Those of you who have read my thoughts on Vero Profumo’s Onda know I’m a fan of this perfume, perfumer and line.   Onda’s rich strange nod to Guerlain’s Djedi, while not being just a copy of that perfume – a new slant on how you get to Mars from Pluto - is brilliant.  She currently has two other scents out, Rubj and Kiki, and they could not be more different in feel than Onda.  Often I find perfumers tend to use the same notes or types of notes over and over because their feel for those notes or type of perfume is where they are most skilled. When a perfumer works with completely different notes on a type of perfume and does a beautiful job with each sketch, you can just color me impressed.  Vero Kern is definitely that perfumer.

Rubj is described as a rendezvous in Sheikh Nefzaoui´s “Perfumed garden,  Opulent & beguiling.”  Notes include Moroccan sweet orange blossom, Egyptian jasmine, and musk.  This goes on very, very orangey floral, and just about when you are thinking it’s only another sweet, almost fruity floral perfume, the interesting take on it shows up.  I know there are other notes in there, and I hope she chimes in and tells us what they are - I wish I had asked before. As the orange blossom and jasmine start to head off down the path to opulent floralland, it gets snatched to the ground and pummeled with a good dose of earthiness. I know there’s some musk that helps with the earthy feel and grounding, but something(s) else are at play that I can’t name as easily.  So while the notes sound like a simple white floral, there is a lot more going on with this that keeps me snuffling around it in the drydown. This turns out to be my least favorite of the three – I do like it very much, just not as well as the other two.  An unusual slant on the rich white floral.  The drydown on me doesn’t last overmuch   after an overnight, I take back the not lasting, it was just sleeping.  It stays an elegant white floral for hours and is just lovely.  I’m not sure this reacts on my skin like it might on someone else’s midway through. I’ll be interested to hear from others who have tried it.

 Kiki’s description is “an homage to the city of Paris and is meant to please confirmed individualists with French chic.”  Kiki’s notes include Lavender, powdery caramel, musk, and exotic fruits.  Reading those notes almost gave me hives.  Lavender… caramel…?! musk…!?!? fruit???!!!! What fresh hell…  And how can a perfumer who created the freakishly beautiful Onda do something that sounds as if Lavender sprigs will be buried in my candied apple?  Saying this a fruity perfume is just unso.  It is lavender, it is fruit, it is candy, with musk rolling around at the bottom of that odd little sack.  Have I mentioned that I don’t really like lavender notes in perfume?  Or caramel unless it is part of a Banana Caramel pie (ask for the recipe if you must know)?  Or that fruit notes normally don’t excite me?  My best description:  one of those weird desserts that they roll out to your table that your dining companion insisted on.  You are sitting there with your nose turned up at the very idea that you would like this, you like none of these things seprately and together is just revolting – they don’t even belong in the same bowl - but as you dig in, you find yourself realizing that lavender and caramel are a lovely contrast and why didn’t someone tell you how perfect they were together?  There is a facet to Kiki that smells similar to what you always think of as a candied fruit perfume, so it seems familiar, but the lavender is so expertly woven through that it never seems too sweet, and it distracts the nose, then it just trills off into some new area that is just lovely and fresh and completely charming as the musk adds a sensuous, deep sensuousness to it.    In the hands of a skilled perfumer, magic truly happens – the unthinkably perverse turns into cuddly nose porn.

I’m certain as the day is long that Kiki will absolutely not appeal to everyone, but I think those of you that are like me and rolled your eyes at the notes should give it a chance. This one is in regular rotation on me since I sniffed it. It fills me with happiness to wear it, and I would like all those folks out there making a fruity perfume to just sniff this so they can see what a fresh approach on an old standard should smell like.

These are available at the Vero Profumo website, $145 for 7.5 ml and $230 for 15 ml, pure parfums only.  She does have a nice size sample set of all three perfumes $20.

Time for a drawing!  Samples of all three of the Vero Profumo perfumes.  Just drop a note in comments if you would like your name put in the drawing!

Patty

To anyone who´s spent more than five minutes reading my blog posts, it must be screamingly obvious that I am, how you say, no trained professional. I do not possess the impartiality or the discernment of the chemist or master perfumer who is capable of dissecting some fragrance with enormous artistic merits that s/he may, personally, hate. You don´t read tons of posts on rose fragrances from me, because I don´t like rose scents, so what can I do? If I stumble across a rose fragrance I actually like, and I do occasionally, you hear about it (off the top of my head: I like a couple of Rosines, SL Rose de Nuit, that nasty Rose Poivree). If resident Hermes genius Jean-Claude Ellena worked anise and lavender into, miracle of miracles, something I love, you´d have heard about it. Sadly, he did not, and thus no post from me on Brin de Reglisse.

When I picked up the Teo Cabanel bottles at Henri Bendel, the name was familiar, but I had never tried any of the three scents. Picking through the scant information on their website leads me to understand that the original firm was founded in 1893, existed at least until the 1930s in Paris, and was reborn in 2003. There´s a section in there about using “only rich natural ingredients” that I will grit my teeth and resolutely ignore in the interests of focusing on the scents, one of which is “me” and the other two decidedly not.

Oha, the first scent I tried, is a dark, spicy rose. Notes of: roses from Bulgaria and Morocco, jasmine, cardamom, vanilla, iris, tonka bean, woods, white musk. To the extent that any of these get any coverage on the fragrance forums, I think this is the most popular, but sadly I am unable to wax poetically about its charms.

I picked up Julia next, because Julia happens to be the name of one of my daughters. The notes are mandarin, rhubarb, blackcurrant, jasmine, hyacinth and violet, sandalwood, incense, citrus, musk. Their website blurb says: “Julia is the perfume for every woman, for all occasions. It brings to mind a bouquet of impressionist flowers. Both voluptuous and subtle, Julia is made for vibrant women with a strong love and passion for life.”

With all due respect, this is wrong. Julia is the fragrance I want to give to a special girl, with all my love, on her 16^th birthday. It is delicately sweet; the impressionist flowers´ bit is spot-on, a seamless blend of jasmine and hyacinth, the rhubarb and blackcurrant freshly picked rather than jammy. The base notes are a tidy basket to carry the flowers in. Julia glows like dewy skin on high-school girls who are, of course, too young to appreciate their own beauty the way an older woman would. It evokes innocence on the verge of something more. There is nothing winking or jaded about it, but it is not childish. It is gentle, reflective. It would smell absurd on me; I am not that young girl anymore. It is a verging-on-womanhood fragrance, fresh as a new rose at dawn. It is lovely. It knocked me sideways.

Alahine, the last of the three, I can´t stop thinking about. Notes of ylang, bergamot, jasmine, Bulgarian rose, neroli, pepper, iris, cistus, patch, benzoin, vanilla, sandalwood, musk. I went by the store and sprayed this on three times, waffling between the parfum and the EdP. I´ve finally decided I like the EdP better. I am not generally a parfum girl, partly because I almost never struggle with strength and/or longevity in scents. Part of it is clearly my scent personality – in a general sense, I am drawn to the rougher edges of an EdP concentration the way some other people are clearly drawn to the seamlessness of an extrait. Anyway, Alahine can´t be described as rough in any way. It´s a mannered oriental. I´m afraid I don´t have a sample to retest, but I was charmed by Alahine´s transformation. It starts out with a ladylike floral note, a generalized citrus/jasmine/ylang, very classic and expensive smelling. It is Julia´s immaculate mother, thirty years older. From there Alahine only gets better as the pepper, iris and the naughty bits start to bloom, but it’s sexy in a subtle way, the woman in the corner of the room who catches your eye, and suddenly compared to her quiet chic everyone else looks a bit overdone.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get a little tired.  Tired of the hoopla, the 2007-harvest narcissus LE, the petals plucked by blind nuns at dawn, the newest sex-shop leather bump and grind.  I don’t believe any of the three Teo Cabanel scents is an old formula; I can’t speak to the quality of their ingredients.  But they have the feel of something I long for — a scent that began with a brief that started with the words, make me something beautiful.

image of Alahine parfum: shop.teo-cabanel.com

image of Olivia Hussey, who will always be Juliet to me, dvdtoile.com

March

I tried to write about perfume, honest, but other things got in the way.

On Saturday, we went out to have a meal with a couple of friends, chew the cud, the usual stuff. I’d been perky all day but found myself getting quieter and quieter as evening progressed. I seemed sad. There wasn’t any clear reason for this – nothing dramatic had happened earlier; I felt well; I like my friends very much. Everyone had noticed however, and I was an absence in the conversation, in spite of physically being there. Matt worked it out before I did.

Earlier, we’d briefly seen the news. I don’t know why the TV was on – we only go down to the tv room for an hour or so a day, and always after 8. Maybe we wanted to check the weather forecast (floods galore in the UK right now), and decided to do it the old-fashioned way; I can’t recall. But anyway, there we were. The news was the usual litany of despair and, though it always affects me, I’ve grown that 21st century carapace that we all wear nowadays to cope with the eerie dissonance between our own lives and what we’re so readily shown from the lives of others. The big story was the arrest of fourteen men in Barcelona for apparent terrorist plots.

It was an incidental that Matt so astutely spotted as the source of my melancholy. As the news anchor intoned over footage about the arrests, the images cut to CCTV of the 2004 Madrid bombings. We watched, without mediation, hordes of people rushing towards a stairwell leading off a train platform and what looked like two detonations occurring behind them. The figures disappeared into the flash and the smoke; it wasn’t clear whether these were amongst the 179 dead, or survivors. It looked fatal enough – whatever I mean by that – to me. The grainy footage, its absence of colour, the half-made forms running in panic, the unswerving unblinking frame except for its judder with the first explosion, vision obliterated by the blast, and then the sudden cut back to the studio…

The shock was on two levels. First, that such footage can be shown, so soon after an event now, only marginally contextualised, as though already historical document and magically impersonal: objective reportage. The second, that real deaths were here shown to the nation as a throwaway set of images on national tv. That’s all it freaking mattered. Not at all. The death of many = something to eat your supper to…

The first shock diminished relatively quickly – I’ve seen dead bodies dragged from buildings on national news broadcasts elsewhere (Spanish TV seems particularly gratuitous to my softer Anglo sensibilities), without forewarning (there’s an endearing tradition in the UK of the broadcaster normally announcing ‘Some viewers may find the following images disturbing’ before harrowing items), I’m not mawkish or squeamish, and I’m fairly savvy to the structure of news bulletins and the tabloid nature of such bulletins on commercial tv here in the UK. But I do tend to get my news on the radio a lot. Sometimes, I remember why.

The second shock lingered, and is still living with me. And it’s this that caused the silent sadness of Saturday night. Once Matt named it, I knew exactly how right he was. Aside from the the sense of wonder that comes from having a partner who knows me better than I know myself, this didn’t lift the gloom, though I could temporarily contain it. I felt freakish – a few million people will have watched that ‘incidental’ footage – how many will have felt it invade their thoughts and feelings, as it damn well should? I’m not claiming some exceptional throne for myself – Prince Embarrassment of Empathy; I’m just sayin’. Terrible, isn’t it? It made me think of this:

War Photograher

by Carol Ann Duffy

In his darkroom he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black-and-white
from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between bath and pre-lunch beers.
From aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns a living and they do not care.

On the journey home, we listened to Johnny Cash, “American IV: The Man Comes Around”. It seemed fitting, especially the wonder of a song that is his delivery of ‘I Hung My Head’. Sometimes, an old man with a deep voice and so few words can capture the fragility, the pressing beauty of life, more than anything else can. Alongside the terrible pain of its loss. I’ll let Johnny do the talking, laconically at least, for me, from now on.

Why am I posting this here? I’m sorry for the downer folks, but I’m taking advantage of the fact that the warmth I get from this website means so much to me. We’re a community drawn together by the ostensibly frivolous, but what strikes me most about everyone I’ve talked to here is the sense of joy and pleasure you all find in life, and the extent to which you all feel and live and love. And my, there’s something wonderful and profound and lovely in that. That pain I’ve felt since Saturday is a tiny glimpse at a dark world; y’all make me feel like I’m living somewhere bright.

Perfume next week. It’s a promise.

Lee

There are days when I don’t really want to be me… it is preferable to be some rich old woman done up with furs, sans the furs and money.  And that’s a day for Hermes 24, Faubourg parfum, First parfum or Patou 1000 parfum.  Other days I do want to blend in with who I am, gently scented, but completely me. That’s a day for Malle’s L’eau d’Hiver or Serge Lutens Encens et Lavande.  If I’m all up in my Marilyn Monroe, I want my Le Labo Aldehyde 44 or Chanel No. 5 parfum.  If I’m down with the sweats, Hermessence Osmanthe Yunnan or Prada Iris Infusion will trail me that day.  There are a thousand facets to who I am, and every day the light hits this diamond a new way, and no one scent can express all of the people I am, was or want to become… so I’ll be needing a lot of scents to keep me happy.

My hope is that the perfume industry will read Burr’s book and not take away from it that they all need to make Kelly Caleche, but I hope they realize there is a wide world of customers that like to smell lots of different ways on about every day of the month, and if they make something beautiful and/or unusual from good materials, it will find an audience.  

For consumers, my hope is that you would all stop buying crap!  For the love of all that’s smelly, don’t encourage them making perfumes with no originality and smelling like cheap scented soap. If you keep buying it, they’ll keep throwing it out on our department store counters, and we all suffer for it.  Yes, I said suffer, because it’s wafting out there and invading my nose and my pores, and whenver people complain about perfume in the workplace, I can assure you they are not complaining about my smooth as silk, though cantankerous, darling Diorling. They are complaining about those overamped molecules that are trying to cover up cheap rose/iris/violet/pink pepper/purple passion grapefruit.

Mostly, I need interesting perfumes to write about. If you keep sending another Chloe, Elle, Midnight Poison, or Britney No. 57 out there, all I get to write about is… bleah, another cheap fruity floral. I’d far rather explain why someone might want to smell like Barbie Doll Sex or Lavender backstroking in your Cheerios than to just throw up my hands and try to review Paris Hilton Can’tSayNo with a straight face. 

Perfume is not going to solve world peace or hunger, and it is a luxury item we don’t need, but all things being sorta equal, I’d just as soon my part of the world smelled great, thanks. 

Okay, I’m done. It’s open mic, y’all can insert your favorite perfume rant in comments.

Patty

Chandler Burr is the sort of guy I´d want to sit next to at a dinner party – full of funny stories and interesting facts and insider information. I wouldn´t necessarily want to be his roommate; my guess is he travels a lot, and we´d end up arguing about whose turn it was to deal with the landlord and who ran up a huge bill calling Bolivia on the home phone. (I´m maybe not Chandler Burr´s ideal roommate either, what with my husband and kids.) Burr´s also missing a little of the self-edit mode when he talks, so he can be pretty impolitic, which of course makes him even more fun to listen to.

Having met the man and been given a copy of his recent book, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York, I started reading it on the trip home from New York and worked through it in the last week or so.

If I were reviewing Burr´s book like I write about a perfume, maybe I´d talk about the interesting contrasts in the composition. Burr is the first person to tell you (in fact, he did tell us) that he´s by training and interest an economics and science writer who fell into the perfume thing through a series of events, not that he´s complaining. The point being: he´s not a massive perfume freak, and in my opinion that distance gives him an interesting perspective from which to write.

The Perfect Scent is full of statistics and for-the-layman explanations of things as various as gas chromatography, perfume marketing and sales structures, and the chemistry and formulation of absolutes. It´s the sort of heavy lifting I´d expect from someone with a background writing for respected magazines like The Atlantic, but I never felt Burr was larding his text with numbers just for show. At the same time, he shares intimate, lovely details from inside the world of perfumers – who can resist the story of Jean-Claude Ellena coming home with the scents requested by his children, from sweaty socks to Madeline cookies, the smell of a cloud, of snow? Burr also details the wonderful story behind Ellena´s creation of a scent based on the teas of Mariage Freres, which after several unexpected plot twists became Bulgari´s blockbuster The Vert.

The book follows two perfume stories – the making of Hermes´ Un Jardin Sur le Nil and Coty´s scent, Lovely, for Sarah Jessica Parker. In the broadest sense it´s a portrait of the modern perfume industry, and while many of the personal stories are funny, it´s here that Burr really aims his weapon and fires. (I´d be interested what percentage of the off-the-record folks in the book recognize their thinly disguised, unflattering portraits and call him up to complain). As someone who, in the best amateur tradition, sniffs a lot of perfume, I´m aware of the dismaying attempts by corporations to make new fragrances generically appealing in a hope to sell them by the truckload, and the sheer number of new releases now is ridiculous. But Burr spells out all the machinations behind the scenes that would disgust anyone with a feeling for perfume (and hence what´s being lost in the mass-market-driven approach). We´re in a situation now where the portion of money spent on the juice in the bottle, as opposed to the marketing and packaging of that perfume, is akin to watching the perfumers commissioned with the job digging around under the couch cushions scrounging for change. Whole lists of ingredients are off the table (too expensive) before the scent creation even begins, leaving the perfumers with, as Burr says only half-jokingly in his book, “Iso-E-Super and some cheap Indian rose essence” to work with. The enormous reduction in the per-kilo price of the ingredients in the perfumers´ budgets was one particularly depressing part of the book. Another interesting, depressing aside: given the way so many consumers now hurriedly select fragrance (off the top notes sprayed on a paper blotter), perfumers are pushed to create scents with top notes that perform appealingly on paper, never mind that they won´t be worn that way once the consumer takes the bottle home.

I understand fragrance companies at the end of the day would like to make some money. But the way they´re going about it seems mighty strange to me. Burr also touches the Third Rail of Perfumery (actually, he kicks it over and over and over, and it doesn´t seem to have killed him) by completely exploding the marketing myth that The Brand Magnate (Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren) is the architect of the fragrance. Another section of the book dear to my heart is his discussion of another verboten topic, the use of synthetics in perfumery, a topic most perfume houses would rather not come clean about because they would like you, the consumer, to continue to labor under the illusion that their high-end fragrances are “natural” — which they most decidedly are not. If I had a dollar for every SA who has falsely touted the all-natural ingredients in whatever fragrance they are shilling, I could buy myself a bottle of (beautiful, synthetic) Mitsouko parfum, or possibly some (stunning, synthetic) Chanel No. 5. Burr does a convincing job of articulating how synthetics in perfumery have given us some of our finest fragrances and are in some cases, such as sandalwood, can be the more environmentally “correct” choice.

Should you read this book? Well, how interested are you in the story behind two divergent scents from two wildly different houses with two different agendas? I´m not a scientist, and I have a greater-than-average interest in the various types of levers that get moved to create a perfume. The story is leavened with more than a sprinkling of gossipy anecdotes and charming vignettes. For me, then, the book´s just about perfect. It´s not dull, and if you want to skip back and forth between the two stories of Sur le Nil and SJP (which is how Burr writes it anyway) you can jump forward pretty easily and then go back and catch up. I´d recommend it for people outside the industry who´d like a clearer idea of how a fragrance is developed, warts and all, told in Burr’s sly, observant, not-particularly-diplomatic style.

March