As many of you already know, I am a shameless Annick Goutal Mandragore fangirl (actually, I’m pretty much an Annick Goutal fangirl).  Mandragore is one of the few fragrances I wear often enough that I have had to replace the bottle.  So news of the overseas release of Mandragore Pourpre, a flanker, had me all atwitter.  Having gotten my hands on a few precious ml, I’m reviewing it today.

Some people are meh on original Mandragore EDT – the most common complaint I think is its lack of tenacity.  Other people find it a bit urine-y, which I’m assuming is an unhappy result of the boxwood.  I bought my first bottle in Paris, having fallen deeply and totally in love with it, and thus have no complaints about the original whatsoever.  I believe at some point they released an EdP, which would in theory have lasted longer, that was reputed to smell pretty much like the EdT (they don’t always).  If anyone tried the EdP, please chime in.

Mandragore Pourpre’s notes are bergamot, mint, star anise, amber, rosemary, geranium, black pepper, patchouli leaf, myrtle, incense and heliotrope.   (For comparison purposes: the original EDT’s notes are bergamot, black pepper, ginger, spearmint, star anise, boxwood, and sage.)

The fragrances smell enough alike that my mind said Mandragore before I popped the cap off the sample vial.  If you loathed the original, I’m not sure you’re going to like this one.  The first significant difference is that Pourpre starts off richer and sweeter on me, although it’s still very much unisex.*  Gone is much of whatever it is at the top of the EDT that is screechy – quite pleasantly screechy to my nose, unpleasantly so to others.  I’m going to hazard a guess that if you think you might like Mandragore without that urine-y note, you might want to try this one.

Then we go through fifteen or twenty minutes where the anise is much more pronounced on my skin, and this phase I am less delighted with.  It’s not that I’m against anise; but anise is one of those notes that, on me, tends to take over a fragrance, to the detriment of almost anything else interesting that might be going on.  I have a couple of anise frags, thanks very much, and am not looking for more.

Then that goes away, leaving a base that is somewhat richer, rounder and deeper than the original, although rich and deep are pretty relative here – we’re not talking Serge Lutens.  I would describe it as a warmer fragrance than the original, more ambery incense.  It certainly smells less like the freshly-squeezed grapefruit that Mandragore has always made me think of, even though it’s not part of the notes.

How do I like it?  Well… I am not sure.  I tried very hard to think of it as its own separate fragrance, since I’m so fond of the original it seems likely that any flanker will come up wanting in my mind.  And I’ve failed on my original mission.  If the pissy-grapefruit part of the original were unpleasant to me, or if I wanted something less astringent, I think I’d like this very much.  As it is, I found myself longing for the sharp edges of the EDT.

When I first smelled Mandragore, it was on one of those bone-chilling February days in Paris when we kept ducking into shops just to thaw our faces on the way back to our hotel, which is how we’d wound up in the Goutal boutique on Place St Sulpice.  I was only trying things to be polite to the very nice sales associate.  Mandragore was one of the strangest things I’d ever smelled.  I thought it was a little ugly and utterly compelling.  I still go through odd little Mandragore attacks where I’ll be doing something and realize I need to drop everything, run upstairs and put some on.  It would be nice if everyone had a fragrance they felt that way about.

So I’ll stick with the original for now.  For those of you for whom the original was close, no cigar, maybe you’d like this one better?  I assume it’ll show up stateside eventually.  I believe you can get it, like the original, either in the femme round bottle or the big square bottle as shown.

*Unisex.  Clarifying: I am a huge supporter of the idea that everyone can wear any style of scent they like.  Regular readers know I am particularly fond of men wearing very “feminine” things like rose and tuberose scents, which I find wildly sexy.  Fragrance knows no gender boundaries as far as I’m concerned.  So when I use terms like masculine, feminine or unisex when talking about fragrance, I am in no way suggesting that those scents should be bought and applied based on stereotype.  I’m simply trying to convey in our imperfect scent-language how the fragrance feels to me in terms of traditional styles of perfumery.

March

Compound

by Loren Eiseley

Plant quiet like a seed within your heart
And let it grow and split that organ through.
Let the fierce root rive all such walls apart,
Let the dark flourish, let your words be few.
Out of the earth and dreaming in the sun
Though the years burgeon, it is well to know,
After the lightning and the wolves that run
In the tense mind, the quietude of snow.
Thirst, if you thirst, for all the elder things--
Lie with the worm against the forest's root.
Eat of the granite, plumb the deeper springs,
Burn with the acrid and the bitter soot
Packed in the puff ball. In that leathern cover
Taste the last taste: compound of life and lover.

March

I’ve removed it from under all of my fingernails, but it’s stuck, godammit, under my left thumbnail. The dirt. So when I’m dressed up smart, advising senior leaders in schools, there’s always a reminder of my basic scruffiness underneath; that I am, to some extent, pretending my workaday role, and what I really am about is rolling  in mud, fondling foliage. The calluses and blisters on my hands don’t diminish the picture, either.

And somehow, when I wear Nicolai’s New York, as much as I love it, this role-performing aspect of my identity seems highlighted and to the fore. That elegant mix of spice and warmth is too well cut, too debonair, for an essentially slovenly type like me, who prefers to shave twice a week and wear jeans with brown toned knees.

Patchouli Homme is cut from the same cloth as New York. Patchouli’s a dirt smell, I tell myself, yet here it’s the dirt in a belle epoque orchid house, where a gentleman with waxed moustaches and a slightly crumpled cream linen suit moves languidly from plant to plant, admiring a blossom here, removing a browning leaf there. He’s the type who can eat a croissant without a flake left on the plate, and whose cigarette holder – ostentatious in most cases – is exactly right for him. All in all, it’s just not me.

Opening with a rounded spiciness – cinnamon and bay according to the notes – this new perfume never becomes so male that it’s easily identifiable as such. There is a lavender warmth to begin with, but this never veers into chest-puffing braggadocchio qualities. The elegance is a patchouli tamed by floral notes – clearly rose, but there are other supporting facets there too. It’s slightly bitter, slightly green, pretty floral, a touch leathery and too complex for someone as inexpert as me to unpick. The overall effect is understated elegance, and it’s so reminiscent of… of… of… something I can’t yet name, that it haunts me. A chypre, I think. But I’ll never buy a bottle. It’ll make me fixate on the left thumbnail at all the wrong moments.

Lee

Today our fabulous Guest Poster Anita/Musette talks about her cool construction job, and her other construction work — layering perfumes!

A piece of angle iron.  Simple.

A 30´ container loader.  Complex.

But it starts with a piece of angle iron.  And a genius partner.  And some serious cojones if one is to translate that genius and angle iron into a 30´ container loader in 2 weeks.  We did it.  But it took a lot out of us.  18-hr days for 16 days means at the end of it all you hate everybody – and you want to smack the daylights out of somebody just to blow off some steam.  And it´s Delivery Day.  And there´s a 40mph crosswind.  Driving rain.  And a 70´ high bridge to get across.

That is NOT the time for Mitsouko.    On good days, Mitsouko is my BFF, armoring me so I can take my poor, frail psyche out into the world to try to sell a match or two.  On days like Container Delivery Day, Mitsouko is good for an assault charge!  On those days she not only gives permission for you to be a flaming, vicious shrike, she actually ENCOURAGES it!   I´ve said that before and you know it´s true.  But she´s supposed to be my go-to gal for difficult business days.  What to do?  Construct.

A little note here:  I am not, by nature, a customizer or layerer (layer-er?  Lay-erer?  Oh, forget it!).  I´m just a gal who likes perfume and whatever I spritz, as long as it doesn´t have the heave-y musk drydown, is pretty much okay with me (not you, Catagan – sorry!).  And Mitsouko is perfect Just the Way She Is.  Except When She Isn´t.

Enter Liz Zorn, another genius.  Miss Liz constructed an Historical (a Historical?  Oh, forget it) Chypre that is absolutely gorgeous!  Lush, bloomy/plumy (what is it about chypres that reminds me of plums?) – but a tad too soft for a workday, especially when that workday is at the tail-end of two of the most stressful weeks of my life.    Alone, neither of them quite worked and Jolie Madame made my nose itch (only because I was so damn tired – don´t beat me).    Together?  ZZZZZZZZZZIIIIING!  The Zorn HC softened Mitsouko´s normally-fabulous bladey edges and Mits shaved off a bit of the pillowy plumpness of the HC that was smothering me in downy softness.

Each of those scents is perfect and I adore them as they are- just as a piece of angle iron is perfect in and of itself – but construction (and a genius partner) makes for wonderful things.  That construction was a lucky fluke and it kept me going even when, after all the construction Drama, the blasted thing was too tall to get out of the shop! I will love that duo forever.

Another is my summer construction, which I never even thought about until now – I just always toss them together – I thought I loved Malle´s Bigarade Concentree. Until I bought a FB.  Damn you, Full Bottle!  Could it be JCE slipped in a little bit of that sweat note? – not exactly the thing I want to smell in 100o heat – but layered with a bit of Fresh Lemon Sugar…..(it´s a good thing JCE is still alive or he´d be spinning in his grave)…. Now that´s some good stuff right there!

So that´s my construction story for the day.  And the loader is in the hangar.  And my 18-hour days are done for awhile.   And I´m too whipped to write anymore (we´re doing process piping this week.  Mercy!).  So it´s your turn – and I know you all do it – what are your constructions (good and bad – oooh!  Tell the BAD ones, too, okay?)

Deputy dawgs!!!  Lo, behold, I, your lovely Sheriff, bring you… a threaded comment upgrade with the return of the emoticons!!!! As we say on the Posse, squeeeeeeeeee!!! So leave a comment even if you think my review is crap, just so you can say hi to Mr. Clown or Miss Pig etc. again!  Also there are gravatars (temporarily, anyway) and maybe I’ll even figure out how to use them!  Also, the loading time should be significantly improved, please comment if you notice a difference.

Nobody has ever accused me of being a neutral, dispassionate reviewer of perfumes.  So it amused me when poking around that I can find almost no blog reviews anywhere of Laura Mercier’s fragrances – because I figure that must mean lots of folks hate her gourmand scents as much as I do.   Those massively sweet things appeared on the scene (or at least on my radar) at about the time I was at my maximum gourmand-hatin’ self, before I came around a little to the idea.  I like vanilla, but I still don’t want to smell like a bakery item.  I admit I find them extra irritating because I consider Laura Mercier to be an adult-woman brand in terms of its often very nice makeup, so I would expect something more interesting and sophisticated from Mercier perfumes than Tarte au Citron and Almond Coconut … and kill.me.now, frankly.  These are the liquid handsoaps they stock the Bergdorf bathroom with, which I avoid like the plague, because you will never, ever wash away that smell.

But I remember liking last year’s Mercier limited edition Nuits Enchantées, which I sniffed once or twice in Nordstrom and then poof—it was gone.  The notes for that one, which was classified as an oriental, were mandarin, orange, cardamom, tuberose, ginger, guaiacwood, pimento, cedar, rose, sandalwood, amber, patchouli, musk, coffee, vanilla, vetiver and cedar.

Today’s review is their newest LE, Minuit Enchanté, which sounded good in Angela’s review on Now Smell This.  Cribbed from Nordstrom: “Laura Mercier Minuit Enchanté parfum, developed as a flanker to the original Nuit Enchantées EdP, evokes the deepest moment of night with deep incense and rare wood accords. Minuit Enchanté is a deeper, darker, more mysterious and more concentrated fragrance than the original Nuit Enchantées.“  The notes are somewhat similar to Nuits, here they are: juniper, mace, ginger, clove, pimento berry, rose, jasmine, tuberose, peach, vanilla, musk, labdanum, benzoin, amber, myrrh, guaiacwood, cedarwood, sandalwood, agarwood.  Please note that’s not a typo, it’s a 50ml bottle of parfum for $90.  When I sprayed it on, it left a sheen on my skin.

It’s lovely.  It starts off with a lot of vanilla and tuberose, and skated in the direction of Too Much for maybe five minutes, but pulled back pretty quickly with all the woods and spices.  Then there’s an interlude of about half an hour when it made me think of something like Shalimar, only a Shalimar I could get behind (actual Shalimar hates me.)  It had this dry thing going on top with the big, non-edible vanilla base that reminded me very much of the Shalimar Dichotomy.  Then we move on to eight or twelve (!) hours of my favorite part, the drydown, which is some excellent but not overpowering vanilla grounded by the last eight ingredients on that list of notes.   I know absolutely nothing about perfume quality in terms of material, but man, this thing!!!  The vanilla/woods/incense angle is spectacular.  Raspy in a great way, that raspy thing you get with sandalwood, cedar and oud, with some incense notes thrown in for good measure.  It reminded me a bit of both Annayake Miyako (which I find a hair too raspy on the wrong day) and Annayake Tsukimi, only Tsukimi is sweeter – I compared them.

I know of at least one person who tried this and loathed it, so I wouldn’t be buying it unsniffed.  But if you like Miyako, and/or the concept of vanilla/woods appeals, you might want to check it out.  Having gone back twice to sniff, I bought it.  I don’t know how truly “limited” this is, but Nuits is relatively hard to come by, and my Nordstrom was down to two bottles.

Mercier has a standing line of three other fragrances I’ve ignored – a Neroli that I find uninteresting and That Other One (Lune?)  But while I was there I sniffed the third, L’heure Magique, because it seemed related thematically to the LEs by name, if nothing else, and a sniff of the cap seemed reassuring.  I’d have guessed floriental.  It’s classified as a woody floral musk, released in 2001, notes are: spices, sandalwood, amber, musk, bergamot, rose and geranium.  No, no – don’t wander away bored!  Because I kept sniffing and sniffing and sniffing, trying to think of what L’heure Magique reminded me of, and call me crazy, but I don’t care what the notes say – it’s TEA.  Glorious, glorious tea!  Now, it’s not just tea – it’s more a floral tea.  But the more I sniffed it, the more taken with it I was, because a great tea can be so impossible.  They tend to skedaddle way before I want them to.  Give this scent ten or fifteen minutes for the citrusy top notes to blow off and I’m getting a strong, dark, not overly sweet tea with a little floral-musky filigree to keep it from being Bettie-one-note boring.

So now I want a bottle of L’heure Magique, and I’m tempted to buy one of those Nuits unsniffed on eBay.  And if I buy three bottles of stupid old Laura Mercier the week before I go to Sniffa I’m going to throw myself under a bus.   I know, I know – break out your tiniest violin.

March