by the drooling Musette

I always wonder why the term ‘diva’ has gotten such a bad rap  – maybe it always has come with that faint tinge of Puritan disapproval and I just didn’t notice it (and it wouldn’t be the first time).  But I like the word diva.  Its Latin origin means ‘goddess’ and if you think about true divas (Jessye Norman, Joan Sutherland come to mind), what it conjures is a massive, almost mystical Presence to match their incredible vocal gifts…..

…which is why I am stunned! that Roja Dove chose to name his new fragrance Diaghilev and create it to mark the Victoria & Albert Ballets Russes exhibit.   This perfume which I fell into, courtesy of WAFT by Carol, is so incredibly, lushly velvet-chypre-y,creamy, swoony-swoopy,  (pant!pant!).….my darlings, I just don’t know how to describe it.  If divas = difficult this perfume might qualify.  But the difficulty will be yours.  I defy you to wear this without incurring a Repetitive Motion Injury.  My shoulder still hurts from the 243 times I lifted my wrist to my nose in one hour alone!

Sergei D. might’ve worn it – by all accounts the impressario was an Imperious Presence – but I doubt any of his ballerinas would’ve.  Not even his prima ballerina.  It’s just a bit too hefty for a ballerina….

Oh!  Wait.    I’m an idiot.  Roja Dove is a genius.  And he’s right.  He created this in honor of an early 20^th Century ballet company. Think everything Diaghilev represented, iron will, outsized ego, Mitsouko-scented curtains.  Think Olga Spessivtseva, considered one of the greatest classical dancers of all time.  A prima ballerina.   Presence.   I see her, emerging from her bath, wrapped in a silk kimono…powdering her shoulders whilst her maid lays out her gown for dinner with a fabulously wealthy admirer….her dressing room filled to the brim with luscious deep pink roses and her chaise longue covered in a cashmere throw, vintage Bollinger on her dressing table, spraying this with abandon….. Sergei and Olga, mirror satellites of fabulousness, each needing the other to achieve the zeniths of their talents..

Shut up about the ballerinas already and get to the perfume! Sorry.  I got carried away with the Bolly and the chaise longue.  You all …..wow.  Okay. (deep breath here)…  You all know how much I adore vintage Mitsouko, right?  And you know I heart current Femme with its sexy sweat…..and Coty Chypre is one of my all-time vintage loves.  Well…imagine that those three are romping in a bed dressed in woven silk sheets and there is a LOT of 1990 Krug (with its  yeasty magnificence)…and a big silver bucket of chilled shrimp with Thousand Island dressing (I’m serious) and a flourless chocolate cake with a warm vanilla crème anglaise….and you have Diaghilev.   Carol and I agree that it is not a ‘modern’ scent at all – this is evocative of the great  50s-60s versions of Coty Chypre.  Like M. Dove I smell Mitsouko (Carol disagrees – for her more coherent review see here ) but the smoothness of vintage EDP, not the current (pre-reformulation) with its gasoline punch.  Roja Dove studied at Guerlain and you can smell the Guerlain influence in Diaghilev – the vanilla that defines Shalimar is evident in the springy roundness  of this scent, which stops just one sugar sprinkle short of crème brulee ( my favorite crèmes brulees incorporate 3 distinct things that flow together:  the bite of carmelized (nearly carbonized) sugar, the sweet followthrough of that sugar and the salty tang of the crème).  Everything about this perfume translates, for me, into ‘mouthfeel’.  Carol uses the term ‘mouthwatering’….and she’s absolutely right.  If I didn’t already adore her, I would hate her guts.   Her evocative review caused a lemming so intense it made my gums ache!  So I schemed and scrabbed and am now anxiously awaiting my leetle bit of it.  And I am willing to share a small sample with one incredibly lucky commenter. Drop a line here letting me know which perfume most conjures up ‘mouthfeel’ for you and I’ll get Pickle to pull a winner.  I doubt this rambling, screechifyin’ post has spawned any lemmings but just in case, you can purchase Diaghilev here . Two caveats:  it has one of those scary bulb atomizers and currently it only ships to the UK.  But everybody knows somebody (or knows somebody who knows somebody) who lives/works/visits London – if you are a chypre-lover this one is an absolute ‘must-try’ for you.

Notes (which I stole from Carol’s post – please do read it (way better than mine)  there’s also a link to a Roja Dove interview…he’s delightfully over the top and I think I am in love!  I carry my own blanket, too!)

top -bergamot, lemon and orange

heart – rose de mai , jasmine

base – oak moss, orris, patchouli, vanilla and vetiver

photo:  frenchchicandshabby.com some rights reserved

I’m not really in the market for a boyfriend. I’ve got my hands full thank-you-very-much. This is about “Boyfriend”, another in the sea of celebu-scents. This one is by Kate Walsh, the actress from “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice”. I don’t watch either show, but I was intrigued by the premise of this scent, which is, “Inspired by the longing felt for [a] boyfriend’s warm scent.” OK, I get the longing and the warm part, but men and women have been swapping fragrance for as long as anyone can remember. There’s really nothing new about a woman stealing her boyfriend’s scent, along with his shirt, sweats, what have you. The androgyny trend skyrocketed way back in the 90s with CK One and it exploded from there. So what’s so hot about “Boyfriend”?

After a bit more research, and clicking over to the Sephora channel on YouTube (who doesn’t have a channel on YouTube?), I learned that Walsh didn’t create “Boyfriend” to be a shared, or unisex scent. It is meant to incorporate the smells of a man with feminine notes of a female scent. She reminisces in one of the YouTube clips about how she loved the smell of her grandfather’s after shave when she was a little girl, and how after a breakup, she found herself at a men’s fragrance counter looking for a scent that would replicate the way her ex-boyfriend smelled. And then she had her fragrance epiphany: wouldn’t it be great if she could create a scent that was feminine, yet warm like the scent of a boyfriend? Isn’t that something we all grapple with?

“Boyfriend’s” notes are dark plum, myrrh, night blooming jasmine, benzoin tears, skin musk, golden amber and vanilla woods. You know how if you keep digging through piles of crap, you’ll eventually strike gold? Well, I wouldn’t exactly classify it as gold, but in the realm of celebu-scents, this one is actually pretty good. It’s got a plummy, stewed fruit Serge-y vibe which immediately got my attention, plus the myrrh and jasmine at the top give it an almost coconutty, tropical feel. The drydown is pretty masculine; the woods are prominent, as is the amber. It straddles the border of a masculine men’s cologne-type of fragrance, but falls short of going over to that side. It’s interesting, and much better than I was expecting. But again, it is far from groundbreaking. It’s no Jeux de Peau, because there isn’t a world full of women hankering to smell like pancakes, apricots and maple syrup. But I’m sure there are enough Kate Walsh fans, not to mention single women hankering for the smell of a man on their skin, to make this one pretty successful. Don’t get me wrong, I love the way men smell. For me, it has to be a particular man, not just random man smell. If I want that, all I have to do is find a random hockey bag after a beer league game. I guarantee that sort of man-smell will never be bottled.

The bottle got my attention as well, for being a nice, solid square chunk of glass, but the flimsy plastic cap ruined it for me, as did the male names etched on the glass. At $65 for 50 ml, it’s a bit pricey, and again, I don’t understand why it has to be $72 here in Canada, especially now that the loonie is a couple of cents above par. Regardless, I dig it, although with warm weather coming, I personally wouldn’t get much mileage out of a scent like this until fall.

“Boyfriend” is available at Sephora, which is were I sampled it.

Seriously? Bread, apricot and immortelle? Did Serge wake up one morning and think – “What notes could I put together to make Patty deliriously happy?” Well, I already have deliriously happy because my big, stinky double-bloom daffodils are opening in my indoor pots. When I was in Paris in January, a flower shop had pots of them outside, and I walked by, stuck my nose in and tried to figure out how to get them home. Well, yeah, I couldn’t figure it out, but now I have my own that I can stick my nose in every day 17x a day. And I do that at least that many times.

Bread, pancake syrup and apricot jam are the three things most likely to make my toes curl. That we get servered our bread toasted and a little nutty – think L’Artisan Bois Farine – just gives some extra curl to my already seriously extended toes. While it’s all over the foody territory, this in drying down isn’t a sugary treat, there’s a milky quality to it, along with a bouncing resilience that isn’t normally in gourmands. By that, I mean it pushes back. Most gourmands, you sink into, giving yourself over to the comfort of them, the places that go ahhhhh. This one, you sink into, and it shoves you back hard. And it has some serious staying power. I wore it out to dinner the other night, and it was still hanging around the next morning. For breakfast. How fitting. You know, kinda like that guy you took home that seemed really sweet -almost too nice – and you get up the next morning with someone that’s much more rugged and male and jaggedy and not too nice in the least. That’s a great surprise because usually it works out the other way – super-stud turns into mealy milquetoast. My bias toward rough around the edges men is showing, I’m afraid.

Jeux de Peau is a much more editorial perfume than he’s been doing with some of the last few exports – excepting Boxeuses and a couple of others. It’s not as difficult to wear for me as, say, Arabie (oh, hush, all you Arabie swooners), but it won’t be wafting all over the ladies who lunch either. I don’t know that it will be widely loved by the perfumista crowd. I mean, maybe, but I think it will be a mixed bag of reviews, even though the early blog reviews seem to be good. Every now and then I can sense a scented swerve near the cliff on me that could turn this into a really bad International Pancake House incident. But luckily, it hangs onto the edge of that ruinous syrupy road and finds a much more mellow nutty, woody place to ride.

This is starting to remind me of my headstands, which, btw, I am continuing with, decided to do them every day for Lent. Along with hero’s pose, which I hate, detest, loathe. That’s the one where you sit on your heels. I used to do this all the time as a kid, but somewhere along the line I scarred the crap out of my ankles and they became quite inflexible, but Hero’s pose has shown me that the inflexible are flexible after all, you just have to apply time and pressure. The good news about doing this every day is my uber-heels now work for me, as I pranced out in my Bottega Venetta FM pumps last week. So bring the pain if this will also get me into my Laboutins and Guccis.

The list of notes from Luckyscent – Bread note, spices, licorice, apricot, immortelle, sandalwood, woody notes, amber.

We do have winners from last weeks’ draw of MDCI’s Helene. And I’ll do a draw for two samples of this new Serge, just drop a comment.

Okay, four MDCI winners are: Jemi, Kelly, jirish, and KathyT! Just click on Contact Us on the left, send me your address, remind me what you won, and I’ll get a little bit of this sent to you!

Patty

By March

My apologies for my massive fail last week – remind me never to type the m-word into a post (m-word signifying those really bad headaches.)  Been awhile since I had one like that.

Second – this whole daylight savings time – compadres, whose nonsensical idea was this?  Since we moved the clock forward an hour on Monday, the teenagers are catching their bus to their local asylum o’ higher learnin’ at (body-time) six a.m. – and they’re at the end of the bus run!  And trying to get everyone to bed at night is not working out too smoothly either.  Is it true Arizona doesn’t have DST?  Maybe I could move there.  Not Phoenix, which would kill me in the summer, but up north somewhere….

But I digress.  I took a stroll through the neighborhood, full of perfume-related thoughts; please join me.

The spring thaw brings up the pervasive smell of earth – loamy, rich, wet dirt, with an occasional accent of potting soil from spring pansies and other early plantings.   An older home had a wonderfully compelling combination of smells right there for the taking in one strategic inhale  – the dank, mossy fug of a magnolia tree, the pissy smell of boxwood, and the honeysuckle-on-steroids smell of what I assume is a non-native witch hazel (I’ve been told the native species are more delicately scented.)  Add in a hint of wet brick walkway or damp slate for a nice twist.

A long, late-morning stroll does contain a few scent surprises.  The main one for me was how frequently I could detect the scent of laundry detergent or dryer sheets, floating out of the houses on a stream of warm, humid air from the dryer vents.  If I can smell drying laundry from twenty or thirty feet away, are we sure we should be putting that stuff on our clothes?

I came home from my walk with a lust for the smell of dirt and promptly threw on CB I Hate Perfumes’ Black March, which I like to pretend Christopher Brosius himself named after me.  The damp earth and faint sweetness of Black March are an ultimate spring virtual-reality scent.  Some people find it unbearably creepy; to me it is suffused with promise.  Other fine dirt scents are (obviously) Demeter Dirt and Le Labo Vetiver, a rootier, more abstract piece of earth.

Damp, wet streets?  The original Dior Fahrenheit and Annick Goutal Eau du Fier, with a jolt of tar, smell nicely of spring asphalt.  A more abstract scent, the feeling of being in the street with some wet fence and some lilacs (bonus!) is Malle’s En Passant.

Laundry detergents and dryer sheets?  You are on your own; plenty of scents out there like that, starting with Clean Fresh Laundry.  But since I don’t want my laundry to smell perfumed (unless it’s my leftover Mitsouko or Femme on the sleeve), I’m no further help.

Having reveled in Black March for a couple of days, I got to thinking how I might layer something with it to get a fuller scent-picture of the street in spring.  Something with a lot of galbanum might work here, but I opted to add the boxwoody Mandragore.  Then it needed a faint hint of sweetness, but not too sweet – L’Artisan Mure et Musc to the rescue.  The three scents were worn on different parts of my arm, so I could lean in and focus on one of them if I wanted to.

Finally, for you gardening fiends: this year my wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) got nailed by the ice storm in February, which is when it blooms, cheering and delightful.  Mine is a cutting from my father’s yard, a wonderful shrub I grew up with, but they’re commercially available.  Anyhow, I’d written it off for the year.   It’s blooming like crazy right now, a powerful aromatic combination of honeysuckle, honey and galbanum, which can be smelled from fifteen feet away.  This is all the more astonishing when you consider the total non-showstopper quality of the blooms, which when fully opened look like the small broken pieces of popcorn at the bottom of the bowl.  (Don’t let those online close-ups fool you; the blooms, at least on mine, are fingernail sized and sparsely placed.)  If you don’t mind the mess as the blooms fall, and I don’t, the cut stems in water will perfume an entire room.

image up top: wintersweet, Wikimedia commons

March

by Tom

First off, can I write how horrified I am by what’s happening in Japan?  Living in a place where that can easily happen I’d like to suggest that we all do the
following: donate $10 to the Red Cross (easy as texting REDCROSS to Give $10: Text REDCROSS to 90999 {in Canada: 30333}), then make sure that you have emergency kits stocked in your home and plans for an emergency in place for you family.  You might not live in earthquake country (although there are faults in the midwest and northeast) but there are fires, floods, hurricanes or even bad winter storms that can affect us all.  A good emergency plan is a great thing to have.

Now..

I was strolling down Beverly Hills version of Main Street, Beverly Drive a while ago (Rodeo gets all the press and the Tom Ford boutiques while Beverly has our deli Nate ‘n Al’s and restaurants and shops that people can actually afford) and decided to stop into the West Coast store of The Organic Pharmacy.  I’d never been in; they feature skin care that’s, well, organic and some homeopathic items as well.  They also have a new line of scents that are pretty great.

They are as follows:

Citron: almost a misnomer, since while it does have a lovely citrus opening it almost immediately goes to a lovely orange blossom.  The drydown has a hint of patchouli and just enough neroli to keep the blossoms blossoming.  It’s a white linen sheath over tanned skin kind of scent, the kind I adore even if I’m more of a white cotton t-shirt over white 50SPF slathered whiteness kind of guy.

Jasmine: not a misnomer.  A sheer jasmine that open with citrus and ends with sandalwood.  They list Ylang Ylang and celery seeds in the middle notes.  There is a very light fruitiness and bit of green in there that could be these, and frankly I’m kind of glad they aren’t more pronounced, since it would stamp all over that blameless young jasmine, which would be a very bad thing indeed.

Oriental Blossom: Oriental in the way that they used to use Myrna Loy in her youth as an Asian.  Sort of Oriental Lite, but that’s no bad thing.  It’s got the citrussy opening, the spices at the middle and the oakmoss at the end.  A girl who thinks that Opium should be applied with a lavish hand will curl her persimmon-colored lips into a derisive sneer.  Those of us who might have been trapped in an elevator in summer with said girl would beg her to give this office-friendly one a try.

Oud: I know, who isn’t doing oud now?  It’s like everyone woke up one morning and decided that oud was the new fruity floral.  This one sort of does to the Montale model what Oriental Blossom does to the Opium one: dials it back from 11 to ranges that won’t frighten the horses.  Because as much as I like Oud Cuir Arabie, it’s a bit much for church.  If I went.  It’s more of a third date, seal the deal kind of scent.  This one mixes in just the right amount of sage, pepper, woods and spices to make it the oud for the rest of the day.

My only issue?  Price.  These are $220 for 100ML.  Granted, they are 100ML and the bottle is gorgeous; heavy art deco glass ones that are quality pieces.  I wish they came in smaller sizes.  But $200 is the new $50, right?  They’re available at the store in Beverly Hills and I assume at the two New York stores the company lists on their website. http://www.theorganicpharmacy.com/

photo:  Red Cross Japan – wikimedia commons/some rights reserved