A few perfumes I've loved this spring

Parfums DelRae Debut
Having first met Amoureuse, I didn’t think I was a fan of DelRae’s florals. Then I met Debut and realized Amoureuse and I weren’t meant to be friends but Debut and I are BFF’s.

Debut is an early spring scent. Debut begins all sharp and citrus (lime, bergamot) but then unfolds into an obvious note of lily of the valley (and hyacinth which isn’t listed in the notes) with a wet white floral/clean musk dry down. I find Debut to be delicate and a little green. Debut can be a heady scent with similarities to Diorissimo, Penhaligon’s Bluebell and il Profumo Blanche Jacinthe. I can’t wear Diorissimo or Bluebell but I love Blanche Jacinthe mostly for its fresh, delicate wetness. The fragrance Debut most reminds me of is Fracas. Debut doesn’t smell like Fracas, there’s no tuberose in sight and Debut is far less indolic, however, both fragrances are classic heady white florals, which somehow share a classy instead of brassy style.

Etro Dianthus
I meant to write a full review on Dianthus alone but never got the words together. I’m still a little shaky on what exactly this fragrance does for me. In summary, I have been wearing Dianthus a lot the past 6 weeks, so it’s fair to say I love it. The problem is that it smells so different at various times throughout the day that I’ve become stumped on how to describe it. If I tell you it’s both cool and warm, wouldn’t that just confuse you? If I tell you it’s powdery and spicy but not powdery in the traditional sense wouldn’t that also just serve to confuse? If I tell you it’s both subtle yet tenacious wouldn’t it begin to seem like this fragrance is a vortex of opposites? Well, maybe that’s just the point. Etro Dianthus is a bunch of seemingly opposite attributes all rolled up into one scent. This is precisely how the season of spring feels to me. Spring can be warm and cool, wet and dry, light and dark, dull, dreary and suddenly bright and blooming. Dianthus contains all these opposite attributes and keeps me interested all throughout the day. When I first smelled Dianthus, I didn’t realize it was based on carnation (dianthus being the Latin name for carnation). It took me a few wearings and a bit of poking around online to quite suddenly smell the carnation note. Once I did it loomed so obvious, but I initially didn’t find it to be a heavily carnation laden scent.

Etro Dianthus reminds me of the character played by Polly Walker in the film Enchanted April.

Annick Goutal Un Matin d’Orage
Un Matin d’Orage has become one of my favorite fragrances. It conjures a feeling, an emotion, and a dark spring thunderstorm. It smells like the lifting of a bad mood, to reveal peaceful contentment which had been stuck beneath a dreary bad day. I’m buying this for myself in the butterfly bottle. I must have it. And I don’t even like gardenia, not usually, but UMdO makes me love this floral note.

Guerlain Chamade
I’m always sportin’ Chamade at some point in the spring. I finally rewarded myself with the pure parfum and it is To-Die-For. The deep green galbanum note is more potent in parfum, I’d go so far as to say the parfum version of Chamade is more fierce than expected. Usually parfum concentrations wear closer to the skin and are smoother, but Chamade in parfum seems aggressive to me. I adore it.

Bond No. 9 Broadway Nite
I’ve been obsessed with this ever since wearing Sonoma Scent Studio To Dream a few weeks ago. To Dream reminded me of Broadway Nite and FM Lipstick Rose in its basic rose-violet personality.

I scanned the reviews of Broadway Nite and came away feeling insulted. Many reviewers say it’s far too overpowering; it’s loud, aldehydic and just plain awful. On me, it’s one of the most complimented fragrances I have ever worn. As far as the potency issue goes; I mean, really, you can’t just apply two spritzes of a powerful perfume and find it just right? I suppose you must love the scent first and then you would adjust the application to make it work for you. If you immediately hate the scent, the fact that it’s potent is only going to make you hate it more when it lingers on you for 6+ hours appearing to become stronger and stronger. I have, of course, experienced that "please-get-this-stuff-off-me" episodes a few times; once I tried Guerlain Insolence (in edt not edp) and initially thought I liked it until a few hours later when I would have paid $250 to be able to shower it off. This has also happened with Vivienne Westwood Boudoir; I was nauseous wearing that one. But me and Broadway Nite are tight... if my plane crash-landed onto an undiscovered island (and I lived to tell of it), I’d be happy to have a bottle of Broadway Nite with me until the rescue crews arrived. I have no issues with its potency; two sprays are perfect, delightfully perfect.

Maurice Roucel created Broadway Nite which seems fitting because I enjoy many of his other creations; such as Bond No. 9 New Haarlem, Gucci Envy, Le Labo Jasmin 17, Frederic Malle Musc Ravageur, Hermes 24 Faubourg and Guerlain Insolence (edp only). Aside from Gucci Envy, most of these fragrances ain’t no shrinking violets; suffice it to say I enjoy Roucel’s style in general and amongst all his creations, Broadway Nite is my favorite.

My Last 5 In-Person, Real Time Perfume Interactions

You might think that people comment on my perfume all the time.  Alas, they don't.  It's exceedingly rare that anyone says anything about it, and I wear, I imagine, quite a lot.  The last week or so has been a bonanza of interaction.  People at the store.  People at the dinner table.  On a park bench.  Passing on the street.

Here's something else:  I rarely smell perfume on other people.  It's a sad fact of life I try hard to accept.  My friend Jack and I talked recently about how much perfume we give away and how infrequently we smell any of it on its recipients.  I don't know why but lately that changed, too--if only just a little.  Here are the top 5 most recent encounters.

1. Standing in the perfume section of TJ Maxx.

Which is a pretty desperate state of affairs lately, by the way, unless you are so in love with Hugo Boss that you can never have enough of it.  I'm standing there, trying to be excited about the one vaguely interesting thing I managed to find, Si Lolita (I did not end up buying it but holding onto it for a time made me feel a little less despondent), and a woman asks me about it, wondering if I've smelled it and if it's any good (I have and it's okay, if your only other option is Hugo Boss), and I pretended to be buying it for a "girlfriend" because this always makes things easier, and suddenly the woman says, "What's that YOU'RE wearing?  That smells GOOOOOD."  I was wearing an oil I'd made.

2. Sitting down to Easter dinner in a double wide.

My friend's family invited me over to celebrate the holiday.  There were two rather large holes punched in the wall and I tried not to focus on how they might have gotten there, and so close together, as if someone lost his temper a lot but was able to really focus it in one little area quite adeptly.  The guy at the end of the table had a mullet.  The oldest son wants to be a cheerleader, and I think not the male kind.  The younger twins seem embarrassed by this.  The guy with the mullet was probably in his seventies and belched loudly and prodigiously.  There was something mocking about his mullet.  It dared you not to be offended in some way by it.  We were in a military town, and before the meal we'd been to the commissary, where I'd put on a little Youth Dew bath oil.  A little spot of relief on my wrist.  The woman across from me at the table--married, better or worse, to mullet-- suddenly perked up and said, "who smells so good?"

I felt my face turning red but figured oh to hell with it.  Me, I said.

That must be Obsession, she said.  I really like Obsession.

3. Sitting on a park bench next to an Indian burial mound.

I was talking to a friend.  A very attractive, newly acquired friend.  Very stylish.  Very well put together.  One of those guys who seems to have stepped out of another time--slightly vintage looking.  They don't make faces like his much.  You see them in old tintypes. He had on a boat neck striped shirt.  Thick blonde-ish brown hair.  There was a little breeze in the air, and I could smell his day on him, and underneath that, just faintly, the gorgeous, silky smell of Chanel Egoiste, totally personalized by a full 24 hours of wear.  He'd put it on that morning, he said.  It mingled with his cigarette smoke.  I had a little trouble focusing on what he was saying.  This is what perfume ads try to capture, I thought.

4. Warehouse office downtown.

A girl I know who has received much perfume from me, and never seems to be wearing it, smelled wonderful one day.  As we talked the smell came in and out, yanking me into different moods and thought patterns.  She told me she'd layered Jo Malone Grapefruit Cologne with Bond No.9's Scent of Peace.  The Malone she doesn't tend to think much of by itself, and frankly Scent of Peace is war on my nerves on its own, but the combination was just enough of a curve ball to call a truce, and super lovely.

5. Standing at the oil counter mixing something.

A guy came in looking for something for erectile issues.  I didn't know the store carried such a thing.  They went right to it.  He was looking at jewelry, too.  I thought, oh, some lady is really in for no end of trouble, and all she gets for the incessant "attentions" will be a little pair of silver earrings she's probably instantly plotting to return.

Another guy came in.  Some kind of itching disorder.  His wife believes things are coming out of her pores.  The ladies at the counter went right to the herbs again.  If you think the fragrance counter is full of intrigue you should step up to the oil section of your local hippie apothecary.

I was very fascinated by all this but kept focused on my oils, until some other guy came in looking for who knows what, and started sniffing the air.  What's that smell? he asked, obsessed.  It made me so happy.  I had all my little bottles open on the counter next to him: rose, patchouli, clove, cinnamon, ylang, Nag Champa, Jasmine, sandalwood.  Turns out he was smelling the rose geranium, which I'm pretty fond of, too.

Dioressence: Moss Appeal

Diorella, Diorama, Diorling, Diorissimo and Miss Dior seem to get the lion's share of appreciation when it comes to older Dior fragrances, and while I like several of them very much, I think my favorite is the newest of the old, Dioressence.  Granted, of the lot, I've never smelled Diorling and Diorama in anything close to original form, and the Diorling reformulation is pretty pale compared to what it must once have been, so maybe I'm biased.  I should also say that I haven't smelled the most recent version of Dioressence, either.  Still, for me, the original 1979 Dioressence would be hard to beat.

Guy Robert, the perfumer behind Dioressence, created several other well known fragrances, a few of which remind me more than a little of Dioressence in certain ways.  I can smell some of the dusty incense quality from Hermes Caleche in Dioressence's heart, for instance, and something of Amouage Gold in there as well.  Dioressence is a chypre and smells quintessentially of oakmoss to me once you get past the pronounced geranium, galbanum, and rose up top.  In fact I would say that the most interesting movement of the fragrance for me is its seamless segue from galbanum to oakmoss, creating an interesting, textured progression from one distinct green note to another, each of which would seem to get lost taken together.

Osmoz lists the notes as the following: aldehydes, orange, galbanum, bergamot, carnation, geranium, rose, cinnamon, benzoin, patchouli, oakmoss, and vanilla.  Violet is included in the description but not the pyramid.

I suppose there are those who will smell Dioressence and sense nothing but a wallop of old style patchouli.  There's certainly enough in there.  And the patchouli combined with the cinnamon can seem like a lighter version  of H.O.T. Always by Bond No.9, or a slightly more domesticated animal relation to the original Givenchy Gentleman, but to me the cinnamon and patch seem like embellishments, meant to support or underscore the primary green notes.  Even the carnation, geranium, phantom violet and rose seem to hover around in the background to my nose, making the fragrance a lot more masculine than most modern feminine fragrances.  No guy raised on a steady diet of mainstream sports colognes is apt to agree with me, of course.  Dioressence reminds me of another pretty masculine old feminine, Trussardi, which was released in 1984

Dioressence feels a little moodier than the other vintage Diors.  Diorella is sunny and succulent; Diorissimo quite upbeat as well.  Miss Dior, while not prim, is certainly more sedate than Dioressence.  Something about Dioressence reminds me of some seventies bohemian hang out, infested with velvet pillows and thick with lingering incense smoke.  Miss Dior would walk into such an establishment clutching her purse pretty tightly.  Staring at supine Dioressence, spread across a series of batik-patterned throws and a thick shag rug, she'd wonder whether something hidden in the carpet might jump up onto her tweed jacket and hitch a ride home with her.  In style it certainly straddles the hallmark fragrances of the 40s and 50s and the bold pronouncements to come in the 80s.

It has moderate projection and lasting power and for the most part settles down to a nice soft mossy haze after about thirty minutes to an hour or so on me.

What Becomes a B-r-r-r-r-utalist Most?

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Center of Olfactory Art curator and author Chandler Burr argued for the official re-appraisal of perfume as an art form, making the case, essentially, that a perfumer is an artist and should be regarded as one, and that when we discuss perfume we might consider it within a context wider than the commercial arena within which it has typically been consigned by its marketers and corporate reasons-for-being.

The Center of Olfactory Art, a newly christened division of New York's Museum of Arts and Design, is, apparently, about rooting around for new ways of evaluating and imagining many of the perfumes we have seen simply as an extension of the companies for whom they were manufactured.  In fact, COA might be said primarily to be about expanding the vocabulary we use to discuss perfume.  While many of us who love fragrance are quite accustomed to calling one a creation rather than simply a commodity or someone like Picasso an artist rather than simply a painter or a sculptor, when the public at large thinks about a perfume, the framing device is generally Gucci or Donna Karan or Jessica Simpson.

Sonoma Scent Studio To Dream

This is the first time I’m breaking my rule of always spraying from the bottle and wearing a perfume 2-3 days before writing a review. Full disclosure: I’ve only sampled SSS To Dream from a dauber vial but I have worn it for 2 days and I’m blown away by it. I’m in lust for To Dream and cannot wait for my bottle to arrive, which, of course, is already on order and in transit!

Ms. Erikson, perfumer behind Sonoma Scent Studio, sent me a sample of To Dream on a whim, thinking I might not like it, because it’s similar in structure with her existing fragrance called Lieu de Reves. I am enamored with virtually all fragrances from SSS but Lieu de Reves and a few of her musks just never resonated with me. I sampled To Dream, in a way, just to be polite.

Wow!! The word ‘Wow’ is all I could think initially. To Dream (TD) is built like a classic rose/violet/aldehyde fragrance. One of my absolute favorites in this genre is Bond No. 9 Broadway Nite as well as Frederic Malle Lipstick Rose. Yves Saint Laurent Paris is also a famous rose/violet scent but Paris, as much as I love the high school memories it conjures, is like nails on a chalkboard for me. Bond’s Broadway Nite and FM Lipstick rose are two of my ultimate rose/violet glamor puss scents. In fact, I don’t often receive compliments on the fragrance I’m wearing, but I always, I mean it’s uncanny, but I always receive a compliment from someone when I wear Broadway Nite. Erickson’s To Dream gives homage to these sorts of glamor puss rose/violet scents but with the SSS trademark woody incense dry down.

Similar to the advice American Idol judges give contestants each year; if you’re going to take on a famous song or artist, someone incredibly original and iconic, like Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston, you must change it up a bit and make it your own. I was thinking about this analogy with Erickson’s To Dream, about how rose/violet fragrances are classics and many of the best one’s are quite well known. To create another rose/violet fragrance and make it sing, make it worthy enough to add to an existing collection which may contain several rose/violet scents already, Erickson would have to make it different, unique and phenomenal in its own right. To Dream is just that; it’s a glamorous rose/violet fragrance infused with the Erickson/SSS magic.

To Dream starts off as an obvious rose/violet aldehyde. After five minutes the aldehydic quality diminishes and a delectable rose/violet/mossy/woody scent emerges. To Dream is potent but it’s not loud. While not a gourmand there is still a delicious sensation here, I feel the urge to lick my wrists. The thing I love about rose/violet scents is that you really don’t have to like the notes of either rose or violet because the combination is something different entirely. I don’t know exactly why, but it’s these sorts of scents, these rose/violet aldehydes, like Bond’s Broadway Nite or FM’s Lipstick Rose that make me think of glamorous old movie stars and red lipstick. To Dream takes the standard rose/violet scent and anchors it with a gorgeous woody base and a dab of incense. Instead of keeping To Dream light and mostly floral, Erickson gave it a deeper base, like an iconic glamor puss with a sultry husky voice.

Erickson strikes again, she has created yet another masterpiece with To Dream.

Notes: Violet, rose, heliotrope, cedar, amber, frankincense, oakwood absolute, vetiver, tonka, orris, vanilla, musk, sandalwood, oakmoss, subtle suede, cocoa, and aldehydes

Alien Sunessence 2011: Edition Or D'Ambre

I don't know why--because they've largely been disappointing--but every year I look forward to all the various Thierry Mugler seasonal, limited edition flankers with the kind of excitement I imagine a teen feels waiting for the next installment of the Twilight franchise.  The flankers for A*men have been more consistently promising, and I don't have many complaints there, but, aside from the astonishingly good Alien and Angel Liqueur duo (2009), the results over at the lady counter have often left me disappointed.

For the most part, the Angel Sunessence fragrances have half the lifespan of their original inspiration and seem very nakedly to be attempts to modify for the few who dislike or hate Angel the things which make the rest of us love it so maniacally.  "Angel toothpaste!" as Luca Turin remarked enthusiastically about one of these flankers, is good for a whirl, I guess, but it doesn't exactly leave you feeling sated, or particularly clean for that matter.  As toothpastes go, it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.  Innocent and its rather jaded follow-ups have consistently failed to even marginally interest me.  The Alien Sunessence fragrances have, on the other hand, smelled so much like the original Alien, that I had a hard time seeing the point, let alone the difference.

I approached Or D'Ambre without much hope, and at first I thought, "same old, same old".  It was only later, when it persisted much longer than even the original Alien seems to, and seemed more interesting than any of its sister flankers by far, hours in, that I came around to what should have been its very obvious appeal.

Thierry Mugler's ad copy tends to delight or grate with its fanciful silliness, depending on your mood, and I'm not sure I smell the promised "trio of wealth" at the top of the fragrance: "the wealth of vitamins, the wealth of the exotic, and the enchanting wealth of warmth."  We all love the French and admit that they are superior in the art of fragrance.  Is all this wealth not enough to buy them an English speaking think tank?  Upon first spraying Ambre, what I get is something very refreshing; if calling that a wealth of refreshment makes more sense of things to you, I invite you to do so.  For me, it's a little more specific.  Ambre offers a weird citrus sheen or zest which is not only unusual for an Alien flanker but engineered in such an unusual way that it compliments the fragrance's weird synthetic sensibility perfectly.  This metallic hesperide lasts all of ten minutes, tops, and flows seamlessly into the heart of the fragrance, a practically teeming virtual reality of impressions.

For something as openly synthetic as Alien, Ambre has a remarkable series of moods and transitions; many more than your average, supposedly superior, more allegedly natural fragrance, which typically purports to use only the highest quality raw materials.  I've always loved the synthetic qualities of Alien, the way it feels super saturated and weirdly succulent without losing that unique cyborgian effect, like something Sean Young's character might have smelled of to Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, a simulation of memories combining childhood sunsets, his mother's jasmine perfume, and the new patented Sumolinoline Vinyl upholstery of his hovercraft.  Alien absolutely feels half human, half mechanical to me, and I love that, and what made the liqueur version so compelling, aside from the fact it smelled like a million bucks, was the sense it gave of taking those synthetically engineered qualities and aging them like a fine liquor, giving them a richness that screwed around with your mind the way someone implanting memories might.

Ambre takes those pastoral-domestic fantasies, those memories of things you might or might never have experienced, and carries them in a tote bag to the beach.  Distinctly summery, it smells, somewhere in there, of sun and suntan oil on skin and the heat bearing down on your closed eyelids.  The fragrance shifts over time on your skin, sticking with you the way the experience of the beach does by the end of the afternoon, when the salt of your sweat has mingled with the oil you applied throughout the day, and your feel somewhat crunchy and sated from the effects of the wind, heat, and sand.  It's an interesting take on amber, applying the Alien sensibility to it, and conceptually it is far stronger than any of the Sunessence flankers have been.  It feels very much in keeping with the original Alien's creative agenda and yet extends it in an interesting direction, exploring slightly different territory.

Ambre is credited to Dominique Ropion, and like much of what he does it has remarkable longevity.  For an Eau de toilette Legere (all the Sunessence flankers are) it has tremendous staying power and feels exceptionally rich, long after application.  While it becomes increasingly subtle as it wears on, it never feels weak, nor watery, as many eau legeres do on me, particularly those which feature some kind of citrus aspect.  And despite the silliness of the ad copy, Ambre does indeed retain an unusual warmth throughout its development, matching the bottle's solar design in execution.  The notes listed include vanilla, orchid, amber, woods, and the wealthy trifecta of tonics up top, including kiwi, which is lost on me.  Ambre unmistakably resembles original Alien but is quite different in many respects.  Spray them side by side and you won't mistake them again.  I would argue that Ambre outlasts Alien, as well.  As for liking Ambre more than Alien, for those who didn't care much for the original, I can't say.  I love both without reservations.

Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier Ambre Precieux

I’m a friend of good amber fragrances (“good” is obviously subjective, but I’ll explain more below). I find many amber scents too sweet and vanillic but I easily have a half dozen ambery fragrances I adore and don’t fall anywhere near the sweet/vanilla spectrum. It strikes me as odd that I’ve never reviewed MPG’s Ambre Precieux (MPG AP) since I find it to be one of the absolute best amber fragrances ever created.

The intriguing part about amber is that it’s not a single note but an accord usually created by a thousand different variations of benzoin, labdanum, styrax, vanilla, opopponax, ambergris, myrrh, various herbs, woods and oriental spices. When I come across uninteresting, flat or super-sweet vanilla type amber scents it just seems cheap, unimaginative and sad to me. These sweet vanilla ambers are the ones I think give the whole genre a bad reputation.

MPG Ambre Precieux, from a quick glance across various blogs and BN, MUA reviews, seems to garner diverse opinions. While most seem to love it, many of the adjectives used to describe it are a little weird to me. Take “powdery” for instance. MGP AP isn’t powdery to me in the least. I suppose powdery is one of those descriptive words that mean entirely different things to whomever uses it. MPG AP might be classified as powdery if your definition of the word is smooth, balanced and silky, like the texture of powder instead of the smell of baby powder. MPG AP’s smoothness is so perfectly balanced that in this regard it reminds me of Amouage Lyric. I don’t mean it smells like Lyric but there’s an ultimate smoothness and perfectly balanced quality in both Lyric and AP.

MPG Ambre Precieux reminds me a bit of Diptyque Eau Lente and Diptyque L’eau Trois mostly due to the herbaceous resins and myrrh. MPG AP isn’t edgy like Annick Goutal Ambre Fetiche (which I love but have to be in the mood to wear), instead it purrs softly, but tenaciously, in a contented and satisfied manner. I’d classify MPG AP as a woody-herbaceous amber with just a tiny dollop of sweetness. So often it seems like many perfume aficionados are looking for the next most innovative, unique, edgy or strange juxtaposition of notes when searching for a new fragrance. I find myself, more often, looking for this type of fragrance, one where I find the quality superior and the overall scent isn’t weird but perfectly balanced and smooth. It might be mistaken as simplistic but I have a hunch that this sort of effortless perfection is the most difficult to create.

Notes: lavender, myrhh, amber, tolu balsam, resin, vanilla, nutmeg and peru balsam.

My Patchouli Problem

I admitted recently that I’ve given up trying to like vetiver and leather fragrances (aside from Tom Ford Tuscan Leather and some old classics that don’t register as Leather with a capital L on me like Bandit and Cabochard). You can add cedar to that list, too. Cedar is the reason I’m not enthused about a number of Serge Lutens fragrances which are considered among his very best (Bois de Violette, Feminite de Bois). But these notes; vetiver, leather and cedar I just do not like. They don’t blend with my body chemistry; they stick out, smell awful and bother me.

One note I have a strange conundrum with is patchouli. I love the scent of patchouli. I crave patchouli, almost like I crave chocolate. I find patchouli to be warm, earthy, resinous, sweet, balsamic, multi-layered and just plain amazing. I could wear straight-up patchouli oil, if my mind would let me. In fact, I used to wear patchouli oils way back in the early 90’s when I was a kid going through a hippie phase. It was about ’90 or ’91 and I was, rather typical of a 19-20 year old, trying to figure myself by putting on various personae’s; so I dove into the whole hippie/love your mother/Grateful Dead scene for about 1 year. I wore a patchouli-rose oil purchased from Arsenic & OId Lace in Porter Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sometimes I wore straight patchouli oil and other times I mixed it with myrrh and frankincense. After about 10 months of being a hippie; wearing anklets and jewelry that jingled, long flowy bright skirts and not shaving my legs, I was quickly over the whole scene. The hippie thing was not for me. First of all, I couldn’t stand The Grateful Dead, it was a combination of the music and their scene (their followers) that drove me nuts. All those people living out of VW vans, following The Dead from show to show, cooking falafel, speaking with accents that were a mixture of California and Vermont (a unique twang all its own) and reeking of the obligatory patchouli and pot combination just got under my skin and made me want to don a conservative suit and go to Harvard B School.

So...to this day, when I smell patchouli I think of hippies and pot. My conundrum is that I love patchouli and so many patchouli prominent fragrances are fantastic. A few years ago, I think it was 2007; I was traveling with a colleague in his car to an offsite meeting. After being alone together in the car for about 5 minutes he asked if I was wearing patchouli. I was, indeed, wearing a patchouli-rich scent, it was Chanel Coromandel. This comment ruined Coromandel for me. I still absolutely love it to pieces, but I feel conspicuous when I wear it, like it signifies I’m hiding a grow room in the basement of my home. Since 2007 I don’t think I have worn any of my favorite patchouli scents in public. No more Coromandel, no Serge Lutens Borneo 1834, no il Profumo Patchouli Noir, no Keiko Mecheri Patchoulissime, no Tom Ford Purple Patchouli and no Prada (in the pink box).

I ask you: what’s a gal to do? If you like patchouli as much as I do, do you wear it often? Do you have any hang-ups about it? Do you think the public at large smells patchouli and thinks of hippies and pot? I would love to begin wearing all my favorite patchouli scents in public again, but I need some reassurance...or perhaps you agree and don’t wear patchouli to the office or in mixed company either. I love patchouli and I'm stumped.

Overrated: I Smell Hypocrisy

I've been called splenetic before.  I won't lie.

I had to look it up, and when I understood what the word meant, I didn't entirely disagree.  This might lead you to believe that I'm a mean, nasty guy who keeps to myself.  And of course I might be--mean and nasty.  But the truth is, I love reading and talking to other bloggers.  I love reading the various fragrance boards.  I belong to a few of the more popular communities--and even a secret society or two.  I've made many friends there, believe it or not.  Every day I visit these sites and forums and do my share of reading.  Often it feels like I'm at these places all day.  The windows seem always to be open somewhere on my mental screen, and the discourse wafts in and out of my consciousness.  It's a matter of record that we all routinely disagree there.  Mostly, we agree to.  I love knowing that the fragrance I love might be disliked by someone else.  I like reading what gets other people talking, even when I don't have much to say about it myself.

So what gets my goat, exactly--and where's it getting from?  I can't say.  Overrated praise for the subjects below is simply "in the air", wafting in and out of the screens--not just on blogs but in forums, boards, fragrance site customer reviews.  I don't pay tons of attention to the source.  I just smell the general stench of something fishy after a while.  The last time I wrote satire or, um, rather...angular...commentary, it was as though I'd slain a bunny in a field of dandelions.  Surely there's room for creative dissent?  Judging from our site's stats for that post, there is, and people secretly love to hate a strongly phrased, technically unpopular, opinion, believing themselves superior to someone's verbalization of things they'd secretly like to say themselves.  I suppose in this case Duchaufour will be the bunny and again I have a sharp weapon in hand.  So be it.  I like a conversation, and I enjoy saying what it seems I'm not supposed to say.  Like any community, online or off, we have our heroes and villains.  I often want to illuminate the underdog and scrutinize the hero.  Collective heroes tend to baffle me.  What makes these people or things so great?  Who died and made them king?  And to what extent is our appreciation of them socially contagious?

Lately, several heroes and trends have continued to rub me the wrong way.  Don't take it too personally.

Eternity: Cleaning Up The Eighties with Calvin

Christy Turlington, saddled with motherhood, daydreams of a night out at Studio 54

For a long time, I regarded Calvin Klein's Eternity as its own sort of stand alone monolithic entity.  In my mind, it sat on its own somewhere, out of context.  It was so all over the place during the time of its release and for several years afterward and was such a brilliantly art-directed phenomenon that it seemed more like a cultural attitude than a scent.  You smelled it everywhere, on everyone.  It seemed so definitively of its time, yet it wasn't anything particularly new (Tania Sanchez has remarked how closely it resembled an earlier Caron, which itself was pretty traditionally floral; a little stuffy, even) and in fact it essentially took an older form, the dowdy floral bouquet, and shoved it into the big shouldered stance so popular in the eighties.

Sophia Grojsman, the perfumer behind Eternity, was of course the go-to woman for this kind of treatment.  She'd done Paris, the quintessential neon floral, several years earlier, and excelled at pumping up the volume without sacrificing density.  Her fragrances of that time were loud without being shrill.  No one has really matched Grojsman in terms of radiance.  Her fragrances, especially the scents she created between the mid eighties and the mid nineties, were radiant to the point of radio-activity, translating the baroque intensity of classical perfumery represented by a fragrance like Bal a Versailles in a uniquely contemporary way.  A Grojsman fragrance took over the senses in a way very few eighties scents, as loud and bombastic as they were, managed to do.  They were powerful but because of their radiance felt buoyant rather than heavy.

Obsession, which came out in 1985, was really Calvin Klein's first massive success in fragrance.  Obsession was one of the heaviest of the heavies, as dark, deep and mysterious as Eternity was bright, buoyant and straightforward.  Even the ads for Obsession were dark: dimly lit scenes viewed through screens and colored filters.  Josie Borain was the perfect model for the Obsession campaign, and really the first sign of Klein's still unparalleled brilliance at creating powerful associative images and personas which brought his fragrances vividly to life in the imagination.  Borain was the athletic-to-the-point-of-boyish Calvin Klein consumer wandering into the exotic oriental territory of Obsession.  The ads depicted her sensual saturation in a nocturnal  world of hedonistic abandon, emphasis on random couplings and sweat.  Obsession was Klein's mass-market version of the often anonymous nightlife excesses popular among the early eighties Studio 54 celebrity demimonde.