by Nava

My very first post here at the Posse was titled “My Serge Drawer”, and last year I wrote about how I’ve started dabbing on my Serges with abandon. The other day, Meggie, one of my dearest buds from my Makeup Alley days, tagged me in a note on Facebook asking for my top 10 autumn fragrances. Here they are:

1. Donna Karan Cashmere Mist

2. Serge Lutens Five O’ Clock au Gingembre

3. Serge Lutens Rahat Loukhoum

4. Serge Lutens Bois et Fruits

5. Serge Lutens Encens et Lavande

6. Serge Lutens Fumerie Turque

7. Balenciaga Paris

8. Si Lolita Lolita Lempicka

9. Donna Karan Chaos

10. Serge Lutens Rousse

I know we’re going to be doing our collective Top 10 shortly, but what got me was that I did this off the top of my head; no contemplation, no rooting around in the collection. The fact that 6 of the 10 are Serge scents doesn’t surprise me. Given the fact that Serge makes up the majority of my current collection, I guess I’ve moved permanently into the “whore” category.

We periodically ask the question, “Which fragrance house is your favourite?” I think my answer is obvious; I also love Parfumerie Generale. But, in terms of actual bottles, Serge wins out. One day, I hope to remedy that.

What do my choices say about me? We discourse endlessly about how complicated a Serge composition is, and how difficult most of them are to wear. You don’t “spritz” a Serge. You have to think hard about wearing one. We’ve joked about clearing out entire gyms with blasts of Ambre Sultan, fumigating family functions by wafting Chergui, and spoken of schwetty balls and Muscs Koublai Khan more times than I care to mention. But, we’re like heroin addicts – we keep going back for more. Is that a testament to the Master or are we all just olfactory lunatics? There will be the comments of, “There’s not one Serge I can wear”, and “I hate them all”. But me? Why do I love so many of them? I even supersized the image of Fourreau Noir because I love that damn bottle so much!

Of all the new scents I smell – and there are Serges I have yet to smell, I can never seem to abandon the ones I mentioned above. Some of them haven’t been around all that long; hell, 10 years ago, I didn’t even know they existed. I try not to put much stock into material possessions these days, and lately, there is much I’ve been able to make do without. But those 6 scents and the rest of my Serges make me happy. That’s just the way it is.

Disclosure: All the scents listed above are part of my personal collection.

While I drum my fingers waiting for my Boxooooooses and the new Amouage Memoir, I pawed through my sample drawer to look at new releases and flankers that seemed interesting or should be interesting that I’ve ignored the last few months.

Estee Lauder Sensuous  Noir – flanker. Estee Lauder is like the High Priestess of flankers. They flank their flankers.  At some point, it’s like a olfactory nesting game. Flankers tend to make me yawn, with the exception a few, like J’Adore Absolu from Dior, which I think is just gorgeous and perfect for a mainstream scent. It makes J’Adore better without too much departure from the original.  So while not a fan of flankers, they do seem more honest than just making a similar perfume and slapping a new name on it, which happens still, but happened a lot more frequently before flanking started.

Estee Lauder’s Sensuous was a scent that I liked quite well, which led me to believe that I may like this noir’ish flanker, composed of notes of purple rose, jasmine, black pepper, melted woods nature print, creme noir accord, patchouli prisma, spiced lily, benzoin, vanilla, honey and amber.  They should have called it Sensuous Dessert instead of Noir.  Noir for me implies a darkness, less peppiness, some darker tonality.  Instead Sensuous Noir gives us a more sweet and gourmand version of Sensuous.  Huge disappointment for me – a darker Sensuous could have been great. Nothing really wrong with Sensuous Noir, but as a flanker, it doesn’t feel like an  improvement on the original, nor does it feel like it embraces the added word onto its name.  Poor little flanker. Having said that, I think it will sell really well for EL because the name and the sweetness will appeal to a demographic that the original didn’t.  Maybe they’re just smarter than I am?  Well, of course!

Chanel’s advance marketing hype for its new men’s scent, Bleu de Chanel was  nonexistent. I saw it featured on their website like a week before it was released – though it seems that there’s a big marketing blitz coming with Martin Scorcese now, so maybe there are just two marketing avenues at work:  the big buildup for the niche fragrances that get plenty of advance copy (the stuff we drool over) and the marketing avenue that is straight for the masses when the scent is released, centered much more around media hype and star personalities (the stuff we tend to not drool over, but sniff dismissively about).  Octavian notes that there was another cologne of this name in the ’30s.  I’ve never smelled the original, but I can’t imagine they bear any resemblance to each other beyond they are fragrance.  This one is all modern sporty fresh perfumery.  I do realize in saying that, most of you will read that as the pejorative that I think of it as.  There’s, again, nothing really wrong with this, it is constructed well for what it is, it’s got all the Chanel quality. It’s just more of the same of a whole lot of other stuff that’s been out there for a while. Maybe Chanel hadn’t mined this particular men’s throbbing vein (reference to March’s post from yesterday)?  I thought they had plenty of the sport scents, but maybe not. If not, then I guess it was necessary to put it in the lineup to get that customer.

But shouldn’t there be a rule – one for them and one for us?  They can release some mainstream thing they need to make to try and cover the market they are aiming for, but they have to give us something cool and unique around the same time, like Chanel doing a parfum version of 31 Rue Cambon or Beige.

That was a bust.

Have I mentioned Vero Kern’s EDP versions of her scents?  Wonderful!  I haven’t talked about them because I don’t think you can get them here yet, and I don’t know what the price point is, but I’m pretty excited about them because I love her fragrances, but the price tag on the extraits really takes them out of most people’s budget.  Of course, just in time for this post to come out, Luckyscent’s Fall Scents e-mail comes out with an announcement that her EDPs are there now!  $190 for 50 mls.

Can we talk about my new Droid X instead?  I need a Droid app for my perfumes, so I can catalog the perfumes I like and whether it’s mainstream (I define this by price point more than anything else, though availability is another big factor) or niche or just overpriced dreck in either category.  Because I’m sitting here thinking about a lot of mainstream stuff I do love, like the J’Adore Absolute and Coco Mademoiselle parfum and Sensuous and the Burberrys.  I mean, I never wear the Burberrys, but my niece does, and I always think she smells so great as she drifts by – perfection for young women.  I’d just like to dial up my little app and run through my list of mainstream things I love to give me some hope that there will be more coming, and I will find more to love there, it’s just having to sort through a lot of rocks in my Trick or Treat Bag.

Mainstream of the last 10 years, generally, what’s your favorites?  Do we get more depressed about it because there’s just more mainstream (this seems to have slowed down a bit) and a lot that smells the same, and it’s farther and farther between loves, or has mainstream really gotten that much worse and generic? I keep thinking it’s that much worse and generic, but I’d like to be convinced otherwise if anyone is inclined or up to that task.

Patty

By March

It happened again last week.  There I was, idly perusing the bottles of men’s colognes on the counter in my local Bloomingdale’s, when the sales associate rushed at me with hands outstretched and a look of alarm on her face as she sang out, “You realize those are for men!?”

Uh … yeah, I guess.  Am I not allowed over here without adult male supervision?  The next time this happens I’m going to drop that big clunky glass bottle and let out a muffled shriek, like she just told me, Lady, that’s where they keep the live snakes!

I was just thinking about touching them, I swear. I hadn’t even sprayed anything on a strip yet, much less started moaning and grinding my hips against the counter the way I’m supposed to when I smell all that bottled virility.  My perfume snobbery aside, don’t lone women shop for men’s cologne all the time? Out there looking for the perfect gift for their dad/husband/nephew?  I have no statistics to back me up on this, but I’ve always assumed a significant portion of men’s colognes are bought by women for use by actual men.

If I take Terre d’Hermes home and put it on my own bad self, that’s nobody’s business, but why the at-the-counter freakout?   Am I somehow suspect because I don’t have my dad/boyfriend/nephew at the counter with me?  What kind of gift would that be?  If I’m buying a man a bottle of fragrance as a gift, I’m not taking him shopping for it.  He can like it or not, wear it or not, but unless he’s a friend who asked me to be his wing-man while he chooses, I’m going alone.

When I reverse the situation, it’s even funnier.  I have never once seen an SA rush at a man holding Arpege and scream, sir, that’s for the ladies!!! You Fracas-wearing dudes out there … do you pretend you’re buying something for your mom?  Or do you just spray on the white florals and let your freak flag fly right there at the counter?

Now, I’m not under any illusions that all the bottles on the counter in the men’s department are supposed to appeal to me – a middle-aged woman – as an appropriate gift for hubby.  I am pretty sure that Marc Jacobs Bang ad below where he’s all greased up and naked with his man-junk hiding behind a factice (Marc, how big is it?) is aimed toward gay men, although I could be a sub-audience, I suppose, of women who enjoy the scenery.  Gaultier Le Male (see image at left) with the tattoos, multiple arm-wrestling pretty boys, and the bathroom-cruise shots? Gaultier’s not targeting me, sailor, but a girl can dream … although I just watched the Le Male video, and was confused when our handsome lad climbs out of bed and the other party’s … a woman?   Maybe he dropped by to borrow her eyeliner and fell asleep.

It’s fun for me to try to take in the meanings or intent of the men’s-department bottles.  The ladies’ section bottles might say I’m thirteen! Or, conversely, I’m a skank (unfortunately, sometimes they say both.)  They often say I’m rich, or I’m rich and humorless, or I’m supposed to be rich but you’re laughing at me so I guess we’ll go with amusing.

The men’s stuff, I don’t know.  The “sporty” ones encased in rubber make me laugh.  Is that to protect the bottle if you drop it while hang-gliding, or during that last push to the top of K2?  (Hummer also makes me laugh, for multiple reasons.)   I’m a traditionalist.  Solid, staid bottles with large, heavy caps I like.  Dior Homme.   Ones that look like they ought to contain pimp-juice I’m not likely to pick up.  Some of them seem inexplicably downmarket and ugly.  The original Dolce & Gabbana for men bottle, those guys couldn’t do better than that?   A lot of the bottles look phallic, which I think is weird, do men really want that imagery in their morning spritz of cologne, even if they are gay?   Finally, if I need a third hand or a PhD in packaging to be able to spray it, it’s a stupid design.  You can have whimsy, though.  The Hermes Voyage one is pretty cool.

That Marc Jacobs Bang, by the way, opens with a big note of pepper. (Notes: black, white and pink pepper, masculine woody notes, elemi resin, benzoin, vetiver, white moss and patchouli.)  After that, the pepper dries down a little and then we get some pepper, joined by a hint of pepper, and then some vetiver.  The pepper fades and the base notes of pepper and pepper appear, and then after that it’s pepper straight on out.  It’s actually pretty subtle (black milled pepper?) and you could do way worse, but I prefer the CdG 88 8 myself for pepper.  At least it doesn’t have a giant hit of that nose-torpedo spiky wood stuff that says I AM A MAN!!!! in all caps, like the drunk at the office party who will not shut up already.

Okay, so inviting you all to crawl out of the woodwork.  If you’re a woman shopping for a cologne as a gift for a man, how much attention do you pay to the packaging?   Am I the only person who thinks the Cartier Roadster bottle looks goofy instead of expensive?   Men – what messages do you feel are being sent with the advertising and bottling, and how much does that affect your interest in a fragrance?   Are there bottles that make you cringe so much you wouldn’t buy it even if you loved the scent?

images: believe it or not the selected images involved a fair amount of restraint on my part.  The model at top is David Agbodji for Calvin Klein, and if you’d like to see the images I wanted to put up, just google him.  But don’t do it at work.   There are some quite nice photos of Robert Perovich (our saucy sailor) as well if you google gaultier le male.

March

Spendies! Scoot! Scurry!

Hoi-polloi is in da house!

Hope Fred likes the bag

by Anita

That’s right, punkins! Bradley Made It Happen.  The doors have been flung wide erm… ooched open a sliver to allow your Musette to slither in and sip a glass of something bubbly with M. Malle.  Well!  And that’s just great.  Except……..

……..uh, what if I am supposed to, you know, SAY something to him?  Ask him stuff about the line?  I used to be really good at that – ’twas I, remember, who blithely compared fans with Herr Lagerfeld, back in the day…but the creator of a groundbreaking perfume house concept!???.  What if he asks me why I’m there, as in “cherie, what brings you to this Event?”.  Uh……

…..so!  I throw open the Doors of Opportunity to you, my vaunted Posse Pals.  I have NO idea if I will get past the handshake-and-air kiss stage but I would love to have a couple of questions/comments ready for Frederic Malle, should the occasion present itself.  After all, I will be there REPRESENTING YOU!  And yes, I will be carrying a killah handbag but let’s face it, Murray can only get me so far and reciting Malle-ku will probably get me thrown out on my ear.

A little help?

If you have wondered stuff about Malle’s Editions, his perfumer choices, his plans for the future, his shoe size….now is the chance to find out if I can find out for you!   Throw your comments  or questions on here and I’ll gather them all up and see what happens.  I hope I can get away with a photo or two and maybe somebody (NOT me!) will get hammered and dance on a table – I promise to report back on the happenin’!

By the way,  I’m  could be way off-base (yeah, like that could happen) but I wonder if his visit is timed to ooch out a little excitement for his new fragrance Portrait of a Lady by Dominique Ropion???  Perfume Shrine speculates it might be a Gothic Rose – you can read all about it here.   I sure hope so – I am a rose lover appreciater, but fussy about them.  Une Rose never quite did it for me – I like them a bit gnashier (see why I need some help with the conversation?  I simply cannot say ‘gnashier’ to Frederic Malle).   But it’s been awhile, hasn’t it?  Geranium pour Monsieur, a fave of mine, was the last scent to come out of the House, if I’m recalling correctly – so a new arrival, for women, will be very welcome, indeed!

Looking forward to your comments, questions, suggestions.

By March

It must be tedious to read a perfume review that winds up saying, well, of course, if you want the good stuff you need to have smelled it back in The Day.  You know — back before they ran out of cheap Mysore sandalwood or banned that particular musk in the base, back before they decided they were going to cut their per-bottle liquid content cost from $18 to $1.80 or whatever the hell it was they dreamed up while they were thinking of new ways to save money.

It seems to me that the most common Arc of Disappointment is 1) The Cheapening of The Ingredients.  The whole construct starts to smell like a made-in-Macau dupe.  (Deor Poisson!)   Sometimes this aura of cheapness goes hand-in-hand with 2) The Dumbing-Down of the Concept.  To pick on Deor Poisson again, I find its current iteration slightly gourmand in a way that manages to feel dated already, and it seems less relentlessly aggressive, less toxic than the older bottles, although I’d still wear it over lots of other choices.   There’s usually a slow downhill curve in the quality decline, unless there isn’t (Diptyque Tam Dao suddenly smells like nice pencils.  Diorissimo still smells great-ish unless you smell the original, so don’t.)

Sometimes a house un-retires a name from the past and perfumistas cry foul because the new model doesn’t resemble the old at all – Rochas Femme, Cuir de Lancome, Lanvin Rumeur.  These are trickier to judge because the newer versions, which may be rather nice on their own, are inevitably damned by comparison.  I like new Femme, and love new Cuir, but I am not blaming you if you can’t get past your disappointment that the only thing they have in common with their predecessor is the name.

Cartier Must, as far as I know, was never pulled from the market for its overhaul, and the current version doesn’t smell like either a subtle taste-tweaking or a cheapening of the original.  (Anyone who wore the old stuff and can flesh out the reformulation timeline?  I’d love your input.)  People have long complained on the Posse that the original Must, in the identical bottle, was much different (and much better) than the current scent.  Eventually a die-hard fan sent me a care package and, armed with a sample of the vintage, I have to agree.  Whenever and however Cartier changed Must, the then-and-now versions are so different as to be essentially unrecognizable as the same fragrance.

If I were to sum up the current Cartier Must in pithy Turin/Sanchez style for The Guide, it would be chocolate ashtray.  And noooo, not in a good way.  (LT says Russian chocolate and gives it one star, he calls it flowers, galbanum and vanilla.)  The galbanum greenness is the bridge from old to new – only in the new version it’s like someone decided it’d be clever to layer the galbanum with a gourmand note, a cheap-chocolate-cookie smell, maybe Keebler’s or a BBW Choco-licious, not to give BBW any more wretched ideas.  (Ack. This’ll now be in their winter lineup, named Sensual Chocolate.)  The current Cartier Must is heeeeeedious, a two-pronged olfactory assault that’s as appetizing as chocolate-dipped herring.  When I read online reviews by people who actually like Must – and yes, there are plenty of them – they’re always talking about the vanilla:  the vanillic sweetness, the warm vanilla drydown.   There’s an interesting conversation to be had about the commonalities of vanilla and chocolate, smell/taste-wise, but I’m not having it, not while you’re asking me to choke down an entire clipped ornamental hedgerow at the same time.  Even I have my limits, people.

I have no idea what’s in the vintage, but on my skin it’s a green/spicy oriental that would probably fall somewhere between Chanel Coco and Cristalle, only done with a heavier hand.  You know, more stereotypically Cartier-ish – more blinged up, suitable for placement next to Dragon’s Breath and the glittery eyes of Panthere.  It’s got a sweet, powdery undernote that breaks hearts because it calls up the original Coty Emeraude – not the criminal, heinous swill sold today near you for $3.99 in a plastic clamshell hang-box, but vintage Emeraude, the one that equals – or, okay, I’ll say it, possibly surpasses – Shalimar.  Go buy a mini vintage Emeraude on eBay, or at the junk shop.  Find one that looks old.  There are still tons of them out there, because Emeraude’s been around so long.  Unlike Shalimar I can actually wear Emeraude, appreciate its vanillic embrace, its powdery sweetness.  Vintage Must carries that seemingly contradictory airy/richness along with its florals and its spice.  Vintage Must isn’t asking to be eaten, like the dregs of the Whitman’s box.  It isn’t asking to be loved, either, particularly.  But it can be admired.  It must have been grand.

My correspondent included samples of the long-discontinued and apparently much-sought-after Must II (EDT and EDP) about which I know pretty much nothing.  It’s interesting how different the two concentrations are.  Must II EDT is drier and green and closer to the original Must.

(WARNING: UNSAFE EBAY BEHAVIOR AHEAD.  NEWBIES: THIS COULD BE YOU.  STOP NOW AND SEEK HELP.)

Then I put on the Must II EDP, in passing, contemplating the many facets of this unexplored side of Cartier, and …………… aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhhhhgllllllllllllllllllgh.

WANT. Want want want want want.  (scramble scramble type)   Oh, look, I can buy this discontinued crap for … lookslike … $298 a bottle BIN!   Fuuuuuuuhhh…gheddaboutit.  It’s like stalking Chaos, I’m not doing it.  Too much heartbreak.  More googling produces the information that it was done by Alberto Morillas in 1993, notes are mandarin orange, peach, hyacinth, jasmine, daffodil, moss, vetiver, sandalwood and musk.

Must II EDP is massively fruital.  Melissa, have we accepted your coinage?  Fruital is yours, yes?  Must II EDP is fruital in the general sense that Poison or Dolce Vita are fruital.  It’s a syrupy, intensely sweet decoction without any of the redeeming spice-qualities of vintage Dolce Vita or the weirdness of Poison, and as I huffed it up my nose I wanted it desperately.  I can smell its peachy fruitalness clear through its sealed plastic mini-bag on my side-table.  You wouldn’t want this leaking in your purse.  Or your car.  Or your mailer.

My resistance? Was fruital futile.

On eBay –  I don’t really want to pony up $200 – $300 for a new (old) bottle that, when it arrives, may smell nothing like my sample.  So, let’s just check the auctions … well, here’s a seller with essentially no track record at all, shilling a partial bottle that’s probably been on Aunt Tillie’s dresser under a south-facing window for the last ten years, soaking up the rays.  The photo’s so bad I can’t even read the label properly, and the description is inconclusive … yep, I think I’ll bid on it.

And I did.  And, as luck would have it, I beat out the other hapless fools drunk-bidding on eBay that night.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

March