Aziyade

While not so surprised that I like it, I am surprised how little Aziyade reminds me of the things I'm told it should. What's not to like? Are there many who don't like Serge Lutens' Arabie? I don't know many of them. It's likable, too. It smells to me of dates marinated in various resins, and Aziyade has some of those fruity woody aspects too. As do Kenzo Elephant and Feminite du Bois. But Aziyade has so many peculiar qualities those don't that I'm not sure I would have made the connection on my own. For me, likability is about the biggest thing they have in common.

I made a comment the other day, talking about Noix De Tuberose, that tuberose fragrances often seem very similar, with only very fine distinctions. I see the school of thought which places Aziyade among the sugared fruits and woods of the perfume world, but it has such a nice, tart angle, with some leather and terpenoids going on in there too. I get some pine, though it isn't listed. I think this might be ginger, which is. None of the notes come as a shock to me. Yes, okay, there are those crystallized dates and prunes, but they're more of a backdrop. Orange is a big player here, adding to that terpenoid zing. Pomegranate, a cameo. The ginger, almond, cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, carob and ciste season the mix in a way which feels uniquely spicy. Aziyade isn't a cold smell, it has some warmth, but it lacks the fuzzy splendor of Elephant and Arabie. Those have always reminded me of Cinnabar in a certain way: they heat up on the skin the way the smell of food on the stove spreads through the house.

Aziyade is brisk. I would call it radiant. It doesn't smell anything like them but its radiance brings Caleche and Clinique Wrappings to mind. Those have a similar, slightly camphorous edge for me which should probably be chalked up to aldehydes. Aziyade's tangy vibe isn't something I've smelled anywhere, except perhaps in another Parfum D'Empire fragrance, Ambre Russe. What to call this? Both make me think of a rich, high end liqueur like the one I sometimes see and covet: a pear floats inside, like a model ship in a bottle. Aziyade dries down into a dreamy booze of a fragrance. It doesn't have the forceful longevity of Elephant and Arabie but it lasts quite well. Actually, now that I bring it up, it smells a bit of pear.

Bored to Tears: New Releases, Old Hat

I'm pouting this week, I'm in a funk, I'm almost bored with perfume and I don't know what to do about it, a situation which would have seemed inconceivable to me only several months ago. Is perfume a passing phase--or am I just sick of being disappointed lately? So many of the things I've been looking forward to have turned out to be uninspired. Some of them feel like a slap in the face.

The Alien EDT is nice enough, but where's the promised difference, the guaranteed frisson? To me it smells exactly like Alien EDP--no heavier, no lighter, no woodsier, no more or less presided over by jasmine. I wanted special. I wanted something tweaked, not because I dislike Alien EDP (far from it) but because I wanted to see a perfumer pushing himself, responding to input about the first go round, teasing out something about the first Alien which showed its detractors how wrong they were, proving to them that Alien was wonderful all along, they just hadn't been looking the right way.

To some extent, the seasonal flankers have served this purpose, illuminating the original Alien (2005) with bursts of clarifying light. I particularly liked the first flanker, eau Luminescente, which brought a piquancy into the original's headier mix. But the mission of seasonal flankers seems to be to adapt the original fragrance's attributes into some fantasy vignette of Spring and Summer, a limiting mission, depending how you feel about Spring and Summer (I, for one, resent being asked to retire my jeans, as if I'm just not quite carefree enough otherwise, or inhibited because I won't frolic around in shorts). Key words, like "lighter" and "fresher", prevail over the exercise. For me, the Alien EDT release might have reinterpreted the original in many novel ways, but didn't, making it little better than a wasted opportunity.

I can barely talk about YSL's Parisienne without getting a little ticked off. More than anything, I'm irritated with myself, for having gotten my hopes up. Parisienne is a massive letdown on a number of levels, but the biggest disappointment of all is the fact that my little honeymoon with Sophia Grojsman might now be over. I was naive enough to believe that I would love Parisienne no matter how much of a retread it might be. I've loved every Grojsman perfume I can think of, though many resemble each other enough to keep others from owning several at once. Paris is an iconic favorite of mine. Its intensity, the lush stuff it makes of rose, violet and hawthorn, is a narcotic for me. Though I've loved it since 1983, when it first came out, the smell isn't particularly nostalgic to me. It's too timeless for that. But it makes me intensely happy, speaking to my imagination in a way which would normally require hallucinogens.

How big a part did Sophia Grojsman actually play in the creation of Parisienne? Her collaborator, Sophie Labbé, hasn't done much of anything I've admired or even been vaguely interested in, with the exception of Givenchy Organza. Granted, Organza is so good that its creator wouldn't really need to do much more in life. It has amazing persistence, impressive diffusion. It smells like nothing else, filtered through a series of recognizable motifs. It certainly doesn't smell like anything else Labbé has done. I'm not a fan of most of the Joop fragrances, some of which she's authored. Kylie Minogue Sexy Darling, Givenchy Very Irresistible, Cacharel Amour Pour Homme, Jil Sander Sport for Women and Nina Ricci Permier Jour don't exactly tip the scales in her favor.

My guess is that Sophia Grojsman is credited because Parisienne trades on Paris not only thematically but by using enough of its formula to owe her royalties. There is the faintest ghost of Paris in there, but so dulled down, so muted that to credit Grojsman is somehow discrediting her. The notes of this so-called woody floral are said to be damask rose, violet, peony, patchouli, vetiver, and most intriguingly, "a vinyl accord evoking metal gloss and varnish." Interestingly (and this is practically the only interesting thing about the fragrance for me) Parisienne smells best from the bottle. Smelled from the atomizer, you get the vinyl accord, and it's as wonderfully strange as the copy makes it sound. The problem is that once you apply it to the skin or a testing strip, it becomes the failed prototype for Kylie Minogue's next assault on the mainstream fragrance-buying public.

There are things I like about Parisienne. It isn't horrible, just insipidly pleasant. Some floral, some wood, watered-down whiffs of unusual. It hides on the skin like it's scared to come out and play or has been pushed out on stage in only its underwear. It has zero projection, and even you can't smell it after a few minutes, without making a fool of yourself practically humping your wrist with your nose. It's nice. It's pretty. It bores the hell out of me. Some have expressed dismay at the tone of the Kate Moss advertisements. My guess is that the perfume, whatever it actually does in reality, is named to evoke the stylized debauchery of "La Vie Parisienne", the naughty pre-war French magazine and the equally controversial opera of the same name composed by Offenbach, which featured, among other entertainments, "trollops masquerading as society ladies" and the "frenetic, mad pursuit of fun and pleasure", all of which Moss seems to be channeling in the ads. The actual perfume, unfortunately, is a society lady masquerading as a society lady.

And don't even get me started on masculine releases. Givenchy Play is a joke, as everyone on the boards and blogs, from basenotes to Burr, is remarking. Givenchy Play Intense is the good cop in this scenario, but it too makes you work to love, let alone like it long time. A little Rochas Man, a little Lempicka au Masculin, some Bulgari Black. It comes out doing a snake-charmer's dance with anise, coffee and labdanum, each of which in its way is more over-exposed than even Justin Timberlake, the fragrance's spokesmodel. Like him, Play Intense wishes to be all things to all people. It sings, it dances, it has a sense of humor. It acts, doing a good impression of colognes I like better, then it slinks off the skin in search of God knows what. Maybe it goes looking for Parisienne. Good luck with that.

It probably doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even someone who plays one on TV, to know that YSL La Nuit de L'Homme is going to suck, and suck it does. It smells like everything all at once. It's doing everything it can to impress and please you, boring the shit out of you. The smell of it fills you with a profound despair. So this is what it's come to. I might as well end it all right here. If women think pink pepper is getting old, cross the aisle and walk a mile in my shoes. The terrain: cardamom, as far as the eye can see. To think I actually love cardamom. Every time I go back to L'Essence de Declaration I realize anew how wrong they're getting cardamom these days. Someone please throw that cardamom a life-raft of birch tar.

The question is, what are they getting right? Yesterday I took out my bottle of Organza Indecence. I couldn't believe how rich and gorgeous it was. More specifically, I couldn't believe I'd forgotten. But with so many snoozers on the market, more every day, it's a wonder I can remember liking perfume, ever, at all.

I'd love to hear what you've been disappointed in lately. It would help me feel less alone or, God forbid, misanthropic.

Small Wonders: La Perla

Every once in a while I suddenly stop ignoring a scent I've willfully disregarded for an extended period of time, and give it a smell, and it turns out to be a real sleeper. For a year I've been going to this kiosk in the mall. They have some rarities, some discontinued items, some stuff you'd otherwise have to get online. They're not the cheapest place but they're handy, and a short drive across town. There are all kinds of things in this little glass square planted in the center of the mall, many of which, even when scouring the shelves for something I haven't tried before, I consistently turn up my nose at.

I don't even think I really ever gave La Perla much more than a cursory glance. The name sounded cheap and negligible. The black and white box looked even cheaper. Sandwiched between Il Bacio and Elizabeth Arden's Blue Grass, La Perla seemed determined to defy my attention span, hell bent on boring me. I don't know what struck me yesterday but I decided to give it a chance.

Turns out it's better than a good third of the fragrances I own. A rose chypre in the style of the old Coriandre (R.I.P.) and Halston Couture (So Long, We Hardly Knew Ye), closely related to Aromatics Elixir, Miss Balmain, and even, more recently, Etat Libre D'Orange's Rossi de Palma and Agent Provocateur, it has persistence and diffusion like very little on the market today. It has a discernible amount of oakmoss in it and enough patchouli to satisfy the die-hard, as well as Coriander, cardamom, ylang ylang, honey, orris, vetiver, sandal and benzoin. It costs all of 35 to forty bucks.

You would think La Perla dates back to at least the mid seventies. It smells old school, rich and warm and happy to reach out and greet the casual passerby. It's bold but textured and complex. Like Aromatics Elixir, it's forceful without being a bully.  It smells classy and a bit déclassé, playing out these contradictions as it dries down on the skin.  It's like a fragrance your mother wore yet it feels modern, as if determined to step into the near future.

In fact, it was created in 1987. La Perla, basically a panty firm, has something like a dozen fragrances under its belt--no pun intended. Who knew? I didn't. I'm not a big fan of panties, as you can imagine. "La Perla" was the first fragrance, after which followed IO, Eclix, Creation, Charme, and others. I suppose La Perla could be considered a glorified Victoria's Secret, but "La Perla" is better than anything that fixture of the local mall ever produced, as far as I know. It was created by Pierre Wargnye, the nose behind Drakkar Noir, Tenere, and a bunch of masculines I find dreary and uninspiring (Antidote, anyone?).

Now that they've absolutely destroyed Coriandre, which remains on the market as a frail ghost of its former self, it's reassuring to know you can still find something like it, an alternative or a compliment to Aromatics Elixir.  La Perla achieves the depth of focus found in those classic rose/floral/leather chypres with a level of sensory detail that approaches photo-realism.

Fendi, "For Women"

With so many of the greats set for discontinuation, it probably seems silly to wax nostalgic about the original Fendi, which was discontinued all the way back in 2005, before any of the crippling restrictions went into effect. Even recently extinct Palazzo is a more practical cause celebre.  Still, before I'd ever heard anything about Guerlain or Givenchy, I was spending what seemed like a fortune at the time (1985) for a bottle of Fendi eau de toilette. It was one of the first perfumes I ever bought, and though it was intended for women and owning it would give me some explaining to do, I couldn't help myself. I had to have it.

I've always been a sucker for a good wood smoke fragrance, which is what I took Fendi to be. I had no idea what was actually in it.  I only knew they sold it in the women's department, and that I loved it beyond reason. Now I know the pyramid: cardamom, coriander, bergamot, mandarin, laurel leaves, lily-of-the-valley, geranium, cypress, cedar, moss, labdanum, tonka. What's most remarkable about this incredibly potent perfume--potent even among its eighties sisters--is how devoid of floral notes it is. What, even then, made it feminine? It has less florals than most of today's men's colognes. Dior Homme is far more floral than Fendi, but so are less overtly flowery male fragrances.

Smelling Fendi now, years after first purchasing it, I'm able to examine it a lot more closely, a little more out in the open, and I realize it really isn't a wood smoke fragrance either, not officially, not exactly.  It smells leathery, with incense undertones, a pronounced herbal influence, and spices.  The spices, of course, aren't polite.  Cardamom gives Fendi a piercing, camphorous quality, a touch of resinous warmth; coriander magnifies the combustibility, reinforcing the overall terpenoid character.

As it turns out, Fendi has a lot more in common with masculines than feminines, a disposition signaled by the advertisement, which depicted a woman snuggling up to Michelangelo's David, perhaps her inner male.  Fendi is closer to aromatic fragrances like Kouros (geranium, coriander, laurel), Trussardi (laurel, geranium, tonka, landanum), and Paco Rabanne (tonka, geranium, laurel) than Poison, Giorgio, or Paris.  Several years later, Fendi would affirm this by producing Fendi Uomo, a more officially masculine variation on the women's fragrance, close enough in spirit that the two might as well have been brothers.

Both EDT and EDP require a light touch.  Fendi EDP is a little less overtly smoky to my nose, but the dry down comes very close to what you get in the EDT.  Both have off the chart longevity.  Comparisons have been made to balsamic orientals like Youth Dew, Bal a Versailles, and Opium, but Fendi is nowhere close to keeping that company.  It has no fruity embellishments and, as mentioned, no discernible floral backbone.  Granted, Youth Dew is no delicate flower itself, but Fendi is butcher still, and maybe even ahead of its time.  Ten years younger, it relates very clearly to the original Comme des Garçons by Marc Buxton (geranium, cardamom, coriander, nutmeg, labdanum, cedarwood) and it has more than a little in common with Comme des Garçons 2 Man, as well, also by Buxton.  Michael Edwards classifies Fendi as a floral chypre, which seems a bit of a stretch.  Still, though not listed, oakmoss is in the basenotes, and lily of the valley IS, after all, a flower.  Fendi is still available online.  I would love to know who created it. 

Casran by Chopard: reviewing the basenotes reviews

For a while I laughed at the i-Phone. The way its devotees made it sound, the device would solve world hunger and stop destruction of the ozone, if only the right add-ons were downloaded. An i-Phone doubles as a calculator, I was told defensively (how handy!), would serve as a flashlight in the darkest of alleys, and in the event you were approached by storm troopers in the Wal-mart parking lot with less than good will on their minds, you could ward them off with its simulated light saber, frightening them long enough to make a run for it. Good for a laugh, it seemed to me--if nothing else.

Then my partner got the newest model, and gave me the obsolete version, and now I’ve come around. It only took going to the perfume section at TJ Max, where various perfumes I’d never really considered buying were stocked. Within minutes I was able to look these fragrances up on basenotes, ascertain their pyramids, and find out what naed_nitram, foetidus, and all the other regular reviewers had to say about their relative merits or lack thereof. While it does take some patience as the pages to load, like most perfume fanatics (do we have a sense of humor about using that word yet?) I have an abundance of patience when it comes to researching and tracking down scents. I can wait.

Yesterday, I decided I needed a fragrance to smell on the drive out of town for Labor Day Weekend, so I returned to TJ Max for the second time this week. I told myself I was going there to buy Calvin Klein’s Obsession Night eau de parfum. Though I’ve smelled it many times, considered purchasing it, and opted for something else each time, I’d temporarily run out of options and it suddenly seemed the perfect choice.

I like Obsession Night well enough. It smells nice. It’s only twenty bucks. Nice is about as much as I expect for that kind of money. It has a tenacious woodsy benzoin base, and I can imagine myself wearing it if somehow everything else in my fragrance cabinet suddenly self-implodes, and of course when you shop for your 225^th bottle of perfume you need a good excuse to get more, so you tell yourself such ominous catastrophes might occur.

I did buy Obsession Night, but while I was looking for it I came across a bottle of Casran by Chopard. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t remember reading anything about it. I assumed it was a feminine, though I don't know why. The bottle was selling for 15 dollars. I couldn’t really think of a reason not to get it, at that price, but I looked it up all the same, just to make sure exactly what kind of bargain I was getting. I like to be informed. I like to keep abreast. Usually, I open the box to smell the perfume at TJ Max. But after the boxes have been opened, as Casran had been, the store tapes them shut securely as if they might leak poisonous gas, and it can be hard to pry one open without drawing attention to yourself, especially with a tall security guard several feet away.

When I look up a fragrance on Basenotes, I immediately scan the reviews to see if foetidus has rung in. It isn’t that I always agree with foetidus. I don’t. But he talks so informatively and with such poetic acuity about perfume that it makes me feel good about being so single-mindedly obsessed with it. Good writing can elevate a subject to mythic importance, which isn’t to say I can be persuaded to believe that Casran or any other perfume will throw the earth off its axis, but I like a dramatic perspective which has the common sense and the facility to disguise itself as more than a highly biased, emotion-driven response.

I was happy to see that he’d written about Casran. “Linear, sweet, clean, sharp, and somehow very satisfying,” he said. “That’s what I get from this scent. I don’t exactly understand why I feel good about Cašran—it doesn’t seem to have any standout qualities, and yet it is certainly a scent that I enjoy.” That’s not exactly high praise, but it seemed favorable enough. The inclusion of coriander and cardamom in the pyramid convinced me I might like it more than he seemed to; so much so that the dry ambered cherries, dates, and prunes didn’t trouble me as much as it seemed like they should. Chocolate seemed promising. Had I paid more attention to the overall tone of disappointment in the reviews I might have adjusted my expectations, but I told myself anything with these combinations couldn’t be less than interesting.

And Casran is interesting, in its way. I waited until I got out of town to open the package. Maybe this was a bad decision, because it wasn’t until today, after jogging and showering and smelling what lingered on my skin, that I could really appreciate this fragrance with any lucidity, and even now, like many of the basenotes reviewers, I remain fairly ambivalent about it.

There’s something about Casran which gives it an aquatic quality. Maybe it just feels a little thin, thus watery. Maybe it’s the cherry. I’ve even heard tell of geranium, which in this mix could resonate as a marine accord, resembling the geranium-coriander accord of Cool Water. Ultimately Casran is a nice, slightly powdery fragrance, or so I thought at first. As Pasha says, “The rum and chocolate I can smell pretty easily and benzoin is also present with the mix of the other two. At the end though, it is a dry vanilla scent that has absolutely no significant identity.” To me, the benzoin is indeed discernable, but I’m hard pressed to smell chocolate or anything remotely gourmand for that matter, nor am I at all getting the “fluffiest cloud in Heaven” vibe mentioned by Chris-p.

It’s hard to believe that of 23 reviews of Casran on basenotes, only 3 are neutral and 3 negative, because the ambivalence about it carries over even into many of the positive remarks, as in Randolph314’s characteristic entry: “After reading the reviews here I had very high expectations going in for Casran. It doesn't quite meet them, but other people (I've been around) really seem to like it, and I guess I do too.” And yet it has that strange, indefinable thing going for it, the kind of thing where you forget you’re wearing it, you’ve dismissed it as largely uninteresting, and suddenly you catch a whiff of something spicy, like the uniquely fresh coriander and cardamom accord I smelled after I’d washed off what I thought was left of Casran.

Many people on basenotes dismiss Casran as conventionally linear, but not foetidus. After experiencing this new, unexpected turn the fragrance had taken, I reread his review, which sums its subject up perfectly:

“There’s no syrupy, sticky sweetness here, just a clean, sharp, incisive, somewhat spicy sweetness that holds true for a very respectable time. The middle gourmand notes are certainly not overdone; they are quite restrained and subtle to my nose, and yet they don’t lack substance. I don’t really get much chocolate but the cherries and prunes come through—especially if I use a little imagination. They, too, are delicate notes that don’t suffer from an excess of syrupiness, and they are so like the top notes that the fragrance gets a deserved reputation for linearity.”

Like him I’m unsure what exactly attracts me to Casran, but find myself watching it a little more closely now than I first did.