For someone who associated perfume with private, clandestine areas of the house, being in a house stocked full of bottles, everywhere you looked, was revolutionary. I can't explain how life changing this was for me. It took perfume out of the bathroom: brought it right out into the open, into the living room, the bedroom, the foyer, the bedroom. And everyone came out with it, setting bottles and cotton swabs of scent all over the counters and shelves. It was a four day conversation about perfume and for once the subject didn't feel like a dirty secret. The whole history of the world was tucked inside the topic. How strange to emerge from the building. Out on the street, no one else seemed to be having the conversation.

Over the next four or five days I spent roughly ten hours there. It was an intensive crash course on just some of the variety available in fragrance. Lutens, L'Artisan, Amouage, Piguet, Carthusia, Lalique, Patou, Crown, Goutal. The owner and his staff were wonderful. They made no assumptions, no value judgments, knew something about everything they stocked. What they couldn't remember they immediately looked up, without my having to ask. I bought five or six perfumes that trip: Dzing!, Sables, Bois 1920 Classic, Comme des Garçons 2, Chypre Rouge. My last day, I had a cold and was quietly devastated that I couldn't smell the things I'd bought. Regardless, I didn't want to leave.

The interesting if perhaps predictable thing is that since that time I have purchased everything I smelled and liked in that store over the course of those four days. And then some, naturally. Am I trying to make up for lost time? Maybe. Last night, thinking about it all, I suddenly considered again how brief everything is. I'd been out to dinner with my friends to celebrate one of their birthdays. Time telegraphed back and forth in my head and I got sad thinking how ephemeral life can be. Your relationships and the things which mean so much to you are blips on the screen, brief and fleeting. It tortures me. Someone's face eventually becomes a photograph, frozen in time, telling only a fraction of the story. The dog you loved and woke to for fifteen years is long gone, along with her smell and the sensation of her fur against your cheek.

Perfume, for me, I realized, extends those blips into lifelong memories, which live on indefinitely in the mind. I only went to LA several months ago, but this weekend I smelled Chanel Cuir De Russie, which I bought there, and already it smells like that whole trip to me: the insecurities I felt showing my film for the first time, coupled with the wonder of being in that weird, magical and merciless place. Perfume brought every complicated emotion back to me with visceral economy. Nothing else has the ability to do that with such facility. Maybe it has to do with the fact that perfume itself is so complicated and hard to pin down. Perfume itself is tangled emotion and wonder, sadness and beauty and beatitude all mixed together. The smell of violets isn't simply floral but ancestral for me. Violets are my grandmother, conjuring every last detail of her memory. Fragrance has the power to bring the dead back to life. It changes things, alters the course of time, penetrates the mind and the mood.

Meeting Abigail in The Perfume Critic chat room was important for me. Starting this blog extended the conversation I began at the Perfume House in Portland, bringing it into the outside world. We talk almost every day, several times a day. We meet on the blog to share our impressions and all those complicated feelings. We share perfume and the stories behind them with each other. And all those conversations are peppered with everything else going on in our individual day to day lives. When I talked to Abigail on the phone the first time, after we'd known each other a couple of months and been blogging that time, it was like walking into the Perfume House again. I didn't want to hang up. We talked so easily, more easily than most people I've known ten times as long. The things I'd worked so hard to hide or downplay in conversation with others were matter of fact between us, and I talked like someone's hand had been muffling me all this time.

I can't imagine talking about perfume without Abigail being by my side in the discussion. Together, we've left the Perfume House and taken it out onto the street, continuing the conversation in public. Funny thing, that. Once you start talking on the street you draw others who are having their own conversations. Ours eventually started getting responses from the people reading us, and we continue (avidly) reading other people. Perfume: The Guide was indispensable. IS indispensable. Turin and Sanchez are real advocates, deepening the exchange of perfume between self and the larger world, chief proponents of the right to opinion and passion when talking about it and sharing it, defending it or dismissing it. All the reference lists on various perfume blogs were key, too. I printed them all out and carried the phone book-sized lot around with me, studying as if cramming for an exam. I wanted to know perfume inside and out. I still do. All the perfumers, all the companies, all the ingredients, accords, terms, all the history. I have the feeling there's no going back for me now, and despite all the wonderful things that have happened for me this year with my work and in my personal life, my initiation into perfume and the open embrace of that long-forbidden pleasure stands alone as a singular achievement.

Below are flashbacks from the year for me, some of the moments which come most readily to mind:

-Walking into Chanel in Beverly Hills, where the first thing I saw was a row of Les Exclusifs. I came for Cuir de Russie but they were out. I was the only one in the crowded store looking at perfume, and the sales force seemed perplexed by my insistence and questions. Wasn't there someone in my life who might like a nice quilted purse?

-Traveling across the country for work allowed me to visit perfume shops and department stores I don't have access to at home, and often I was much more preoccupied with tracking down bottles of juice than the real reason for being in town. I visited Nordstrom and Parfumerie Nasreen in Seattle, Barneys and Etro and LuckyScent in LA, Barneys in Chicago, Fena Fresh in Greece. My favorite is still the Perfume House, though it doesn't have many of the lines I look for.

-I shopped online a lot. Nothing compares to the excitement of opening a package you've been waiting for. Will it disappoint? Will it exceed expectations? I've experienced both and everything in between, from the let down of Comme des Garcons 2 Man (poor longevity) to the thrill and surprise wallop of Rien and Jasmine et Cigarettes.

-Reading the Guide for the first time made the whole world stop for me. I couldn't hear or see anything else.

-Buying every last perfume I ever smelled in my stepmother's bathroom, including all the Estee Lauders and Coco.

-The constant adjustment my sensibility has gone through regarding gender lines and designations when it comes to perfume. What once seemed unspeakably feminine to me now registers as totally androgynous. What once seemed impossibly butch is now passably femme.

-I spent all year trying to find several perfumes. I ordered Chaos for a friend when it finally came out again and was a little more affordable. In the meantime, during my search, I came across DK Signature, which caught me off guard and turned out to be one of my favorite purchases. I looked everywhere for Lancome Cuir. Even the Lancome reps seemed never to have heard of it. It finally became available on Parfum1, and I love it.

-I ended the year buying five Ava Luxe fragrances and Breath of God from B Never Too Busy to be Beautiful.

Thanks to Perfume Shrine for involving us in this project. See also:

Perfume Shrine
Ars Aromatica
A Rose Beyond the Thames
Bittergrace Notes
Grain de Musc
Legerdenez
Notes from the Ledge
Olfactarama
Savvy Thinker
The Non Blonde
Tuilleries
1000 Fragrances

This Week at The Perfume Counter: Seattle

I missed my first flight to Seattle last Saturday. Supposedly, the alarm didn't go off. That's what my boyfriend tells me, though I suspect this is like the time my bottle of Port disappeared and he looked at me with a wide-eyed face swearing innocence. Luckily, I was able to book a flight for a few hours later.

This put me into Seattle at 4, rather than 11:30, as originally scheduled. I was going for a film festival, but my main priority was finding out where Nordstrom and Barney's were in relation to my hotel. The festival programmer who picked me up assured me they were nearby. I dumped my bags in the room and raced over to Nordstrom, not expecting much. I'd looked online the night before and hadn't seen anything I was too desperate to smell. I remembered the disappointment of Nordstrom in Portland months before. The only surprise that trip had been Declaration Essence, which knocked my socks off.

As it turned out, Seattle Nordstrom had many things I've been curious to get my hands on: many of the Guerlains, for instance, in all concentrations. They had pure parfum testers in spray bottles, meaning I could cover my whole hand in Mitsouko and L'Heure Bleue. If you haven't smelled these in anything other than EDT you might want to. Mitsouko in particular smells phenomenal. It stayed on my skin for the rest of the day. Best of all, the store stocked Vol de Nuit. Perfume House in Portland once sent me a sample of the EDP but it was very old and smelled nothing like the fragrance I smelled at Nordstrom. Nothing I'd read had led me to expect the bold gust of galbanum at the the top of Vol de Nuit. Osmoz categorizes the fragrance as oriental-vanilla. I get the oriental, and even the vanilla to some degree, but the galbanum puts it in an entirely different place for me, somewhere closer to Miss Dior.

The informed expertise of the woman who helped me made her ubiquitous presence more bearable. At least she knew what she was talking about, I guess. My biggest complaint when a clerk follows me so closely is not being able to concentrate. Smells speak slowly to me a lot of the time. It takes me a while to figure out what they're saying. The pervasive background of mindless chatter at the mall never helps, and a clerk complimenting my good taste as she pimps the latest Boss on me can make me downright homicidal. The best I can hope for is intelligence and the ability to carry on a relatively enlightened conversation.

I was able to smell many of the Carons I hadn't spent much time on before, of which Parfum Sacre and Aimez-moi were my favorites by far. Aimez-moi might be the best violet I've ever smelled, finding just the right combination of contrasts. The addition of cardamom and anise takes the fragrance right to the edge of violet. Magnolia and jasmine soften things up. Vanilla gives the already tasty quality of violet a nearly edible doughiness. Parfum Sacre is a rose with incense undertones, due to the counterpoint of pepper, mace, myrrh and cardomom. It wears lightly but with persistence, and smells by turns incredibly simple and impressively complex, like the heady air in a cathedral during mass.

Abigail has written about Tom Ford's White Patchouli elsewhere, not so favorably. I was more impressed, attracted by the medicinal quality she found abhorrent. The fragrance strikes me as a favorable alternative to Lovely and Narciso Her, both of which wear so lightly on me I cease to detect them after a few minutes. Both have left me feeling on the outside of an in joke. White Patchouli has their musk-driven foundation, but locks things in with a healthy quotient of patchouli, incense, and coriander.

I also smelled Private Collection Gardenia and Amber Ylang, the latter of which I liked more than the former, reversing my expectations. David Yurman was pretty enough. The new Shiseido Zen is a pleasant, even somewhat compelling patchouli bomb. Another surprise was the presence of the Chanel Exclusif line at Nordstrom: Coromonadel smells, to me, remarkably similar to Prada. 28 La Pausa is a boozy iris on the rocks. No. 22 is a gorgeous alternative to numbers 5 and 19.

Barneys was the true disappointment. I'd expected Baghari, the comme des garcon incense series, the Rosines; in short, the selection I'd encountered in LA. Instead, there were Lutens and Malle, and very selective offerings from other lines. I did eventually get Malle's Une Rose during my stay, after spraying it on one morning out of curiosity and spending the rest of the day under its aromatic thrall. I've heard the arguments against Une Rose's bid as best rose ever. I've heard how it isn't supposedly anything truly exceptional. A rose is a rose, etc. I've heard all that and expected very little. The truth is, it's fantastic in every way. And if this is all a rose perfume can hope to do, then the stakes are very high. I've yet to smell a rose that compares more than favorably.

The best part of Seattle was Perfumerie Nasreen, located off the lobby of the Alexis Hotel. This downtown shop has many scents you won't find elsewhere. It's uncomfortably small and precariously arranged, and feels as though you've stepped into someone's perfume cabinet. The testers are perched atop their boxes, which is fine until you get to odd-ball bottles like Kenzo Flower. For the most part, it's help yourself in there, though there are places you have to ask for assistance. The owner knows a lot about perfume, but don't ask her about Turin and Sanchez, whose names she hasn't bothered to commit to memory. She refers to Perfume: The Guide as "that book" and dislikes it immensely for being so opionated. She is very opinionated herself, and proceeded to tell me precisely which perfumes to love and which to despise. When I pointed out to her that most people, writers and admirers alike, feel very strongly about perfumes, for and against, and that Turin and Sanchez ("those people") were simply giving voice to that passion, she rolled her eyes insolently. Her seasoned disdain seemed silly to me, given how many new customers the book must be bringing her. I wouldn't have bothered to seek her out if all I knew to look for was Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

She's a shrewd businesswoman. During Christmas she delivers five pounds of chocolate to the perfume counters of each Nordstrom location, expressing her thanks for customers they have "referred to her". Methinks she owes "those people" and "that book" some chocolate too. It was a fun place to shop, despite or even because of her bossy flourishes. When I arrived with my friend and we began spraying testers, she demanded the door be opened. I get a headache, she explained, which did seem a problem for someone running a perfume shop. She seemed impatient with our exhaustive curiosity, though I'd been there several days before, when someone else was behind the counter, and spent three hundred bucks before leaving. Surely a perfume migraine is preferable to "I can't pay the rent" aches and pains. She also fibbed, which was only unusual because both my friend and I made it perfectly clear within minutes of our arrival that we knew more than a little about perfume, if only by the ones we requested to smell. When I asked if her cap-less bottles of Guerlain Parure were testers she denied it emphatically, curtly assuring me that this was how the bottles had arrived from Paris. Similarly, I was born at night, but not last night.

Loulou by Cacharel

It was the summer of 1987, the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school. I was lucky enough to get to Europe for a month to visit family and travel around. My friend and I spent two weeks in Paris. When we first arrived in Paris, I bought Loulou in the airport. I was already a budding perfumista at the age of 16 and had Diva by Ungaro, Poison, White Linen and Joy in my suitcase. But something about the dreadfully tacky box and bottle containing Loulou captivated me, so I had to have it. I wore Loulou every single day for the rest of the trip.

I’ve been wearing Loulou more and more over the past year. Since wearing it exclusively in high school I haven’t worn it or even smelled it for at least fifteen years. Loulou and I are having a reunion of sorts. I admit it was Perfumes: The Guide that made me find Loulou again. For all the fragrances where I felt Turin & Sanchez didn’t get it right, they made me happy by getting it exactly right with Loulou.

Loulou is a diva. But she isn’t a cold, manipulative, demanding or selfish diva. Instead she’s the lovely warm, curvaceous diva that everyone on set loves. If Marilyn hadn’t professed her love for wearing Chanel No 5 to bed (and if Loulou existed during Marilyn’s time) I would say Marilyn wore Loulou.

Loulou is a loud yet soft, powdery floral oriental. Somehow, Jean Guichard, the perfumer, manages to keep Loulou from going completely over the top and makes you want to smell it again. I’ve read reviews that call Loulou a “grandma” sort of fragrance. I guess if you consider your grandma a sultry, exotic diva...in a burlesque sort of way...then it could be a grandma fragrance. Loulou is the sort of abstract perfume where I won’t even begin to describe the notes. It’s a well blended soft floral-oriental which creates an aroma that’s altogether it’s own without any realistic florals or spices exposing themselves. I think Loulou smells vintage, it gives a big nod and bow to classic, full-bodied and complex perfumes. I’ll put the list of notes below but I don’t think the list would help anyone figure out what it smells like.

I have a soft spot for under appreciated fragrances. Loulou, to me, is an underdog. She’s stuck in a cheesy 80’s box and a light blue and burgundy plastic bottle. The house of Cacharel has created some beautiful perfumes; Anais Anais, Eden and Noa come to mind, yet most seem to think Cacharel is an awful drugstore brand. Sometimes you really have to look beyond the packaging and just smell the juice.

I couldn’t agree more with Luca Turin’s final statement about Loulou:

“This is one of the greats.”

Longevity: forever
Sillage: huge – no more than 2 sprays please

Almost everywhere I checked had a different set of notes. This is what I believe to be the correct (or very close) list ~
Notes: Jasmine, bergamot, mimosa, apricot, cashmeran, marigold, Tiare lily, iris, sandalwood, vanilla & incense

Bvlgari Black

Bvlgari Black, created by Annick Menardo launched in 1998.

Maybe I’m too far along in my perfume addiction, but I’ve never thought of Black as weird or edgy – I’d call it interesting. I’ve also never thought of it as among the top 10 best perfumes of all time. Sure there are hints of smoky rubber but they seem low key and soft. Black is mostly a fragrance about vanilla. It starts off smelling like celery salt. Then it morphs into smoky celery salt and rubber. Then when it finally settles down it becomes prominently a soft woody, celeriac vanilla. I really love Bvlgari Black particularly the celery salt bits. Overall it’s a cozy comfort scent for me. I put Bvlgari Black in the same category as People of the Labyrinth’s Luctor et Emergo. They’re both hard to define and seem in a category all their own, they both have cult-like followings and they’re both comfort scents. I’ve never figured out what’s so ‘black’ about Bvlgari Black. I know there’s black tea among the notes but I don’t detect it at all. If I where to give a color label to Black I’d say it’s Pale Green.

I’ve been wearing Black a lot since I read Perfumes: The Guide by Turin & Sanchez. I was somewhat shocked by the high marks it received and very shocked that it placed in the top 10 perfumes of all time. Of course, being a scholar in the field of olfactory science, means Turin knows much more than me when it comes to perfume. Turin is knowledgeable of all the elaborate details of perfume making. He knows how difficult certain notes are to create and he knows more about the history and structure of perfume than I ever will. But Bvlgari Black just isn’t that amazing for me. I do love it, just like I love POTL Luctor et Emergo, but I wouldn’t place POTL in the top 10 either.

I need to subtract points from Black because it lacks longevity and has virtually zero sillage. When I wear Black I need to douse myself in it, (I mean douse, like 10 sprays) in order to smell it for about 3 hours. The first hour is the most interesting. I like Black the best before it dries down to a comfy vanilla. I fail to understand what Turin is raving about in his review of Black. To me, Black seems like an interesting starting point. I suppose it is groundbreaking in its structure and its ability to morph through an unusual assortment of notes and yet still smell pleasing and beautiful. Perhaps Menardo or another perfumer could build upon this idea but make it more daring and also add some longevity and sillage this time.

Black is an interesting fragrance and it smells really good. I do think that more people ought to try it because it’s a worthy fragrance for those that want something unusual yet not too odd. Black is easy to wear and unlike POTL it can be had for cheap.

Longevity: Poor
Sillage: Soft

Newsflash: Perfume, The Guide is openly opinionated.

Now Smell This has posted an excerpt from an interview with Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez which was published in the Guardian. The interview interests and irks me in equal measure, for various reasons. The pull quote reads:

But if the title lacks poetic fun, the book most certainly does not. Although the language occasionally dips into the kind of hyperbolic floweriness one perhaps must expect from enthusiastic connoisseurs, on the whole it is written with pleasing plainness and, most of all, a sense of humour. Guerlain's Mouchoir de Monsieur is lauded with an adulatory four-star review and readers are advised that "if you can wear it without thinking of Rupert Everett playing Beau Brummell, do so by all means", while something called Montana Mood Sexy is dismissed with one star and a curt "not tonight".

I'll be the first to tell you that I disagree with Turin and Sanchez on various reviews. Last night, for instance, I picked up a bottle of Spellbound, thinking, "Nice, cloves and flowers, mmm, oh yes, here we go," whereas they find it a stink bomb with a merciless range of detonation only instinct and God can protect you from. Abigail and I both, I believe, would gladly tape ourselves shut, as Turin suggests, in a room with Amarige, though unlike him we wouldn't hesitate to tape others in with us. I'm not sold on Beyond Paradise, which the authors rate spectacularly. I don't see the sunset from a Concorde window, nor receive inner calm from its sillage. But I don't agree with Abigail all the time either, nor she with me, and reading Perfume: The Guide is hardly about consensus.

The other day I compared Sanchez and Turin to Pauline Kael. Kael, of course, was famously opinionated. Her Spellbound was Woody Allen. Others, including me, loved his work in the late seventies and eighties. I remember being shocked, when I discovered Kael's writing and sought out her New Yorker archive in the school library, that she didn't love Manhattan, was left cold by Stardust Memories, was hostile to Interiors and Broadway Danny Rose. I was petulant for about twenty minutes, then I got over it. Andrew Sarris and others might have loved Allen's movies, but they wrote like a college course on biophysics. I wanted someone who shared my irrational obsession with film--and wasn't too above it to fess up.

Reading the above quote from an otherwise favorable paragraph and a friendly interview overall, I bristle at what I take to be a typically lazy British priggishness. Call me picky. The whole project of the Guide, it seems to me, is to create new territory for the very concept of such a book. Any best of list is highly personal, and to the extent it seeks to conceal that subjectivity, a sham. Here's a book which, like Kael's criticism, collapses the format, exposing that inevitable bias with candor and wit. The bias is embraced, and rather than speak to you as an authority garbed in a velvet smoking jacket, with a dry air of superiority and a bogus assertion of the definitive, it speaks to you as a fan, with enthusiasm, passion, and drive. It wrings its hands and gets right in the room with you. Doing so, it engages you in a dialog. The sensibility of Sanchez and Turin is refreshingly interactive rather than smugly self-enclosed. They strip the critical format of its silly supposed-to's, challenging you to meet their strong opinions with opinions of your own. They ask you to think and converse, rather than receive and regurgitate. And they aren't afraid to make enemies by taking on the big boys.

Of course the title lacks poetic fun. Um...duh. In quotes. In light of the book's project, which is at least in part about parodying the concept of a definitive guide, it exists on a higher level of word play than the writer of the Guardian piece is apparently able to apprehend. I call it a Bible in a similar spirit of good humor. It doesn't try to conceal its lack of journalistic objectivity. To the contrary, Turin and Sanchez laugh at the notion such a thing exists, as well as open up the debate about who makes or what constitutes a canon. Can journalistic objectivity be counted on to tell you what you should own or smell? Hardly, at a time when taste is clearly marketed and formulations change, unannounced, from day to day.

Yes, to be sure, Turin and Sanchez insist that the nose recognizes a good smell, and instinctively suffers from a foul one, and every nose essentially "knows" the difference. They make no apologies about their snobbery. Snobbery is part of the project. Yours as well as theirs. But if their book is a guide to anything, it's a guide to their passions and engagement, and like Kael they hope to be disagreed with, if only to keep evolving the discourse. They would likely scoff at my attraction to Spellbound, but doing so makes me define my position more articulately. Knowing what they like, and how personal their tastes are, encourages you to get to know yourself as well. As John Waters recently said about the state of modern movie-going, and I paraphrase: People leave a blockbuster these days and it doesn't occur to them to really detail for themselves just how bad it was and why, and how different their reaction is from what they've been told it will be or is supposed to be.

The "language occasionally dips into the kind of hyperbolic floweriness one perhaps must expect from enthusiastic connoisseurs"? She makes that sound like a bad thing, as if yet another newspaper article's objective report on the doings of one of its advertisers would be preferable.

I'm just saying.

The Return of Perfume, the Guide (online)

Lucca Turin and Tania Sanchez have decided to publish quarterly installments of their Bible, Perfume: The Guide, which is a relief to those of us who've been wondering what they think of Calvin Klein Euphoria, Acqua di Gio, Allure Homme Edition Blanche, Estee Lauder Sensuous, Giorgio, et al. Some of these were omitted from the original publication. Some have since been released. Others had fallen outside the authors' radar, which is hard to believe but there you go.

In case you're wondering, Giorgio gets four stars. "It is considered polite to deplore the excesses of the eighties (and to trot out Opium, Poison, and Giorgio as exhibits)," writes Turin. Consider Turin impolite. Those eighties mainstays might have OVERstayed their welcome at the time, but you can hardly blame the salt someone used to rub into your wound. And to deprive yourself of salt forever after doesn't make much sense, unless you simply want to punish yourself.

The authors are champions of the forgotten, the neglected, and the wrongfully maligned. Conversely, they remain the best bullshit detectors in the field when it comes to the overrated and the ridiculously hyped. Serge Lutens' Five O'Clock au Gingembre is commended for its "pleasantly salty, meaty note" but ultimately "settles for the smoky vanillic smell of plain benzoin."

The writing is so literate you sometimes wonder if in fact you're reading about perfume. Sanchez and Turin are to perfume what Pauline Kael was to film. They are just as wonderfully opinionated, as passionate, informed, and insightful. Like Kael they manage to write poetry disguised as criticism, and one of their chief accomplishments, to my mind, is an ability to break things down without lobotomizing them. They elevate perfume and the people who love it in the process.

This writer much appreciates the entries on Heeley in particular. If you haven't smelled them and can somehow, get to it. Cuir Pleine Fleur is as wonderful as Turin tells you it is, and then some. "CPF should serve as an object lesson to all, from Hermes to Cartier," he writes, "who hanker after a new type of beauty in masculine perfumes." What that new type is? Wondrously strange, hay and leather, the smell of the stall and the flower beds beyond it. CPF lasts and lasts, and of all the fragrances I own, it elicits the most interesting, exclamatory reactions, often from strangers. It's that lovely.

The first installment of the online addendum to the Guide can be downloaded on the book's website. What are you waiting for?

Binge Dieting: Secret Obsession, Magnifique, Sensuous and Other Anorexic Simulations

What is it with the latest batch of commercial releases? What aroma-chemical or marketing approach lends them all the baffling sense of sameness? Pick up Lancome Magnifique, Estee Lauder Sensuous, and Calvin Klein Secret Obsession to name several. The dry downs of the latter two seem virtually identical: politely discreet, vaguely woody, a half-assed, half-finished accord akin to someone with stale breath turning his face away so as not to offend you, inadvertently insuring you won't be able to hear what he's saying any more than you can tell what his sentence smells like. Magnifique shares with these a thinned-out sweetness in the top notes, as if someone diluted the overall composition with water and vodka and anything else she had at hand, just to see how far she could extend it before its aroma reached that barely-there threshold.

What do these fragrances and this apparent trend have to say about the buying public's desires or our cultural sensibility as a whole? Many fragrances targeted specifically to the Asian market take into account the Asian buyer's partiality to perfume so pristine it ceases to smell like perfume, creating fragrances which bow their heads and avert their eyes in deference to all who approach. Americans, on the other hand, seem to be obsessed with fruity florals, or someone thinks they are and relentlessly produces them. Add to fruity florals the obscenely, obsessive-compulsively clean. Aqua di Gio continues to be a bestseller in the masculine market, even as masculines inch ever more toward the floral. Meanwhile, Dolce and Gabbana's Light Blue is a top-seller with women and smells like something a man would spray to hide the B.O. his girlfriend finds offensive or the lingering odor of a particularly torrid indiscretion.

The Reds and Giogios and Poisons and Paris' of the eighties seemed in keeping with a culture-wide disregard for the feelings or circumstances of others, a fashion for big-shouldered, high-haired silhouettes, and an imposition of one's self onto one's environment, as if the latter weren't complete or noteworthy until the arrival on the scene of the former. Trends change but always reflect cultural values to some extent. So what's with all the anemic fragrances flooding the department store counters? Are we wishy-washy, non-committal, or simply afraid of our own shadows?

It's interesting to compare the reviews of Chandler Burr and the intellectual team of Lucca Turin and Tania Sanchez. While all three revere the great creations of perfumers past, Burr advances the idea that the practical application of these creations in the contemporary social environment is non-existent at this point, while Turin and Sanchez hold to the idea that perfumes are timeless and relevant; they no more go out of fashion than a Dior cut from 1940 or the Declaration of Independence. It's all about attitude and character, and homage without context is worthless. Change is great, but at what cost?

Burr often gives high marks to compositions which recall those vintage perfumes the way postmodern writing begs, borrows, and steals from the classics of literature, tossing all its constituent attributes into a hybrid which recalls without specifying exactly what or when. His unqualified appreciation of Sisley's Eau du Soir is a good example:

"It is an expert pastiche of the traditional French “animalic”—i.e., the smell of animal (a classic trope of French perfumery)—but in a version for the 21st century. This take on animalic is not redolent of an armpit but rather of a mink coat, which is to say it is the smell of real leather plus real hot fur. This is a visceral luxury, and Mongin builds the perfume’s top by welding it to a greenish, sleekly modern floral."

Turin's dismissal of the fragrance as insipid, empty-headed knock-off is equally indicative of his own values. The perfume doesn't even rate a review in Perfume: The Guide; rather, he knocks it in passing, in the course of another fragrance's review, as if throwing a passenger out of the car without stopping to let her out. To Turin, Eau de Soir is a perfume which recalls the classic green chypres, to be sure--the way a town in Disney's Small World attraction recalls its real time source. You can't expect to understand Japan from the little pivoting automatons in kimonos.

Don't get the idea Turin and Sanchez are living in the past. Witness Turin on Chanel No 5 Eau Premiere: "This is abstract, classical perfumery at its best," he writes, "revisited by people who do not see modernization as an excuse for screwing up." Turin will be the first to slam Guerlain for altering its classics, unless or until he feels the job is being well done. Progress is great: hurray for the future. Turin just happens to be the strongest critical voice in his field speaking out for the recognition of perfumery as art, the relevance of art to cultural history, and the importance of history to culture at large. That isn't to say Burr dismisses the past or perfume's artistry. Of Germaine Cellier, the nose behind Fracas, Bandit, and Vent Vert, he said: "an artist working in the olfactory medium." It's simply to say that Burr and Team Turin-Sanchez are necessary polar points in the modern dialog about perfume, presenting its complicated, panoramic picture to date. That Burr presents the picture using photo-realism and Sanchez-Turin represent it with the kinetic brush strokes of cubism illustrates how much room there is for interpretation.

What would these three say about the relative sameness of modern commercial perfumery offered at the local mall; specifically, about Secret Obsession, Magnifique, and Senuous? This is the face of perfumery the average consumer digests and perhaps demands in some way. How can someone like Calice Becker go from the pungent glory of Tommy Girl and J'Adore to the milquetoast timidity of Secret Obsession within such a relatively short amount of time? Turin, at least, has sounded off regarding Sensuous, remarking, "...up close the fragrance disintegrates over the first hour into a bare array of disconnected things failing to cohere: white floral, synthetic wood, praline-like amber. All told, thin and lacking mystery."

Perhaps the modern fragrance reflects the contemporary obsession with diet and self-abnegation and a concomitant nation-wide phenomenon of obesity. Are these fragrances our way of punishing ourselves for our indulgent excesses? If we're going to gorge ourselves on the fruity gourmands and decadent pleasures of heady floral bouquets, we must, we might feel, at some point fast. At least we have the wit and erudition of writers like Sanchez, Turin, and Burr, who elevate the conversation to an ideological plane which feels as rich as chocolate and feeds the mind without indulging its apparent need to eventually deny itself pleasure.

The Best Laid Plans

I planned to create a blog that would be all about perfume, one of my biggest obsessions. I wanted to include loads of perfume reviews but then I was stumped, about just what else I should do with this blog. Then along came Brian. I met Brian at PerfumeCritic.com. We hit if off instantly. We both love perfume and share many similarities and just as many differences in our likes, dislikes and thoughts about scent. One idea we both agree on: Perfume Is Art. Perfume is evocative. Perfume is a damn good time. Perfume is a medium through which we can write stories about our lives, experiences, dreams, rants, raves and day-to-day musings that will hopefully be interesting to others like us.

One thing is for sure, I sortof hate Brian right now. After agreeing to work on this project together, I've found that he is a shockingly beautiful writer. My writing will pale in comparison. (be quiet Brian, it's true, so get over it, Mr. Humble). I'm not sure what I'll do about this. Rise to the occassion? Be the one to write the more mundane reviews? We shall see what happens.

A note about my perfume reviews. I'm finding that I don't have the patience to go into the extreme depth of other perfume reviewers, discussing how each and every note unfolds over the course of a few hours. When I try a perfume, I usually either love it, hate it or just think it's 'meh' (not worth discussing). I can mostly detect individual notes, but prefer not to do so, I'd rather discuss the 'work' as a whole. So, I hope that I don't disappoint my imaginary readers, but I think my perfume reviews will be somewhat brief and to the point and geared towards giving you an overall impression of the "juice."

This may be too obvious to even mention but I'd also like to point out that my reviews are entirely subjective. This is my personal taste, it's what I like and dislike, so please don't ever be insulted if I happen to dislike something you adore. I mention this because it took me about 3 weeks to get over the agony of reading Turin & Sanchez' book, Perfume: The Guide. Turin haaaaates 3 (ok it's really 10) of my favorite perfumes.

I'm over it now, but for 3 weeks this tortured me. I think perfume is extremely personal. Even though thousands perhaps millions of people have all worn the same perfume, each time I apply one of my favorites, it feels as though the scent is personally mine. So to say one of my favorite perfumes is atrocious, well, that just hurts! I know I didn't create it but I buy it and wear it and that says something about me. Anyway, I finally realized that perfume, like just about everything else, is subjective, and what might not be my cup of tea, might be someone else's luscious chai latte.

In case you're wondering, I'll let you in on the one that hurt the most. The perfume that I adore that Mr. Turin hates. It's Amarige by Givenchy. Yes, Amarige is potent. But, that is, of course, why I love it. I have a preference for perfumes that are strong and lasting. I'd rather be careful about spritzing lightly than wear a perfume that is fleeting and lasts for 14 minutes. Amarige is absolutely gorgeous in my book. It's a floral oriental that turns into molten lava on my skin. It follows me around like a cloud. It literally feels warm - like a warm cloud enveloping me all day. Some say Amarige is a tuberose heavy scent, and I'm not sure tuberose is among the listed notes. It's meant to showcase Indian Mimosa. Amarige bursts with personality. It's alive, sexy, sensual, fiesty and feminine. I actually don't even smell individual notes but instead a well blended floral oriental bomb of a perfume that can only be described as Amarige.

To Luca Turin I say this: Someday I hope we get trapped in an elevator together when I am wearing 4 bold spritzes of Amarige. ;-)

To my readers: I hope you enjoy what Brian and I do with this blog. It will be great fun for us and we hope a fascinating journey for you.