As I’m sitting here sipping my newfound drink love, Kir Royale, I started thinking about what raspberry perfumes there were out there and came up pretty blank. Are there any, I wondered? And I thought I’d ask all of you because I know you guys know everything.
Before we go on, we have some winners.
Winners of the Iris Gris recreation samples – Mary, Denyse (she has the original in some quantity!), lilybug and Mariekel. Just click on the Contact us over there on the left and shoot me your address, and I’ll send you a sample. I do want your thoughts after you’ve smelled it. I’m most anxious to hear from those of you that have smelled the original. I don’t find it the same, but I do find it really lovely, just didn’t have any of the original left to put on skin to get a better comparison or what was different.
Winners of the Soivohle Lilacs & Heliotrope samples: Adrianna, Bunny and Beth. Same thing, click on the Contact us on the left, remind me what you’ve won (since we have more than one thing here), give me your address, and I’ll send you a sample!
Where were we? Oh, yeah, summer drinks and raspberries and smells, which is timely since we are one day away from the beginning of the summer season, which for me officially begins on Memorial Day. Memorial Day, as all of you who have hung around here for a while know, consists of me and my mom and whoever else is around trolling through three cemeteries, visiting the graves of dead relatives, putting out flowers, usuallly in the rain or wind or muddy country roads or all of the above. It’s a tradition that I love, it’s a day out of the year that I spend remembering and talking to all my dead people. My mom worries about who will do this once she is gone. Well, mom, seriously, me and my sister, of course. But one day those graves will no longer be remembered or visited by anyone, forgotten as so many others are in those cemeteries, with no descendants nearby who can visit or want to. That should make me sad, but it doesn’t, it just seems right somehow that we all fade into time.
There will be beer and Kir Royale and ribs and bierocks, fresh-cut grass, the morning after a Kansas thunderstorm. We’ll likely have to take shelter once during the weekend from a potential tornado. And berries. In my drink, in my mouth, in bowls to pluck out as you pass by. Perfumes keep using that berry scent in there, but it’s never right. It’s too sweet, too overdone.
What perfume would I pair with my Kir Royale for my summer? I think either Le Labo Aldehyde or MDCI Peche Cardinal. Not for the raspberry, but for the bubbly parts, though the Peche is a little tart.
Let me wish all of you a wonderful Holiday weekend (if you are outside of the U.S., just celebrate it anyway) and a great summer season.
Kir Royale is the perfect summer drink! (Vive la France) I sniffed Miss Dior Cherie for the first time recently – rather raspberry, I think. I’d go with something different altogether, though, like an aldehydic one like Rive Gauche, which is very French, too.
Oh, there’s no e for royal. Have to get it right, my own big cheese is French!
MPG’s Fraîcheur Muskissime! What do you think? (from basenotes)
Top: Blackcurrant, lemon, grapefruit
Middle: Blackberry, raspberry, jasmine
Base Note: Mysore sandalwood, musk
Going to spritz some right now…
Apparition by Ungaro is all about the raspberry. I quite like the stuff.
Once you’re tired of fruity liqueurs to dose your bubbly, it’s interesting to get into all the rest of it — everything else that constitutes the wild world of the Champagne Cocktail.
F’rinstance? Champagne and single malt. Yum, yum.
ivoire by balmain has a wicked raspberry note. especially the new juice. back in the ’80s when i first wore it, it wasn’t as prominent. now, it’s almost so strong and fruity i can’t get past it!
Love both Kir and Kir Royale — I love to see the cassis fading from the bottom up, and that little sweet jolt when you get to the bottom of the glass.
Annick Goutal’s Quel Amour evokes a Kir Royale for me — I know there’s a blackcurrant or some other fruit note in there, plus the dry, peppery fizz that follows it.
Didn’t someone just launch some kind of Bellini scent?
Now I’m wanting Champagne with fruity stuff…
Springtime also gives me the urge to drink champagne cocktails. I’ll try the raspberry liqueur idea, Patty, thanks. My wonderful, dear aunt used to give me a glass of white wine with a fresh strawberry, or slice of peach this time of year–like a miniature white wine sangria. It’s a fun thing to do at a party, you only need a very cold, middling to good sort of wine,no matter the variety, and it makes it special. For perfume, I’m spritzing the Guerlaim Insolence I got from a discounter–it’s especially nice when it’s sunny and still a little cool–and has a big sweet raspberry note to my nose, at least. (*)
I am a long time Kir Royale drinker and I must point out that a real kir royale should taste nothing like raspberries. A proper one should always be made with creme de cassis which is made from blackcurrants. When I go to restaurants and they put in Chambourd it always goes back, it must be made with cassis.
Best berry fumes:Byredo Pulp, Givenchy’s Hot Couture and Hanae Mori’s new No. 1. Best blackberry, Trish McEvoy’s No. 9. Mmmmmmm 😡
Hey I just discovered Pulp, I love the way the fig comes lumbering in!
And I also loved the fruity one in the Van Cleef series; it actually made me think, hmmmm, maybe this ‘froot’ isn’t so bad after all!
And to think ‘froot’ nearly turned me off perfume!
Nobody did it like Angel…would that be the thang for a humungous champagne cocktail???
😮
I make my Kir Royales with a special cassis liqueur made on the Ile d’Orleans near Montreal in Quebec. I LOVE cassis – Claude-Andre Hebert, a Montreal perfumer, makes a lovely cassis fragrance called Bali. I wear it every summer. I also made my own Kir Royale perfume out of a Susanne Lang custom blend of her cassis and champagne scents. Yum!
Back to Basics makes a shampoo/conditioner called Raspberry Almond and the scent lingers for a long time in your hair–I love it. Found a body spray of the same on ebay quite some time back and it’s surprisingly long-lasting. Not complicated, just plain old raspberries and almonds. Nice on hot days.
I’ve never tried Kir Royales but I want to. Going to New Orleans in June–is that where you said you rediscovered them? Do you have a recommended place to try a great one?
It seems a fruity rose scent , like Rosine Roseberry would be nice with your aperitif…I also love Pink Room , it seems very raspberry jammy to me .
Thanks, Patty! Hope you have a wonderful weekend as well. Sounds like you will.
A friend of mine sent me samples of a couple of obscure berry scents – something called Mimmina More Musk by Intercosma, and Wild Blackberry by Mistral. Your post inspired me to try them out – one the back of each hand. The Mimmina smells like a cheap raspberry candle to me. Looks like it’s a discontinued scent, too, so glad I’m not liking it. The Mistral, though, is really nice! Soft and warm. The Mistral website description:
“Wild Blackberry is a complex fruit medley of four unique, yet equally exquisite berries. Essences of sweet grenadine, lemon and orange swirl around a green heart of crushed violet leaves while vanilla and musk carry this scent to perfect fruition.”
SOTD: Parisienne! Another berry fragrance if you don’t mind the rose…
Hi! I’m a a new regular reader, so I hadn’t heard about your special tradition. It sounds wonderful – makes me want to visit Kansas just to smell everything! For such a spring weekend, and with Kir Royale, I could also picture a fruity rose (YR Rose Absolue?), an old-fashioned rose with aldehydes like Ombre Rose, or perhaps an earthy rose (Voleur de Roses applied with a light hand?).
The taste of raspberries always reminds me of summers spent in northern Ontario as a kid. The smells would be dry wood docks, lake water, hot grass, dusty roads, cool green woods and pine gum. And raspberries, of course, picked off the canes that grew in tangles wild besides the dirt roads and eaten out of our hands.
I haven’t found that perfume yet, but Bvlgari Femme is a nice powdery floral for the summer, and it is supposed to have a raspberry note in it.
Thanks everyone for the raspberry – connected scents. We won’t see real raspberries here in the pacific northwest for a few more months. Delrae’s Bois de Paradis is my contribution…has a great blackberry note.
yeah, it does have that. The rest of it is too havey for me on most days, but during winter it’s really great.
A few months, Cheryl, but just think how good they’ll taste. And then …. PNW blackberries! Those are just wonderful. Eat a few for me will you? I miss them.
Patty, I’mo send you my LeLabo Ald – it smells ‘wrong’ to me. I thought I remembered it all tart and bubbly but now I get all sweaty musk. Weird.
Anyway, TDC Sublime Balkiss is berry nice, with a little lick of salt in it.
Summer is lemonade and vodka and lemonade and vodka time and a crisp Gibson on the porch – time to bust out the Brillante.
Iced tea: Agraria Bitter Orange
have a wonderful holiday weekend. your traditions sound lovely! It’s El O’s birthday Saturday so I am taking him to dinner and then suffering through that unpleasant-looking Robin Hood movie (I’m the No 1 Fangirl of the Errol Flynn version and this doesn’t look like much fun at all, alas)
xoxo >-)
Really? I haven’t put it on in a while, but it was all frothy the last time I sniffed it. Balkiss is great. Fleurs de Sel would be great for a lighter, airy feeling too.
Sorry about the Robin Hood. I’m still not certain I’ll go see it. This is one I’ll wait for reviews on first before investing.
Ridley Scott!!!!
We went, I loved it, but then I do love a rip-roaring action movie…the violence actually stayed pretty much on the non-gratuitous side. My favorite aspect was the wonderful sense of time and place, and watching Russell undoing his Yankee accent!
I looked up the recipe for Kir Royale, and found out that cassis is made from black currant. Basenotes lists, like, 137 scents with black currant. Who knew? Chamade and Gucci II both have it. The Gucci II also has some blackberry, so its berry note is a little more prominent, but it’s cut with an herbal sage-like base.
I remember a time back in the 90s when raspberry was a really popular scent for body wash at The Body Shop, Bath & Body Works, etc. I’ve always liked the scent of raspberries. And red raspberries are my favorite fruit.
For some reason I was thinking raspberry (oops!), so I make my Kir Royale with raspberry liqueur instead of cassis. Maybe because that’s hgow the New Orleans place was making them, with Chambord, and they were so yummy. I’ve seen recipes making them both ways.
so I’m raspberry obsessed, but I have been throwing blackberries into my Kirs whole since I was out of raspberries. 🙂
Hmmm, I’m actually thinking Creed Acqua Fiorentina is raspberry sweet-ish. I like the Yvresse Carter mentioned for the relationship to the bubbly in the drink (and it’s got the added fun of originally being named “Champagne”).
If you wish to complement or contrast rather than echo…say, like “what garnish would go with this drink?” or “what could I serve the drink on?,” I’d go with…
GARNISH – AA Herba Fresca or TDC Charmes et Feuilles (wouldn’t you like a sprig of mint or something green in there on a warm Memorial Day weekend?)
Still thinking on something to serve “under” it…
I don’t’ know that I’ve ever smelled that Creed. Is that one of the newer ones, like in the last 2-3 years?
You’re right about the Charmes. I had some for a while and ran out. I may still have a spray or two, I need to check!
Yes, that Creed came out about a year ago. Mebbe you would like to sniff? {need whistling dude!}
My Ines de la Fressange (the Becker) seems to just go with fruit drinks. It’s… peach in there, I think, but a tart peach and a fizziness to go along with the very-girly rose and violet, and it always reminds me of the mimosa brunches we used to have in college. We’d get dressed up in our best tea-party dresses, all ruffles and full skirts and puffy sleeves, big hairbows on our ponytails (it was the 80’s. Need I say more?) and go eat cheese straws and drink mimosas and fuzzy navels and gossip.
Wore it to a wedding reception in the country last week, and it was perfect.
Is that the cheapie bottle with the leaves on it and the gaudy gold sprayer? I have some, and you’re right, it’s amazing. I know March reviewed this a while back, which is why I bought a bottle, but I’d never opened it.
Worth Courtesan also is a good fruit/slut perfume.
It’s not the leaves one (Morillas, I think), it’s the hexagonal one with the silver top (Becker). It is cheap, though – I dropped $13 on a 1 oz at Beauty Encounter last summer, and then went back and bought another one this spring.
I find the Morillas (the leaf bottle) to be way less refined (and more fun) than the Becker – both lovely, but the Becker has a restraint to it.
Oh BEHAVE with that Courtesan. 8-| My O only, it’s like Je Reviens after a 3 day bar hop on a cheap holiday in Jamaica.
Wait. That’s what YOU said. Only your descrip was way shorter! LOL!
xo >-)
I love me some Courtesan… but true to name, that thing is a tremendous SLUT. Shameful, even… 😮
Funny, I was just saying that I wished I had a Mimosa (champagne & fresh squeezed OJ) to start my morning. Unfortunately, I’m at work ;-(
I’m wearing the perfect accompaniment – Bigarade Concentree – and swooning over its tart beauty. It’s going to be in the low 90s today and have packed my decant to reapply throughout the day to keep me fresh and cool. Heavenly…
yeah, I love my mimosas. I’ve started making them with Naked Mango juice, though. Makes them a little thicker, better.
The most potent ones I had were with Alize, which is a cognac covered in passion fruits, so it’s mostly fruity, but with a huge kick.
Bigarade Concentree is really perfect. I must have some around here somewhere.
I spent part of my childhood in Munich (Germany). We were fugitives from Czechoslovakia with no relatives living near or any possibility to contact those still living behind the Iron Curtain. On All Souls Day, when everybody remembered their dead, my mother would take me to the local cemetery and we’d light candles and lay down flowers on all the graves that seemed forgotten or neglected. Hoping, I suppose, that somebody would do the same for “our” graves far away. I still love cemeteries.
I keep thinking that I want to start visiting cemeteries on All Souls Day, but I just haven’t figured out how to work in that trip back to Kansas to do that since it’s so close to Thanksgiving, but I may just do it anyway. A cold fall/winter day in the cemetery is even more amazing than a spring day.
As I recall, Tom Ford’s Tuscan Leather has a surprising raspberry note listed.
Really? Okay, I need to go back and look at that. It must be drowned out by everything else in that scent.
Kir Royale – haven’t had one of those in years! They can be lethal if you add too much cassis though (I speak from experience).
How about Chanel 22 with its fizzy aldehydes? That might go well. And you need a nice matching lippy too of course!
Hope all the Americans have a lovely holiday. It is a Bank Holiday here in the UK too which means it will rain and I will stay in and sort out my perfume collection.
I’d somehow missed them until i was in New Orleans. You are right about the raspberry. I got too much the first time and had to keep diluting with champagne.
22 could definitely work!
I love the description of your family tradition – melancholy but joyous in its celebration of past lives. What a great family you have! Just thought you might like to know that good old Yves Rocher does a raspberry fragrance. It’s pretty much just that; mabye a bit sweet for you, but I rather like wearing it after a hot bath when the weather’s cold and miserable as it reminds me of sunshine and nice things to eat and drink. There are also in the same line a peach and a blackberry. Again, uncomplicated but enjoyable and, of course because it is YR, they are all extremely good value.
I’ll have to hunt for that one. it just seems like a nice note to wear in the summer. There should be more of them.
Thanks. Yeah, I have a very cool family. We have that southern tradition of acting as if the dead were always with us because we believe they are. So they’re just in another room for an extended period.
YSL Yvresse or Chanel Cristalle.
I have trouble with both versions of Cristalle, but I defeinitely see how they could work!
I think your tradition is precious,
what a way to appreciate life that has gone before us and what it will be like when we leave it too.
I’ll be running a 10K on the 30th in my beloved Lord’s Hill in the rain so I’m looking forward to that. Afterwards I’ll just be recooping so I’ll be greeting the summer on my arse but it will be worth it. I love Kansas spring and summers, my mama’s family lives there and now my lil’ brother is getting stationed there also.
It’s been poopy in Wa. lately but the weather is bringing us the lushness of summer , just biding my time till then cause you know I won’t waste a sunny day. I can’t think of any rasberry perfumes either. I’ll find out what everybody else suggests too.
Take care everyone!
Good luck on that 10k!
Kansas springs are amazing. Nobody ever believes that until they’ve spent a late June there when it is all green rolling hills and golden wheat. It’s really pretty magical.
I spend Memorial Day in much the same way – my mother, my sister, my aunt and I visit three cemeteries in Northwest Kansas and decorate the graves of our deceased relations with the irises and peonies that grow in my mother’s yard. I always wear FM En Passant. I hope it won’t sound too flip if I say Happy Grave Hopping! That’s what we call it in our family 🙂
Balkis came to my mind as well (is it discontinued? Couldn’t find it in Paris). And Miss Rocaille, which is a happy, fizzy summer drink with raspberries all by itself (and would go well with Kir Royal, I think).
Okay, I need to go resniff Balkis. I’ve never paid any attention to it up to now, but if there’s raspberry, I need it!
Hmm, Péché Cardinal sounds like it would be good with a Kir Royal. Or maybe that luscious KM Ume that I discovered recently.
Do you use any special brand of Creme de Cassis? The cheapest supermarket brand just doesn’t seem right.
As for raspberry, I happen to be fond of the note that’s in PdN Balkis. Somehow the rose and the coffee in there seem to temper it perfectly. The whole works can definitely be a little syrupy, but that’s why just the tiniest spritz is usually enough.
Have a great holiday weekend. Ah, summer!
Right now I’m using Chamborg (sp?) and this raspberry liquor from Mathilde. I hated throwing in a $10 bottle of Creme de Cassis in it!