I would include Ormonde Jayne on the short list of must-smells for any budding perfumista.  They’re interesting and different and often quite lovely.  You don’t run across them everywhere, so it can be a bit of a challenge, but they have one of the best sample deals going, in my opinion – 35 pounds for a sample pack of all their perfumes, here’s a link, the sample set’s at the bottom of the page.  I also like sniffing a new house that way, because then you can cross-reference and get a feel for their style.

I was a little late to the OJ party.  Ormonde Woman can take some getting used to, and several of the fragrances are pretty dense, although Ta’if is a saffron-rose that even I the rose-hater can get behind.   Any number of people are fans of the lighter/linear floral scents – Frangipani, Sampaquita, Osmanthus, and the ethereally lovely Champaca, with its notes of champaca flower, basmati rice and green tea, which is probably the one I’d ask for if a friend offered me anything I wanted from the line.   To my nose, the denser fragrances share an aesthetic, if not an actual base, that approaches an OJ signature.

The newest Ormonde Jayne, Tiare, has notes of mandarin, orange flower, Sicilian lime, Tiare (Tahitian gardenia), freesia, water lilies, jasmine, orris, ylang, cedar, vetiver, sandalwood, patchouli, moss and musk.

One of the fun things about perfumage is you can read the marketing materials and the notes and discover that – whammo! – whatever preconceived notions you had about the scent ate completely wrong.  This was one of those times.  I was expecting Tiare to fall in the lighter-floral-simpler (which is not to suggest uninteresting) camp of Frangipani, Osmanthus, etc., and indeed it’s grouped with them on the OJ website.  I also – sue me – was imagining some sort of tropical vibe, which I guess is a result of being subliminally influenced by the last 85 things that said “Tiare” on the label, which is somebody’s shorthand for “tanning oil.”

Tiare falls right between the heavier, rich OJs and the lighter ones.  But the most surprising aspect to me, which is there right from the top, is the mossy, musky base.  While Tiare develops along its own lines, it invokes scents like Estee Lauder Jasmine White Moss along the way.

In their marketing materials emphasis is made on the transition from the citrusy top to the tiare, so I was expecting the top notes, which are, indeed, quite citrusy.  Then we go through a slightly sweeter floral interlude that carries a faint echo of fruit for me, I’m not sure why – maybe it’s the citrusy top meeting up in that moment with the florals.  It’s not especially sweet, but there’s something a bit jarring about the transition, at least on my skin.  By the way (admitting ignorance here) I’m not sure whether Tahitian gardenia is supposed to smell like the gardenia we’re all familiar with, but you won’t find any of the ripeness/mushroomy/cheesy bits that some of us love in other gardenia frags.

It isn’t until well into the drydown that Tiare begins to take on some of an Ormonde Jayne feel.  As the citrus notes fade and the sandalwood, cedar and musk emerge, the entire pitch of the fragrance creeps in the direction of the woody-herbal astringency of Woman, although never becoming as deep or as strangely compelling as the latter.

While browsing other OJ reviews in contemplating this one, I ran across the following (in a review of Champaca), from Robin on Now Smell This:  “One of the things I adore about the Ormonde Jayne line, and Champaca is no exception, is that while the fragrances are composed of modern materials, the individual notes maintain an old-fashioned, pre-aldehydic kind of distinctness. These are perfumes for people who really like to smell things, and they don’t appear to have been influenced by modern test marketing practices.”

First off, I couldn’t agree with Robin’s sentiments more.  Which brings me in a roundabout way to my persistent, nagging, possibly completely unfair unhappiness with this fragrance.  This is the first time I have ever smelled an OJ and had it immediately remind me of something else – and not just a particular perfume(s) but an entire trend.  We’ve been cross-blog joking already that perfume houses must be bustin’ out their post-IFRA new chemistry-set faux-mosses now that oakmoss has been blacklisted.  Off the top of my head, Tiare is somewhat similar to the EL Jasmine White Moss, Miyake A Scent, and Cristalle/Eau Verte.  Okay, three perfumes is hardly a glut, and I’d rather have that than another gourmand, or fruitchouli.  But still.  OJs in the past have reminded me of nothing except what a freaking genius I think Linda Pilkington is.  I dug out some random samples to resniff while preparing this post.  While smelling Woman for the umpteenth time I am still struck by how compelling and original it is, and Ta’if is gorgeous and vibrant rather than cloying, as it might have been.

So … this one I am not entirely loving, although I think it’s beautifully done and the lasting power is excellent.  However, I am also not the queen of the mossy greens, and I’d certainly say that fans of Cristalle and the Estee would want to smell this.

March

Ok, here´s what´s been going on since I last posted: I am working on a brand new HP Pavilion laptop (a MAC Book was a bit too pricey for me right now), with Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2007. Little did I know that Word was going to flummox the crap out of me. If you can, stick with your version of Word even if it is the moldy oldy one from 2003; this one has me wanting to fling this very impressive piece of electronic machinery out a window. Fortunately, I am in the basement.

Yesterday, I took my uncle to a doctor´s appointment at one of the area hospitals, and while we sat alone in the waiting area, I miraculously spied the December 2009 issue of Flare, one of Canada´s fashion magazines.  A current magazine in a physician´s waiting room? Why yes, it was nestled in amongst issues from 2007! Further perusal of the publication (the cover of which is graced by a rather frightening picture of Lady Gaga) yielded an article titled, “30 Years of Iconic Fragrances”.  Just as I was about to tuck into this essay, the doctor poked her head into the room and invited us into her office.  Without giving it a second thought, I rolled up the magazine and shoved it in my purse. Mind you, this copy does not have a mailing label affixed to it, so really, anyone could have left it there.  I swiped it; just like I once swiped a sizeable cardboard Mike´s Hard Lemonade promotional sign from an East York Toronto casual dining establishment, and two rather impressive etched beer glasses from a Boston Pizza, the location of which I will not share. You know how when you´re in a place that is unfamiliar or possibly foreign to you, you sometimes take leave of your senses and do things you would never normally consider? Needless to say, I have to remember that I live here now!

The opening paragraph of the essay quotes Karl Lagerfeld: “The reflection of an era happens in a fragrance,” he once said.  The more I think about this, the more I realize this statement is spot on. The essay cites Charlie as the late 70s feminist-career girl-independent-strong single woman scent, Yves Saint Laurent´s Opium as the Studio 54-sexy-party girl scent, Giorgio Beverly Hills as the inaugural big 80s, you want to kill the woman standing next to you in the elevator who poured a whole bottle of it over her head, scent. And then there´s Angel, which needs no editorializing whatsoever. From there it is CK One, which firmly cemented the fragrance barrier between my generation and the Gen X-ers. What era are we in presently? The celebu-scent one, of course. And for us “hardcore perfume connoisseurs” there are the “luxe scents getting luxer”, with their maddeningly limited distribution and wallet-busting price tags.  I don´t think I need to explain that one, either.  In the end, this article didn´t tell me anything that, as a perfumista, I didn´t already know.  But, I hang my head somewhat sheepishly and give you my solemn promise that I will try my best to refrain from swiping any more magazines from waiting rooms.

On to the scent at hand: Ricci Ricci by Nina Ricci. I´m not a big fan of the moniker, but here again we have a bottle that is just too damn cute and a scent that is, well…middling at best. What piqued my curiosity was the fact that rhubarb is one of the notes. There are just not enough rhubarb fragrances out there, and I say that in all seriousness.  I love rhubarb. Put me in a room alone with a rhubarb pie and guess who will emerge victorious? Give me a fragrance with rhubarb in it and reduce me to tears.  It just never seems to play well with others. Here´s a suggestion: make a scent that smells like a rhubarb pie: add strawberries, flakey pie crust, vanilla ice cream, a generous dollop of whipped cream, and bottle it. I´ll be first in line for a case.

Ricci Ricci is not a bad scent; it does, however, fall into the fruit and patchouli camp that a lot of scents seem to be in lately. That trend was born with Angel; it is still alive and well and gift-boxed for the holidays at your local department store. Along with rhubarb, Ricci Ricci lists bergamot, Belle de Nuit flower, Centifolia rose, tuberose, sandalwood and patchouli as its notes. The tang of the rhubarb cuts through the flowers, giving Ricci Ricci an appealing tartness, but the patchouli kind of kills it for me. If there was just a minuscule drop of vanilla or tonka bean in it, I´d have my rhubarb pie in a bottle. Without that sweetness, it´s just another doppelganger adrift in the fragrance zeitgeist.

If you happen to be a fan of fruit and patchouli, I have an adorable little Ricci Ricci mini to give away. The Bay seems to have a never-ending supply of minis in their fragrance department. The fact that I´ve sucked up to a couple of really sweet SAs has been lucrative so far. So, if you´re interested, Lily will do the honours once again.  Her snacks of choice are now Lays Ketchup potato chips and Nativa Organics mini chocolate chip cookies from Shoppers Drug Mart.

I’m in love with a 4-inch glass cup full of wax that permeates my house with roasted chestnuts on a plume of light vanilla, which just renders that toasty nut smell slightly milky.

One of the Diptyque limited edition holiday candles, Marons Grille (roasted chestnuts) may force me to beg them desperately to keep making them or I’m faced with buying about 20 of them just to have around. Surely everyone will understand the reason for no Christmas this year?

I’ve never though Diptyque had great throw on candles, but this is decent, mostlly because it is soft and needs to stay soft, so the lighter throw works.  It had everyone coming into the house asking what that smell was.

I also got the Benzoin one, but I can’t tell you much about it except it smells rich and all incensey right out of the box. I’ve been too busy  with my roasting chestnuts to pay it much mind.  I do promise to get to it eventually!

Now, the price tag is $68 at Beautyhabit, but if you use the code instyle, you’ll get 20% off, so that makes it a bit more reasonable’ish?  Well, not really, but it doesn’t cost so much, at least.

That’s it that’s all I’ve got today.  Life intervened, but please feel free to use comments to talk about whatever you like!  Favorite holiday candle, smell, whatever!  Roasted chestnuts and cinnamon and clove are mine.  Pretty traditional there.

Patty

Prada Infusion d’Iris was an interesting fragrance turnaround for me.  I spent weeks (months?) after it was released grumbling that I couldn’t smell it.  It was a faint, tepid thing that barely qualified as fragrance.  Every now and again, however, I’d get a tantalizing whiff of it, and the raves of others were enough to get me to keep trying.  At one point I discovered I could smell the (very nice) body lotion, and shortly thereafter all the pieces fell into place.  It’s a popular scent in my conservative city, judging by the regular whiffs I catch of it on people nearby – in elevators, on the subway.  It strikes me as the sort of scent you could get away with wearing in almost any but the most strict no-frag zones.  I still think I can smell it better on other folks than on myself, but I wear it pretty regularly in the summer, and/or at times when I need something clean and stealthy.  It’s a fragrance that I keep winding up with sample vials of, somehow, so I still haven’t bought any.  But if the sample supply dries up indefinitely, I’d probably end up with at least a decant, or maybe I’d go ahead and fork over for the pretty bottle.  I like Infusion d’Iris a lot.

Having lived the dream once with Prada Infusion d’Iris, I was prepared for the shenanigans of Prada’s new release, L´Eau Ambrée.  Sure enough, the first time I smelled it – at the end of an intense sniffage session with a group of gals – I couldn’t smell a thing, and they mostly couldn’t either.   I wound up with a sample so I could keep playing when my nose wasn’t already assailed with other things.

I keep renaming this scent Infusion d’Ambre in my head – it’s just about as light as Iris, maybe a bit stronger (notes: citron, May rose, gardenia, patchouli, opoponax, vanilla).  It’s a different smell, although it takes a pretty good soaking to pick the differences out — it’s both a tad sweeter and more powdery than Iris.  Like the Iris, it has the same interesting stealth effect, at least to me.  It dries down and fades away but has a habit of popping up again and again, all day long.  Also like Iris, for something that wears lightly it has excellent lasting power.  It’s not wildly “amber” in that it’s missing the cloying liquid sweetness of many modern ambers, and it’s not particularly feminine.  Do I like it as much as Iris?  Personally, no.  Infusion d’Iris has a subtle, bitter, rooty/arid strangeness that I find compelling.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if most people smelling them side by side preferred the drydown of L´Eau Ambrée.

L´Eau Ambrée is in the regular Prada oblong rectangle bottle, which is fine but nowhere near as pretty as the tall Infusion bottle, in my opinion.  I vastly prefer L´Eau Ambrée to Infusion de Fleur d´Oranger, which looked gorgeous but which I found unbearably soapy and bitter (no offense to its fans) and which – after a big rollout – seems to have disappeared from my local Nordstrom, making me think that I’m not the only one who didn’t love it (and I mostly love orange scents.)

If you’ve tried this I’d love to know what you think, especially if you have much in the way of feelings about the other Prada scents.

March

I have a small amount of whining to unburden myself of before I move into perfume and, of course, a request for advice.  Because I have no idea what I’d do if I couldn’t ask you guys to tell me all the things I don’t know. Have I ever told you how much I love y’all for that?  Well, I do.  Mwah, xo!

I’ve been doing yoga and spin for a year or so – running I did up until a couple of months ago, needing to give a hip that won’t heal a break -  not always faithfully, though regularly.  It seemed like a good idea to get a jumpstart on preventing Old Man Winter’s Pound Piling Factory, so I enrolled in a boot camp at a yoga studio, thinking that it may be yoga – wrong! The boot camp is great, except for it being at 6a in the morning and it is circuit training  and weight lifting.  Have I ever mentioned how much I hate weight lifting?  Just slightly more than cornmeal mush, which is a lot.

But can we discuss soreness?  They suggested we take a yoga class in the afternoons on every day of boot camp to ease the ache.  All I can say is, I wonder if I would be able to walk right now if I hadn’t made that yoga class at noon. I ache all over. I don’t get it. I’m reasonably active, yoga 2-3 times a week, sometimes more, spin 1-2 times a week, I walk.  Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of muscles I haven’t been using enough, and every one of them are telling me about it in detail right now.

So ideas for easing the ache, and is the other yoga class every day a good idea?

One other thing, do I need to go see Coco Before Chanel?  I’m thinking yes.  I almost went today, but didn’t want to walk around the movie theater in a hobble.

Chrisopher Brosius has a couple of new creations this fall - AmBrosius and M #4 A Room with a View.

AmBrosius is made up of amber resins, labdanum absolute, cistus resin, Benzoin, Black Pepper and Spices.  This is seriously yummy amber incense.  The open is really sharp and just a smidge scary. The cistus is pretty overwhelming on the open, but if you give it a couple of minutes, you get a beautiful infusion of the smokier incense feel and amber.  It dries down beautifully into a soft, smoky amber, slightly sweetly spiced.  Amber is not something I wear easily, but this one is perfect in balancing with the incense notes.

M#4 A Room With a View is based on the E.M. Forster novel.  From CB’s site, it is described as “This perfume captures the scent of the hills above Florence – the vineyards, the wild grass, the finocchio, the hot dusty Florentine earth.  And of course a torrent of Violets…”  That pretty much nails it.  It is an earthy grassfest with violets peeping up and cascading out of every nook and cranny, and the longer it is on, the more the violets invade your senses nestling in a bed of hay. In simpler terms, think Black March, the Hay accord merged with one of CB’s violet scents.  If you’re not fond of the earth or grass (I’m getting hay as the grass) accords that CB does, you’re probably not going to like this either, unless the violet wins you over after the first 30-45 inut3es.  If you’re a big fan of those scents of CB’s, like I am, you’ll adore this. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one, but it’s better than the sum of its parts. I like Black March, the Hay accord and Violet empire  separately a lot, but putting them all together with a couple of other things is genius.

Beautifully done, Christopher.

Patty