Tom Ford Purple Patchouli: A Review

Purple Patchouli might be the least liked of the dozen perfumes good ole Tommy Ford launched in 2007. I have been very curious about it for some time now but given the exclusive price tag my curiosity simply lingered. Last month I bought some big ticket items from Bergdorf and the fabulous sales associate there tossed in a bunch of 5 ml Tom Ford samples with my purchase.

I dabbed on Purple Patchouli a few weeks ago but didn’t think very much of it. Once I transferred the coveted juice into a spray/atomizer (because I simply can’t get the true impression of a fragrance by dabbing it on), I realized, wow, Purple Patchouli is a character.

When I think about Purple Patchouli in the overall scheme of Tom Ford’s collection I realize it’s really sort of a “Purple Black Orchid.” In fact, it would make much more sense if Black Orchid had been named Black Patchouli instead. Then we’d have: Black Patchouli, White Patchouli and Purple Patchouli. There, all better. Now you can sniff Purple Patchouli and “get” it.

Purple Patchouli, starts off very “purple” for me. I get a blast of sweet violets and very nearly a blueberry note (similar to Guerlain Insolence edp). Purple Patchouli is much sweeter than I’d imagined and this sweetness stays throughout. There are definitely floral notes, jasmine I would guess, and leather and amber notes. I think the “purple” smell I’m noticing must be the orchid accord, which is rather sweet, somewhat jammy and tropical. Fold this jammy purple orchid around earthy leathery patchouli and, viola, you have Purple Patchouli. The patchouli note is definitely apparent for me, I don’t think innocent bystanders would think I was wearing straight up patchouli but the trademark patchouli is on the guest list at this party. Others mention citrus and vetiver but I don’t detect these as being prominent on their own.

Purple Patchouli would smell uber-sexy on guys. I like it on myself and think it’s surely unisex as Tom Ford engineered these fragrances to be. I quite like PP but find it a bit much for office wear (I don’t wear Black Orchid to the office either). I see myself wearing PP on the weekend and out amongst friends. I think the patchouli note is what makes me uncomfortable wearing it to the office or for traditional “stuffy” settings. Purple Patchouli has a playful, sexy, night-out-on-the-town vibe to it for me. Once I finish this 5 ml sample, I think this might be a full bottle for me.

Three additional reviews of Purple Patchouli ~

Marina at Perfume Smellin Things
Kevin at Now Smell This
Patty at Perfume Posse

Cavemen in Pinafores: Perfume Does Drag

The other day, applying a perfume ostensibly intended for women, I thought, "I really better butch it up today if I expect to pull this one off."

Funny thing, though, how all that works: half way through the morning, I realized the perfume itself provided more than enough swagger. Maybe you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of fragrance which can come across like Corporal Klinger on M.A.S.H. All the markers are there: the satin, the tulle, the rouge, some lipstick. The hair is curled softly; it just so happens it's growing on the chest.

Like many male perfume bloggers I'm decidedly androgynous in my tastes, and feel strongly that a scent, though it tells a story in the bottle, only reaches conclusion on the wearer. Fragrance colludes with personality, and often works wonders when played against type. A guy in Lolita Lempicka, as Tania Sanchez suggests, can be a startling thing, akin to seeing the same tired movie with an entirely different cast. I'm not averse to wearing the allegedly chronic girly, such as Paris, Joy, or Herrera. What I'm getting at here is slightly different: the scent which mixes messages before one even applies it, and presents an even more complicated story on the skin.

The most obvious choice would be Black Orchid, a scent I, like many others, go back and forth on. Just when I decide it's silly and overrated, it changes my mind. Regardless, it bursts into the room, rattling the glassware. I think back to the first time I experienced it, at Sephora. I sprayed it on the back of my hand and instantly felt as though I'd opened a porn mag inside the Hallmark store. It felt shocking, like Angel once had, so wrong it was right. I admired it the way I admired a drag queen I walked the east village with one Saturday night in the nineties, before the area went antiseptic. You never knew what might happen to you out on the street, unless you were with someone so flagrantly confrontational, in which case you could expect to be egged. This particular drag queen gave it as much as she got it, and seemed fifty feet tall. This was a personality with the power to affect whatever environment it entered, not just interacting with it but altering it. Whatever you think of the dress and the make-up, you have to admire the balls.

Poison is so deeply associated with mile high bangs and Mildred Pierce shoulder pads, so tangled up in a cluster of mental recollections of the eighties (often heightened to the point of distortion) that one easily forgets or is prohibited from seeing at all how essentially masculine it is. Forget the tuberose; to smell Poison is to inhale a strange medley of spices most florals avoid at all costs. Coriander and carnation give Poison a peppery, woody aspect, embellishing the perfume's feminine properties with such a wallop of gusto that the category short circuits. I wear Poison occasionally. Everyone recognizes it, until they realize I'm the source. Then they're not so sure. How could it be Poison? What guy would have the guts to put it on? That slight element of surprise can allow a mental adjustment, enabling one to experience Poison outside its enforced context of era-specific excess and unfortunate-to-tragic fashion misfires.

Like many of the vintage orientals, Bal a Versailles is a bit of a winking Jesus, first uber-fem, then a resounding baritone. Some might say that winking is decidedly coquettish, settling the matter. But Bal a Versailles winks at such a rapid clip that the movement ceases to register. What's left is a kinetic, subterranean interplay between gendered codes and preconceptions. Some say the opening is inarguably feminine. I say nothing is inarguably feminine. Tie as many strings of pearls as you like around the neck of Barbara Bush. Dress her up in dowdy. Tell me she's simply a very straightforward, no nonsense woman, a la Barbara Stanwyck or, less generously, Janet Reno (which opens up another can of worms). I'm still not convinced George Sr. isn't in fact a tranny chaser. Which isn't to say Barbara isn't a woman. Just to say that a man attracted to her has wonky ideas about gender and tastes which, if dissected, might reveal unexpected, category-busting rather than -defining answers. It isn't that Bal a Versailles is beyond gender, but how many distortion filters can you put jasmine and rose through before they start going the other way? Bal a Versailles is the answer in action, working itself out right under your nose.

Spend some time with the oeuvre of Bernard Chant, and you'll start to notice certain similarities, not just between the feminines but between the feminines and their male counterparts. Many of Chant's male and female fragrances are so close in composition that it becomes increasingly difficult to regard the line supposedly separating them as anything but a mental construct. I sometimes wonder if Chant was a conceptual artist working in the field of perfume. It's as though he was engaged in a lifelong experiment. Create scents which resemble each other so closely that to discern gender differences between them would prove a bit like seeing the Emperor's new clothes. The only truly emphatic separation between the galbanum-driven Alliage and Devin are a few yards of marble flooring at Macy's and Saks. Likewise the woody-herbaceous rose of Aramis 900 and Aromatics Elixir, while Azuree and Cabochard lock eyes with Aramis. Was it Chant's project to demonstrate how little tweaking is required to edge a masculine into the feminine and vice versa? The distinctions between his masculines and feminines are so subtle as to imply mere formality. It's interesting to see the male consumer's largely negative reaction to Devin, such that it is (the fragrance remains, like Aramis 900, little known). Alliage, on the other hand, seems better understood. But it operates on a decibel one would consider more robust than a proper feminine. And if you're a guy who likes your fragrances to last, hop on over to the women's department. The only difference that counts between Alliage and Devin, it turns out, is a matter of hours.

Other fragrances which mix the gender codes: Cinnabar, Youth Dew, Gucci Envy, Habanitas, L'Heure Bleue, Chanel Cuir De Russie, Dune, La Nuit, Feminite Du Bois, Angel, Dioressence, Kingdom, Funny!, Caron Infini, Arpege.

Dandies of the Day: ABBA

Back in the day, they loved to wear Opium by Yves Saint Laurent. All of them. ABBA likes to match, right down to their choice of cologne.

Today, the band members have updated their scent wardrobe due to the huge success of Mammia Mia! First the play and now a film (with Meryl Streep no less!).

These days, ABBA likes to wear Tom Ford's Black Orchid. They are, however, all looking forward to this Fall's release of White Patchouli.

Overrated, Underrated

More than a few people have noted a passing resemblance between Chanel Allure Sensuelle and Tom Ford Black Orchid. Both follow a recent trend in feminine perfumery, mixing a floral up top with a grunge accord at the bottom, albeit to varying degrees of success. Both have a candied decadence to them. Both dropped the same year. However, Black Orchid gets all the love, while Sensuelle, which must carry the weight of Coco Chanel on its shoulders, is treated as the ugly step-child.

Let’s be clear: Allure Sensuelle is no Chanel No. 5—but neither is Black Orchid. And while Allure Sensuelle has mastermind Jacques Polge behind it, Black Orchid…doesn’t. Like the new and old versions of Rive Gauche, the two intersect, smelling more like each other at certain points during their respective developments, then less. Both arguably unisex, Black Orchid has the advantage of Tom Ford’s blurred lines behind it, whereas Chanel sells to the gender segregationist set, and therefore plays to half its potential audience.

Despite the bluster of its campaign, signaled by the phallic, rectangular bottle (a bit like Mildred Pierce in her square-shouldered furs) Black Orchid never quite pulls it off. From the moment you spray it on, you can see it has big plans. It screams get out of the way in a coarse baritone vibrato. For the first five or ten minutes it's running off at the mouth, boasting so assertively that you trust it has something to say. It does and it doesn’t. The construction of Black Orchid is comparable to one of those old Rube Goldberg contraptions. In order for the little silver ball to end up in the bucket, everything must be perfectly conceived and constructed. The metal rails must be pitched the right way, lest the ball lose momentum before it hits its mark. The wooden lever that ball is meant to drop on, which will then hit the stick which holds the rubber fist, which will then slam against the button which releases the trap door, and the ball, so it can roll along its merry way, must be flexible enough. You look at a Rube Goldberg construction and it seems fine, everything looks great, until you try it out, at which point it either operates beautifully or things fall apart. Black Orchid is pitched a little too sharply. Certain chutes and ladders have been angled ever so slightly the wrong way, but you don’t know it until you’re rolling along all those rails. The proportions are wrong. You can see the image you’re meant to watch, under sheets of zigzagging static, or you think you can—but whoever tried to fix the picture slammed the side of the TV, rather than taking the time to adjust the knobs.

The heart of the fragrance lingers in gorgeous, twilit territory, where the flowers are nicely complicated, as if turning the lights down low made it as hard to smell as see, and a vivid, earthen woodiness reminds you the ground is underfoot. There’s even a tangy zest somewhere in there—turning the aromatic pungency of a fougere on its head. Wild Orchid lingers, pretending to relax, but only briefly, and the bluster of the opening notes resumes. This is a busy fragrance—places to go, people to see—off it rushes again. That would be fine, were it rushing somewhere half as interesting as the place it’s evacuating. The next thing you know, it’s stuffing its face with food, so furiously that you’d be hard pressed to say what’s on the menu.

Black Orchid’s intentions are fairly clear, and that’s probably a large part of its problem. From the ads and the hype you know what it’s meant to be: a bold, starkly etched fragrance reminiscent of those the great houses once released with the fanfare of the first walk on the moon. And it is reminiscent—like Jessica Rabbit is reminiscent of Rita Hayworth. In order to understand Black Orchid you must hold it up to the classics, and of course it comes off like a caricature. A shame, really, as it isn’t bad—or even mediocre.

The heart of Allure Sensuelle never quite achieves the magic of Black Orchid’s brief, hallucinatory moment of beauty. Arguably more linear, it is a consistent performer. It has some of Black Orchid’s tang but holds on to it until it figures out how to use it. It has the incense on bottom, along with patchouli and vanilla in place of truffle. It’s remarkably similar, but feels confident it has nothing to prove. Someone please tell this fragrance it’s a Chanel. Clearly it didn’t get that memo, which is where its own troubles began. Like Guerlain, the house of Chanel is on thin ice: will it mess with the perfection of its old reliables? Will it continue to produce the kind of quality women the world over have come to expect? Well, yes and no, in no certain order.
Had Allure Sensuelle been release by one of the niche lines this would be a moot issue. It’s a perfectly respectable, even lovely perfume. It draws from various currents of modern perfumery to show the others how it’s done. People expect innovation from Chanel—perhaps unfairly. So a mother lode of aldehydes were dumped into No. 5. So Cuir de Russie is the most exquisite embodiment of luxury between Planet Earth and Pluto. Why must every Chanel fragrance which doesn’t have the good fortune to be a miracle have to be considered a miserable step in the wrong direction?
Allure Sensuelle has its strengths. Its use of vetiver is accomplished and unusual for a feminine perfume, handled with considerable sensitivity to overall development. It has just the right amount of peppery dissonance, is burnished just so with the solar heat of frankincense. It lasts. It is aptly named, managing to achieve an interesting balance between salty and sweet, floral and oriental. It is arguably more androgynous than Black Orchid, and when a man smells it on a woman, he might just be taken aback by unexpected, unfamiliar urges and impulses.
If anything, Chanel must be faulted for its laziness in building a palpable sense of identity around Allure Sensuelle. A simple comparison between the genius of Ford’s creative direction (Black Orchid: vintage glamor, decadent impulses) and Chanel’s proposed fantasy (Allure Sensuelle: exactly…what…exactly when…exactly where and how?) makes clear Allure Sensuelle's true failure.
All the same, you could do much, much worse—in or outside of Chanel.