Excuse all typos, it’s late, I’ve had dinner/champagne/wine. While not anywhere near circling the intoxication drain, I’m just tired and very relaxed.

Probably one of the highlights of any trip to Paris is getting together with Denyse from Grain de Musc and just catching up with her and sniffing all the things she’s gotten her hands on that aren’t in stores yet.

So just to make sure I”m a complete Smell-tease.  Keep an eye out for a completely great Duchafour scent from L’Artisan in the late spring.  Can’t say anything beyond that, but it’s love for me that almost turned into undignified begging to get more.

Sniffed the new Parfumerie Generale.  It starts out as a very sharpish green scent that dries down to into a softening of its edges.  Denyse pegged it to Estee Lauder Private Collection-esque. I’d agree with that, but without all the really perfumey aspects you get with Lauder perfumes.

Vero Kern is also making EDPs of her three scents.  If you’ve ever smelled the Djedi-inspried Onda, you know it’s a parfum that you have to make a full day or two’s commitment to when you wear it.  I’m not sure the EDP of it requires much less of a commitment, but she changed it in some interesting ways that make it, for me, a lot more wearable.  I still would have to intentionally put it on and know we were going to be circling each other for 24-48 hours, but the new elements add a warmth to it.  Well, you’ll see. She did a similarly great job with Kiki and Rubj in the Edp. I don’t know what the price point will be ont hese, but they will be at Luckyscent for sure when they are ready, and the edp conversions should lower the pricing enough that y’all can Onda-up as you wish without losing the beautiful weirdness of all of her perfumes.

Lastly, but not leastly – Dior has added another to that line that we can’t seem to find anywhere except in Europe or the occasional Dior boutique or maybe Neiman-Marcus, and when you can, it’s in those monstrous bottles, Ambre Nuit. Notes are listed as bergamot, Turkish rose, cistus Labdanum, and oriental and amber accents.   This is all ambery incensey goodness, with some little spicy thing running around in the background.  It has the charm of that spice note in Iris Silver Mist, but the two scents are nothing alike.  Why are they calling it a cologne mystifies me.  Whatever bergamot you get on the open is quickly shoved aside by a much more interesting perfume.  Longevity -  I dabbed a spot on about 6 hours ago, and it is just humming along, mellowing out from a pretty vigorous amber perfume to this very muted, skin-hugging , velvety smooth, warm, rich concoction.  Now, word of warning, Denyse hated this, so there may be a chemical in there you could be sensitive too. I thought I might be sensitive to it as well, and on the open, it veered off into that alcohol area that warns me I’m not smelling something accurately, but then it pulled back and just went into gorgeous.

So why is it that that whole series that Dior does, Bois d’Argent, Eau Noire and Cologne Blanche (? is that it ?) are probably the best things they’ve done in years, and they seriously hide them. Not even an exclusivity thing, they just don’t distribute it, whereas you can smell every other non-original thing they’ve done in every shop up and down the Champs.  It remains a mystery to me.

Dear Dior, repackage these great scents you keep in the Dior Basement in cute packaging and roll them out in some exclusive way like Cartier and Van Cleef did, but add a couple of slightly more feminine scents to it.  Stop making Dior Forever and Ever, which is a perfectly nice scent, but is that really what you want people saying about your perfumes?  Nice, but dumb. And then go make me some more Diorling parfum in China or somewhere where they don’t care what you put in your perfumes.   xoxo – Patty

Here, you can write  quick  note to the perfume house that’s jumping up and down on your last nerve with some helpful advice in the comments.

Tomorrow (today) is my always wonderful lunch at the Musee D’Orsay, probably a trip to the Rodin museum, quick run by Colette, Bon Marche because, well, it always has to be done, and a nice dinner down the street.

Patty

When I did my post a couple weeks ago on swag, someone commented that it was obvious we weren’t corporate shills because if we were, there’d be a lot more reviews of mass-market celebrity-type fragrances.  Which struck fear into my heart, because what if my handlers at Proctor & Gamble realize I haven’t been reviewing that stuff?!?   They might come to my house and take back the Rolls Royce and the pool boy!  And we can’t have that, can we?  So here are my addled musings on some new mass-market celebrity scents (including a nice surprise or two) — reviews made even cheesier by the fact that I am basing one of these on a magazine scent strip.  Yeah, baby!  Always searching for new ways to lower my standards!

There I was, minding my business, all curled up with a bowl of caramel popcorn and the latest issue of Glamour, when I espied the ad for Sarah Jessica Parker’s new scent, SJP NYC. And my first thought was, here it is!  This is it!  This is the fragrance, the cool fragrance, the one she wanted to release that was based on CdG Avignon + some sort of musk oil blah blah but they said it won’t be commercial enough so she did SJP Lovely instead.  Followed by Covet, about which … well, the less said the better, but you couldn’t accuse it of being a shameless pandering to popular tastes.

SJP NYC is that shameless pandering to popular tastes, however.  The bottle looks like the tawdry spawn of Ed Hardy and the D&G animal-print Man/Woman bottles.  And the fragrance, as sniffed out by my discerning nose?  The consummate insipid fruity floral.  Notes are: mandarin, white osmanthus, wild strawberries, gardenia, honeysuckle, mimosa, red Damascena rose, vanilla absolute, sandalwood, rum and creamy musk.  I have one word: strawberries.  Ugh.  Nobody’s gonna build the Taj Mahal out of strawberries.  To be fair, five minutes of research online reveals that this is some sort of Sex and the City tie-in fragrance, so it’s meant to be insipid – er, youthful and fun.  SJP, you disappoint.  Maybe you could take some of the gazillions of dollars you’ll earn from this scent and do the interesting one next time.

I was still cross about SJP when, a few pages later, I ran across – wait for it – the new celebrity scent by Kim Kardashian!  Famous for … I have no idea what, being a fame whore?  Sisters Kourtney and Khloe?  I’m ashamed I know their names.  I asked 15-year-old Diva about Kim and she said, “she’s the genius.”  I am not sure what she meant by that.  Perhaps she was being sarcastic.

But look at that ad up top.  You know what?  I LOVE that ad.  No, seriously.  It’s all retro-fabulous (those lips! those nails!), she looks pretty, her bits are covered, I see no giant, ugly tattoos, she doesn’t weigh 82 lbs., and I love that bathing suit (lingerie?)   I knew my kind thoughts were going to come crashing down when I smelled the scent strip, so I ripped it open and smeared it on my wrist and … okay, fine, Kim Kardashian, you are messing with my mind, because I like it.  I really do.

Notes for Kim Kardashian via Sephora are mandarin, honeysuckle, orange blossom, jasmine, tuberose, sensual spice, lush gardenia, jacaranda wood, tonka bean, vanilla orchid, musk, creamy sandalwood.  As the notes would indicate this is a rich white floral, musky/woody rather than sharp.  I get mostly creamy tuberose, a touch of orange blossom and a clean gardenia on a light musky/woody base.  It’s sexy and heady at first and kind of man-candy-ish, assuming your man doesn’t want you to smell like a sugar cookie.  It’s not fruity, fresh or gourmand (yay!), and I thought the drydown, which is where some mass-market fragrances completely fall apart, was still decent – woody tuberose and a spicy vanilla musk.  Even the girls liked it, which surprised me.  I didn’t buy a bottle, but I’d wear it.   Okay, okay, it ain’t Fracas (what is?) but for me it’s a manageable tuberose that doesn’t threaten to smother me.  I wouldn’t necessarily wear it to work in a regular office job, but it’d be a fine going-out (or staying-in) scent.

I went to two Sephoras looking for Kim Kardashian – the one at the mall and the fancypants one smack-dab in the middle of our snooty local retail area.  I wish I had a photo of the face of the sweet young man at Snooty Sephora when I told him they were getting it in.  Poor guy probably went in the back after I left and sobbed into his hankie.

For those of you reading this who think either a) I must have fallen and bumped my head or b) the blog’s been hijacked, CHECK IT:  When I went to the online Sephora reviews of Kim Kardashian, the lowest (one-star) reviews consistently use descriptors of this scent like OLD-LADYish, or TOO STRONG, or SOMETHING MY GRANDMA WOULD WEAR.   Ding ding ding!!!!   The sure sign of a (potential) winner!    Several Sephora reviewers mentioned White Shoulders by way of comparison, and the notes look right, although I can’t remember the smell of White Shoulders at all, except to say that (like everything else) I think it used to smell infinitely better in the 1950s than whatever they’re selling in the drugstore right now, next to the execrable current version of Emeraude.  Any opinions on that?

While at the mall looking for Kim Kardashian … (cue the music from Jaws) I tried the new Beyoncé fragrance, Heat.  Notes are vanilla orchid, magnolia, neroli, peach, honeysuckle nectar, almond macaroon, musk, sequoia milkwood (?), tonka bean and amber.  I have a soft spot for Miss B, her body is slammin’, I love her in spite of her hideous clothing line, House of Deréon, which I always mis-remember as House of Derriere, although I think that’s in a song of hers so it’s not all my fault.

I squirted it on my hand and inhaled.  Heat is … well, it’s … it’s … it’s … okay, imagine yourself in a perfumery course, which I have never done.  And in this perfumery course the instructor whips out a small vial of civet, or castoreum, for everyone to smell and says, well, yes, it’s terrible – but you just use a drop of that to add sexy interest to the base of another, much more complicated fragrance.  Heat smells like a thin veneer of canned peaches in syrup over the most powerful, intensely animalic stank of unwashed ladyparts that I have ever smelled in a perfume, and I don’t mean that in a good way.  It doesn’t even smell like a finished perfume (good or bad) – just … well, like I said.  So I triple-dog-dare you: go try Heat and tell me if I’m nuts. I tried two different bottles because I couldn´t quite believe what I was smelling.  Just don’t spray it on anything you can’t wash, and one small spray is plenty.   If I stood next to someone wearing Heat in an elevator, I’d probably throw up in my hands.

I decided to bury my stinky fingers under Queen by Queen Latifah, because … it was sitting right there and I was desperate?  Although I went back another day and tried it again.  Notes are tequila, bergamot, mandarin. rose, jasmine, cognac, coriander, patchouli, sandalwood, vanilla, tonka absolute, Egyptian incense and musk.  Queen opens big and a little rough, and then settles into a not-terrible fruitchouli – let’s thank Melissa for that term – that, again, I won’t be rushing out to buy, but you could do a lot worse.   I like it better than half the Miller Harris line.  It’s neither terribly bitter nor overpoweringly sweet, and it (sort of) ate the worst bits of Heat.  The drydown becomes a little more resiny-spicy without getting especially sweet.  You wouldn’t want to soak yourself in this one either, it’s got a ton of sillage, which strikes me as appropriate from the Queen, but it doesn’t smell like the candy aisle in the grocery store, and it’s an identifiably adult fragrance while still being warm and flirty.  The boozy bits, which are not my favorite notes in perfumery, weren’t dominant.  If I had to choose between this and Kim Kardashian I’d likely take Kim, but really, a pleasant surprise.  Here’s a link to Robin’s review at Now Smell This, she was pleasantly surprised as well.

A note on bottles — whether you like the looks of a perfume bottle is obviously a matter of personal taste.  And opinions can vary widely — I like the cheerfully vulgar Betsey Johnson bottle but hate Van Cleef Feerie, which makes me think of Avon.  I think many perfume people feel the opposite about them.  In general, a visual stroll through the celebrity-bottle section will inspire new appreciation for the bottle designs of other perfumes, mainstream and niche.  I know it sounds snobby, but many celebrity bottles appear to aspire to a kind of bling, or “fancy” concept, that has the opposite effect in reality — the fancier it strives to be, the more cheap it looks.   A very simple bottle (think Chanel) can look expensive.  The fussy, blinged-out, and/or oddly-shaped gold-etched bottles as an Expression of The Celebrity’s Vision are kind of painful to look at.  From a “celebrity” perspective, the Kim Kardashian bottle is a model of restraint, although in person it’s a little cheesier — the KK logo (pink plastic?) is raised and embedded on the bottle front rather than printed.   Heat, Queen, and SJP NYC I wouldn’t want to look at on my perfume shelf.

I’ll wrap this up by saying that, as a consumer, the whole celebrity-fragrance trend baffles me.  Obviously I’m not their target demographic, whatever that is.  I think in general they can be hugely successful in terms of a celebrity brand extension.  If I were Liz Taylor’s number one fan I still wouldn’t want to wear White Diamonds.  Besides, if I were Liz Taylor herself, I wouldn’t wear White Diamonds.  Wouldn’t one perk of wealth and fame be to bathe in Chanel No. 5, or hire Thierry Wasser to make you a bespoke perfume?  I guess it’s just my envy talking.

Sources:  SJP NYC, scent strip, Glamour; Kim Kardashian, tester, Sephora; Heat and Queen, testers at Macy’s.

March

When is patchouli not patchouli? When Tom Ford puts his name on the bottle.

I´ve made no secret of my stormy relationship with patchouli, and I don´t think we’ll ever achieve the sort of détente that will allow me to completely embrace the full-on sweaty, stinking glory of it. But, I do appreciate it when it´s done right. Tom Ford seems to do everything right; including direct movies. I am dying to see “A Single Man”, mostly because I love Colin Firth, but mainly because Tom Ford is one of those individuals for whom whatever he touches turns to gold. Does vicarious proximity to someone like that result in a reversal of fortune? God, I hope so.  Hang on…I need to check the movie listings.

Here´s some important criteria I consider before wearing a scent containing patchouli:

• The fragrance in question must not contain fruit. See my recent review of Ricci Ricci by Nina Ricci. “Fruitchouli” should be outlawed, thereby banning all sales of Angel, Bond No. 9 Bryant Park and any other scent that dares to smell like fruit and two week old laundry.

• Patchouli must be paired with things that are inherently complimentary, like vanilla, amber, labdanum, tonka; stuff that sweetens it up, but doesn´t make it smell like chocolate cake served with a potting soil coulis. The one exception to this would be Profumum Patchouly, which is quite possibly the dirtiest patchouli scent out there.  The listing of four harmless notes – patchouli, amber, sandalwood and incense should mean it would smell good, right? WRONG. This stuff is a “two weeks since my last shower, haven´t done laundry in months, poured a sack of ground cumin over my head, lost my stick of deodorant, atomic body odour bomb”. One spritz of this in a crowded gym would clear the place out for days.

• Those who want respect, give respect; these are the scents containing patchouli deserving of accolades (in my opinion): Chanel Coromandel, Le Labo Patchouli 24, Etat Libre d´Orange Nombril Immense, and the scent du jour, Purple Patchouli. There are a few others, but in the interest of staying focused, I´ll stop here.

Purple Patchouli was love-at-first-sniff for me. And that´s saying something, considering the first time I smelled it was at Bergdorf Goodman during the 2007 Sniffapalooza Spring Fling. It´s very easy to overwhelm your sense of smell at the big Sniffapalooza events, but Purple Patchouli left such an impression on me, that I bought a bottle of Tobacco Vanille instead. I fell for Tobacco Vanille because I sampled it on my skin. I only sniffed Purple Patchouli, and rationalized that it was one of those, “smells great in the bottle, but goes all hideous once it hits your skin” scents. As we all know, the first impression isn´t always the correct impression.  It was over the summer that I went back to Bergdorf´s to give it another shot, bee-lining for the bottle and trying it on without anything else on my skin to alter my perception.  Now, I sheepishly admit it was the second impression that totally won me over.

This is yet another scent I find challenging to articulate. I´ve recognized a pattern, here: the more well done a scent is, the more trouble I seem to have putting what I like about it into words. I had this issue last week when I wrote about Andy Warhol Silver Factory, and I´m experiencing it again now. Tom Ford has pretty much changed the landscape of fashion over the last two decades and is still finding ways to reinvent himself. Even though he is an American, he doesn´t fit into the same category as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. That can be said about his fashions, as well as his fragrances and accessories. Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein have something for everyone, but Tom Ford has managed to hang on to a certain aesthetic which clearly states his wares are not for the masses. That includes his fragrances. The Private Blends are not widely available, and are expensive to boot, but there is something special about them. Love them or hate them, they are exquisitely crafted scents. It would be impossible to love or even like them all, considering there are now 20, including the White Musk Collection and the latest Private Blend, Bois Marocain.  And, it takes a certain degree of confidence and good, old fashioned cojones to even consider trotting out a line of that many scents. After all, he´s not Guerlain, Caron, or even Annick Goutal.

What I love most about Purple Patchouli is that it doesn´t smell like any one of its individual notes. According to TomFord.com, the notes are Orchid Accord, citrus notes, Noir Leather, Signature Patchouli Accord, exotic spices, amber, patchouli, Peru Balsam and Vetiver. My skin pulls out a lot of citrus and orchid, some slight spice, the balsam and vetiver. I get no leather whatsoever, and nothing that I could accurately describe as patchouli. This is the ultimate no-patchouli, patchouli, but it definitely has that devil-may-care, headshoppy quality that makes it fun and easy to wear. I´m sticking with that description, but there´s a little voice inside me whispering, “This stuff smells exactly like Erno Laszlo Light Controlling Lotion”. Since I haven´t used that product on my face in close to 20 years, I´m telling my little voice to shut the @#$& up.

Disclosure: The bottle of Purple Patchouli reviewed in this essay is from my own collection. The term “fruitchouli” was coined by Melissa, a frequent Posse commentator, and a real sweetheart.

Note to anyone expecting a perfume post for today. This will touch on smell, but it’s mostly a Travelogue.

Our trip to Costa Rica was wondrous.  You never really believe a place can be that lush and almost untouched, until you drive down the backroads and see this simpler life unfolding around you.  Then all you feel is a wave of gratitude that it doesn’t look like Cancun and hope fervently that it never will.

The first part of our trip was up to Arenal to see the volcano.  Well, mission so not accomplished there.  The hotel, The Springs Resort and Lodge or Lodge and Resort, something like that, was gorgeous and wicked expensive.  Yeah, it had 18 hot springs to swim in, the hotel was immaculate and built in a way so every room had an amazing view, even when it was cloudy and misty for the four days we were there.  I’d recommend it if you have money to burn.

The driving!  I just can’t think about this too much without hyperventilating.  There are no road signs in Costa Rica, no highway signs.  It’s like the one-person transportation department made up a big game of travel checkers with the $1200 yearly budget and left no directions except the 12 road signs in the entire country – all of which poorly painted and come up about 100 feet before you might need to turn.

An argument broke out in the car over the No Hay Paso sign.  What do you think that means? I thought it meant I couldn’t pass, but it’s a wrong way sign of sorts, as I found out when the other cars coming right at me in my lane pointed out to me with their horns and some other visual cues with their hands and fingers.

Another good recommendation if you plan to drive in Costa Rica – just rent the GPS they offer at the car rental place.  With all the extra insurance you’re paying for – with great reason! – it’s a small amount, and apparently they have a monopoly on accurate GPS mapping, as we found out after we downloaded one that people raved about, only to find it had no idea where we were exactly most of the time and figured out how to take us on a longer route back to San Jose than the already convoluted way we had gone going in the other direction.

We returned the car, paid off the debt with my arm and leg and get a taxi to the teeny domestic airport, Bolanos, to catch our flight to the more remote Puerto Jimenez in the Osa Peninsula.  They weigh you before they let you on the plane. then they put you on a van to drive you to the teeny prop plane. It sets down in Puerto Jimenez, which is this sleepy little fishing village by the ocean, they clip the trees with the landing gear on the landing, wheel around and stop – right  next to a cemetery.  I was laughing too hard to remember to get a picture of it, and I was distracted, too, trying to figure out which person waiting at the gate (and I use that term exactly – it was a gate that swung back and forth exiting the landing field) was there to take us to our home for the next week. Ah, the guy that nods yes to “La Pina?”

No road we had taken up to this point prepared me for the road from Puerto Jimenez to Pan Dulce.  It was the worst road ever.  I have some authority in this because I grew up on a farm in Kansas, where we had to deal with narrow, washed-out bridges, sand roads, dirt roads that became mud pits when it rained. This road had a bridge that was made of rebar and just fit a vehicle on it.  Driving through water with lots of rock on the bottom made me a lot happier.

We finally got to La Pina, which is so darn cute.  It’s a bamboo house, all solar, with a huge porch to watch the monkeys, macaws, coatis, pizotes and butterflies from.  Which is what we pretty much did that whole first day. The monkeys were swinging by as we arrived, and 40 or 50 of their friends went back and forth through the trees like three times that afternoon. We were mesmerized.  The first howler monkey howling – more like a woofing roar – made me look in the trees for the dinosaurs.  Amazing beyond belief. Rugged, beautiful, untouched, pristine, where you feel like you are definitely not the one in charge of anything.

The beach we had all to ourselves most of the time, though we did share it with Ticos and pelicans fishing.  The pelicans would dive bomb right beside you in the water.  As remote as you can get, staring out at the waves and an old inactive volcano across the water.   I could happily spend my life just watching the waves come in.  It reminds me that I always need to live my life from my center – the part that knows who I am and needs no one or no thing to define me – and that we should all live like water, never resisting, just flowing.

We walked everywhere.  Down to Martina’s, the little dive by the side of the road 15 minutes’ walk away, for beer. We walked up the super-steep hill to Lapa Rios.  It’s perched in the hills up from the beach, surrounded completely by rainforest and has a view that almost makes you weep because it breaks your heart that you can’t hold that sight forever in your memory.

The smell?  Clean, lush, ripe, green, alive.  In our yard was a ylang tree that the caretaker, William, showed me.  I’d never smelled fresh ylang before, and it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.  Yeah, it smells like Chanel No. 5, but lusher, overripe.  I went out and picked some every day and wore it in my swimsuit strap.  It was enchantingly perfect for where we were.
Then there were the bug wars.  The sun went down at 6 p.m. every night, so we’d turn on the lights so we could see a little to read on the deck.  The bugs didn’t bother you at all until the lights went on.  We quickly beat a retreat to our beds by 8, so we could crawl under the mosquito netting.  But then it would just get weird because we’d have the light on reading, and you’d look up and around the mosquito netting and see some scary things crawling ont he netting surrounding you. Some mornings there were strange bugs just hanging around, really BIG ones.  Normally spiders, bugs, snakes makes me scream and cry like a little girl, but for some reason they didn’t bother me there, they just don’t move fast, it’s like Jurassic park bugs, you don’t really believe the big ones are real.

Our alarm clock was the howlers.  4:30a on the dot, and it would go on for a couple of hours as they moved through the trees, on all sides.  Since we went to sleep at 8 most nights, the early wake-up call was pretty great.

All of that are just the things that we saw/experienced, but you can never really get a feel the Osa Peninsula by the details.  It is much more than that. It is a pacing, the attitude of manyana manyana – there’s time for that tomorrow.  It was perfect because it felt real – not a vacation spot, but a place where people live – really live.

Then it was time to go home, and I cried a little, and I miss it still.

Patty

Two of the fragrances that came up repeatedly in comments when I mentioned exploring sandalwood as a perfume note were Guerlain Samsara and Chanel Bois des àŽles.

Guerlain Samsara is a fragrance many people love to hate – it’s identified as a big 80′s office-ban-type fragrance (although technically I believe it’s from 1979) and (quoting here from The Guide): “Samsara felt to many like an irreversible break with tradition, confirmed by the subsequent (awful) releases of Mahora and Champs-Elysees.”  Although please note The Guide still gives it four stars.  Notes are jasmine, ylang, sandalwood, narcissus, tonka, iris, vanilla, although most people would identify it (accurately) as pretty much jasmine and sandalwood.  Guerlain fan though I am, I couldn’t even remember what Samsara smelled like, except: a) not Guerlain and b) not me.

It was clearly time to reconsider.

My first stop was at Saks to sniff the current EDT, which – predictably for a Guerlain – I hated.  Seriously, if you’re just dipping your toe in Guerlain, at least smell an EDP if you’re talking about a classic Guerlain.  They get so much better.  “Vintage” – something even five or ten years old – is likely to be that much better.   Anyhow, current Samsara EDT smelled very much not me in that it smelled like the overpoweringly sweet, aggressively woody fragrance that would best be worn by a deeply tanned woman wearing a lot of shiny gold fabrics and with a smoker’s rasp to her voice.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But I am not that woman.

The thing that kept me curious was the occasional whiff that skeezy Samsara on the back of my hand – jammed inside my leather glove for the rest of the day and kept at a distance … well, it was really pretty.  More investigation was called for.

So I hooked up with two different versions – a vintage EDP and a vintage parfum.  While I won’t argue with the rest of the notes listed, most of what I get is jasmine and sandalwood, with the vintage EDP being a little more aggressive at the top, and the parfum (naturally) smelling much more seamless.  Both of these feature the old sandalwood that Samsara lovers are familiar with.

And both of them … well.  Here’s the thing.  Samsara, on me, is heavily jasmine, although, yes, I can smell the sandalwood just fine and it’s gorgeous.  And I like jasmine very much, but it’s a difficult note for me to ignore.  If I want jasmine, I want something nice and indolic; I have a bottle of Montale Jasmin Full, a very ripe jasmine (faint hints of banana, diaper and rotting garbage), a few sprays of which would probably clear most normal people from a room.  Also I quite like the Donna Karan Jasmine Essence.  If I want jasmine, I want JASMINE, and I wear one of those.

Moving on to Chanel Bois des àŽles, which dates to the 1920s, and notes via Basenotes are jasmine, Damask rose, ylang-ylang, bitter almond, gingerbread, vanilla, tonka bean, sandalwood, vetiver.  (Here’s a different list from Fragrantica: aldehydes, bergamot, neroli, peach, jasmine, rose, lily of the valley, woody iris, ylang-ylang, vetiver, sandalwood, benzoin and musk.)   More recently it was reissued in Les Exclusifs in the 200ml bottle, and I think (?) production ceased on other sizes except parfum.

That new Exclusifs version – meh.  I wish they’d made it twice as strong and stuck it in a 100 ml bottle.  It’s just too tenuous, and that’s me talking – I don’t often complain about things being too light.  The original EDT I’d tried years ago was no powerhouse, but it was stronger than that.

So I tried two pre-Exclusifs EDTs.  The first, interestingly, is doing that Bois des àŽles thing, and I’m taking a survey – has anyone else had the problem with their BdI sort of reducing itself to expensive scented water?   Vintage Coco EDP tends to collapse in on itself, as if it were a walnut and someone ran over it in the driveway.   Vintage BdI in the EDT concentration seems to lose much of its smell.

The new BdI parfum was, predictably, stunning, although I can’t help but wonder if it would smell different if I bought a bottle now, right this second, with the Mysore sandalwood situation rearing its ugly head – I have no idea what Chanel uses for sandalwood.  The BdI parfum starts out much more sandalwood, where the EDT that’s still good is quite gingerbready and aldehydic on me.  Bois des àŽles is a much more complex smell than Samsara, although other than the sandalwood, iris and gingerbread I’m hard pressed to pick out individual notes.  But it’s more of a kaleidoscopic fragrance, with different aspects seeming to reach out over time.  The EDT and parfum both smell very “Chanel” if that makes any sense.  They both smell expensive and dry and not overly sweet.

While I am blathering nonsensically I will say that No. 22 and Coco and No. 5 and most of the classic original Chanels smell not-romantic to me, by which I mean: they smell smart and opinionated and are the sort of scents you buy to wear because you like the smell, not to woo random strangers around you with your flower-like (or cupcake-like) sweetness.  If your beloved happens to like the smell of Cristalle or No. 19, well, lucky you, but I can’t imagine picking a classic Chanel as a man-hunting scent, Marilyn Monroe’s pulchritude notwithstanding.  This is obviously my opinion and yours might be quite different.

Paradoxically, if the whole Cult of Chanel leaves you cold – if they all strike you as bitter or aloof or too man-in-drag: I still think you should try Bois des àŽles.  Maybe it’s because the scent construct itself is so old that it feels timeless; I find it mysterious.  And there’s something heartbreaking about the luminous florals next to that woodsy base.  Bois des àŽles is singular, it reminds me of absolutely no other perfume.

Notes on sources: new Samsara EDT tester at Saks; vintage EDP and parfum, private sample.  Two different vintage (pre Les-Exclusif) bottles of Bois des Iles EDT and one new BdI parfum, private sample.

March