D'Orsay Le Nomade

Le Nomade starts off with a tart, sparkling lime note, making the fragrance seem almost dewy at first. I wish it lingered there longer because it's a unique note, but it's a pretty fantastic openings. After this, it moves along into woodier, spicier terrain, but it never really loses that tart disposition altogether. Some have compared it to Cartier Declaration, and while it's true they feel related, there are enough differences between them to warrant individual attention. Declaration is nuttier somehow. Le Nomade feels a little more floral, recalling the jasmine beatitude of Third Man, if perverted by the spice rack.

I liked Le Nomade instantly. It smells better than the majority of masculines I come across, and, like Third Man, has something about it which makes it feel a little more unisex, partly the jasmine, but also something else. It doesn't take much to veer away from "masculine", when you consider how homogeneous your average masculine fragrance is. Many of the D'Orsay fragrances date to the early 1900s. Le Nomade is practically a baby, at a little less than ten years old. It smells much older, and not just because it bears very little relation to contemporary trends in mainstream perfumery.

The D'Orsay website features the fragrance as part of its "Intense" series and lists the notes as follows: ivy green, cedar leaves, bergamot, lime, jasmine, geranium, cardamom, coriander, cumin, black pepper, vetiver, atlas cedar, sandalwood, balsam fir, sage, and liatrix. The easy way out would be to describe Le Nomade as a woody vetiver, citing the cedar, the sandalwood, fir, sage, etc. But the spices, the jasmine, and the geranium take the composition to an entirely different place. I've heard people describe this as a confused fragrance. D'Orsay doesn't help dissuade from that impression. "Where cultures collide," the website boasts, continuing:"the perfect blend of essences from Asian and African civilizations." Then again, that makes sense to me, as the overall result smells like a fusion of a spicy dish and a steaming porcelain cup of jasmine tea, side of lemongrass. Le Nomade is that rare thing, an eau de parfum masculine.

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.