While I was doing last-minute research for the Cuir Fetiche post, I learned of the passing of Jean-Francois Laporte, the visionary behind Sisley, L’Artisan and Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier (MP&G) among others.   His contribution to the perfume world is extensive and he will be sorely missed.

I cannot do him justice here because it’s already been done, way more beautifully than I ever could.  Please take a minute to go over to Denyse’s tribute at Grain de Musc for a look at a truly remarkable man’s life.

By March

First off, everyone – thanks for the many comments on last week’s mope-post of mine, on scents for mourning.  I read them all, and there are some great stories and images there.  My dad’s doing well, all things considered – he wound up with an incision from just under his eye all the way down to the corner of his mouth, which is not what we thought we’d signed up for, but it’s healing nicely and they’ll take the stitches out in a couple of weeks.

I was working on another post for today but it hasn’t coalesced (congealed?) correctly, so you’re getting this instead – random thoughts about house-smells.

It’s the time of year when folks like me – folks who don’t usually scent their houses with anything in particular – bust out the “Smell of the Tree” room spray or the holiday cinnamon-stick and clove potpourri.  I like to think about the way people’s houses smell when I walk into them.  I am pretty sure that if you took me blindfolded into the houses of, say, my father and the people in this area whose homes I visit the most, I could correctly identify them.  And the interesting part about that for me is, it’s not like there’s one particular smell marker for each house – wet dog, mildew, cigar, etc.  Each house is a mysterious accretion of the smells of the lives of the people who live there.  I couldn’t name a single “note” in those house-smells.  And yet I could distinguish among them.

Our house smells … fine. I hope.  When we first moved in it had a new-house smell (new paint, etc.) which I hated.  But now it smells like old wool carpets, dust, art supplies and furniture oil, with an overlay of whatever we’ve cooked or baked.  Awhile ago I got tired of buying boxes of cookies that disappeared in five minutes – we have a wicked sweet tooth over here – and so I said, if you want sweets, you have to bake them yourselves.  I didn’t save any money, and what we make doesn’t last any longer, but frankly, I’d much rather have a slab of pumpkin bread, warm from the oven and smothered in butter, than an Oreo.  And the bonus is the baked-pumpkin-bread smell.

We use unscented laundry detergent, in one of those low-water front loaders, and after awhile the clothes get this kind of sour smell, even when they’re clean.  Putting vinegar in the bleach dispenser helps, and I tuck mismatched socks dabbed with lavender oil in the drawers and the linen closet, so there’s the faint smell of lavender.

Right now I’m using my Annick Goutal Noel, which I blogged about at some point.  It’s a room spray, and I think it’s still available online.  What I love about it (despite its somewhat misleading name) is: it’s the exact smell of the inside of a nice florist shop.  It’s got a hint of wintergreen and eucalyptus, and/but mostly it’s that unique cornucopia of cold air, cut stems, and walking into the chiller where they keep the flowers.  It’s a really fun smell, and it’s a nice, subtle background in a room.  It’s not beating you over the head with the pine boughs or bonfire.

In the scent-fail department, a couple years ago I bought those Slatkin & Co. plug-ins from BBW, it looks like they no longer carry the line.  The scents were something like “Winter” and “Pumpkin,” and they smelled great in the store.  No, seriously.  Anyway, I got them home and plugged them in and … no matter where I put them, they were overwhelming.  It was like being buried alive in a vat of baked pumpkin, or smothered on the Christmas-tree lot, take your pick.  I moved those things all over the house, trying to find somewhere I could plug them in that the miasma wouldn’t be too overpowering, and eventually I gave up and threw them away.

Finally, scented candles just don’t do it for me – with all these kids, I’m always afraid I’ll forget one and the house will burn down.  However.  I do have an (unlit) L’Artisan Figuier mini sitting next to me as I type this, and it always smells deliciously, faintly figgy.  Also, next to my bed is the candle of Annick Goutal Sac de Ma Mere (“my mother’s purse”), which is the scent of a fabulous leather bag with powdery makeup, kind of along the lines of the newer version of Cuir de Lancome, only more suede glove and less powder.  It’s a lovely smell, even unlit.

Your turn now – do you boil potpourri on the stove, deck the halls with fir boughs, bust out the orange oil for the pre-Thanksgiving dusting?  Could you identify the signature smells of the houses of your nearest and dearest, whether or not you could pick out individual elements?  What’s your favorite house-smell?

image: Fireside Friends by John Weiss.  This makes me laugh ‘cuz you know that house smells like wet dog.

March

by Musette-with-a-Whip

I adore leather.   leather gloves.  I have a glove collection to rival Imelda’s shoes, in all colors and types. Leather dresses.   I wore a Harley-Davidson  black leather evening gown with red leather opera gloves to a conservative charity event.  It was weird – the leather part (the gown design is a plain black v-neck column) – but fabulous.  Biker jackets.  Before ballistic nylon and its ilk, it was the hide that would save your hide in event of an unexpected get-off.   Soft, tough, sexy leather.   The smell of a leather coat worn by a beloved someone.  A tissue-thin evening glove with a hint of skin-scent and hand cream, maybe a touch of perfume.

Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier has captured all of that in their new scent Cuir Fetiche.     This is one of the sexiest scents I’ve smelled in a very long time, mostly because it doesn’t seem to be trying all that hard, corseted bottle notwithstanding.  The leather doesn’t come on strong at all, which you would think would be a negative, given my love of leather.  But the first, developing notes conjured an almost visceral image :  slowly sliding a soft, glove-leather jacket off someone you adore beyond reason, someone you want so bad it makes your gums hurt and your skin feel just a tad too tight, whenever you are anywhere near them.  That faint buzzing in the ears, where you can’t be sure you aren’t behaving oddly because …..well, just because.  And then.  And then, you finally arrive at a time and place where you can make the buzzing stop – and perhaps the first step is sliding that leather jacket off….

that’s what I got out of it, anyway (“I’ll have what she’s having”).  On first spritz I get a touch of soapy powder over leather but in the time it took me to write that the soapy powder settles down and becomes a very intimate, human-musk skin scent, with soft floral overtones.  I usually hate musk so I was surprised to find it so ‘intimate’ and pleasurable.  Weird as this sounds (and remember, I wore ball gowns to my last office job) I could see how this could work as an office scent, as long as you don’t mind your officemates following you around like snuffling dogs all day long.  Notes are courtesy fragrantica:

Top: red mandarin, bergamot, lemon, geranium
Heart: leather, ylang ylang, jasmine, rose, iris, vanilla
Base: Musk, ambergris, patchouli, cedar, sandalwood.

check out this gorgeous bottle!

This is my first MP&G so I had to read up on them – Jean Laporte, the former owner of L’Artisan, inspired by Parisian gantiers (glovemakers) who supplied scented gloves to 17thCentury aristocracy began this company in 1988 and apprenticed  Jean-Paul Millet Lage, a former banker-turned-perfumer (at first I read ‘baker’ which made more sense than ‘banker’ but as a machine-shop-owner/artist I am in no position to judge.  Talent and occupation are not always in sync).  Just stop for a second and read that word ‘apprentice’ again.  When was the last time you heard of anybody other than a union tradesman ‘apprenticing’?  In this day and age of instant expertise, the idea of a banker being willing to apprentice himself to a perfumer to learn his craft is ….well, it’s heartening.   I don’t know about his other MP&G scents (but reading comments indicates this is a bit of a polarizing brand, with the soapy and the musk)  but this one is really nice – though it reminds me of something else…the skin-scent drydown, with the touch of leather, is remarkably close to another scent….and for the life of me I can’t remember what it is!  I am going off my notes from a few days ago and am now at the onset of a flu I thought I’d dodged, dammit!  My nose is in shreds.  I’m not even going to bother trying to do scent-detective work.   Instead…I’m going to do us all a favor and do a giveaway of my little sample.  To enter, tell me how YOU feel about leather.  Or this line.  Or both!.  I’ll have Pickle pull a winner via random.org on Friday.  He will NOT be wearing this:

(though Mario is ROCKIN’ this!  Hard!…and c’mon.  I had to include it.  When else would I ever get a chance to use it?)

sample: gifted by a dear Perfumista friend                                                                                                                                       (Mario Lopez in Nip/Tuck)

Cuir Fetiche, an Autumn 2011 release,  is not on the MP&G website just yet.  It’s supposedly going to be offered through aedes and luckyscent, though it wasn’t on either site as of last night.

Update:  Per a post on Perfume Shrine, M. Laporte died recently.  A sad loss to the Perfume World.  Condolences to his family and friends.

 I’m having retro moments lately (notice I didn’t say “senior” moments), although I must confess to having had another birthday earlier this month which puts me that much closer to that designation. But I’m not going to complain, as it certainly beats the alternative.

 Anyway, I was getting ready for work one day last week, and slipped on a silky mockneck sweater in the most gorgeous shade of blue-violet, put on a great red lipstick and suddenly felt the urge to spray something a bit opulent to complete the effect.  So I turned to my bottle of one of the ’80s greatest  hits: Givenchy’s Ysatis.

 Yes, it’s big — shoulder-pad big, but still so beautiful and classy to me that I can forgive it for that. And it has a little fun built in, too, I think, with its wink of coconut, to keep it from being too serious and over-the-top. It was launched not long before I began my most glamorous job ever, doing fashion public relations. I had to dress to the nines every day for work there, and Ysatis was a frequent companion as I wrote press releases, helped organize shows, and handled parties and seminars for buyers who would come in several times a year for the various markets.

Ysatis never failed to make me feel elegant and well-heeled, even as it did last week. Mind you, I wore it sparingly, as one spritz is a gracious plenty (at least for me), but it was just enough to make my day.  Ah, to be that young, thin and carefree again …

  So please share with me: When you’re having a retro moment (or would like one), what do you wear and where does it take you?

On This Day – and Every Day:  A Profound Thank You to all our Veterans and  standing (and reserve) Service Men and Women. 

“Anita, you know how I feel about Diorling. However I don’t expect miracles anymore. The old house of Dior is part of the past.
You might find the same structure but the ornaments are different. I see it like a different fragrance that happens to have the same name Diorling. “

This was the wise intro to a conversation I had with the beautiful Celina regarding the new (2011) version of Diorling.   Most of you know my deep and abiding love for the original  – I have at least 4 early-ish iterations of this beautiful fragrance, which has been reinvented several times, since the 1963 Paul Vacher chypre creation which is full of leather, oakmoss and patchouli.  Angela did a great comparison here back in 2008 and mentions a host of reformulations in the past (gasp!) 45 years!  I was 11 in 1963, way too young to know Diorling – and Dior was not my mother’s House.  So I came to the party way late and, like so many latecomers, full of rabid desire for the good times I missed. And several of the vintages I have hint of good times, indeed!

It’s weird to think of 1963 as vintage – that makes ME vintage, alas!  But there you have it.  And if I go down that Vintage Path of Comparison we will be here all day, with me lamenting What They’ve Done To Diorlingblahblahblah….and you know what?  I need to get over it.  Celina urged me to approach the 2011 version on its own merits…and after hemming and hawing about it, I did – sort of.  Okay, I approached it first by comparing it to an 80s-ish version, which was, actually not all that great a version.   It had a soapy quality to it, though the leather showed up quite early and stayed a bit longer than I expected – but it wasn’t as much fun as I would’ve liked.   My Snob Self was stunned…..becauuuuuuse….well, okay!  I admit it.  I PREFER THE 2011 VERSION!  There.  Ya happy?    The thing I exhort all perfumistas to retain, that Beginner’s Mind, slammed shut in my own brain, as I condemned the new version out of hand.   Well. Hoist on my perfume petard and all that.  I decided to quit while it was ahead – no way in the world could it compare to the earlier versions.  So with Celina’s gentle suggestion dingling around in my brain, I took a shower and started anew.

The new version, by Francois Demachy, is a flat-out chypre, with little pretension to leather, though it shows up halfway through the midpoint.  If I were to compare it to the original I would call it Reverse Diorling as the leather comes after the floral – but I’m not comparing, am I?  This one has a little bit of bergamot fronting it, with the jasmine, patchouli and leather following and dancing around…it’s got that ‘new’ Dior Chypre smell to it, as if the whole reissue group is taking its cue from Diorella  (and Michel Roudnitska).  There’s a hint of the lemony-bergamoty-leather from the original Diorella but it’s not as lemony-leather as Bandit.  If I were to compare, Bandit’s lemon-leather is an ivory-handled straight-edge razor, whereas the new Diorling is ….hmm…maybe a nice mother of pearl pocketknife.  Both can kill you but the former will likely scare you to death first.  Thesmooth bergamot comes sneaking back in during the drydown and is supported by a nice little (emphasis on little) hit of leather.  And it has decent, wallpapery, longevity.   I spritzed it at 8p and was surprised to find it still with me at 8a.

I know I’m stompin’ around this tune and not really getting to the point, which is “dangit, does it smell good and would you wear it!?“  and the answer, blushingly enough, is yes.   Not FB but I certainly don’t bemoan my decant. And blushing because I had to be (sweetly) scolded into Doing My Job, which is to rate a perfume on its merits, not on my own prejudices.  And…..well, with the name and all it can’t help but be  a reissue of one of my most beloved frags – it’s like I feared falling in love with another Rottweiler, now that my Georgie is gone.  And that’s just dumb (no dog can take his place but there is always room in my heart and home for another. ).   This is most definitely not the original Diorling but as Celina pointed out, I don’t think they were aiming for that.  I think (hope) they were setting out to issue another in their Chypre series and did so without embarrassing themselves overmuch (as they did with Diorama, imo).  2011 Diorling actually smells more like a Roudnitska now, rather than the original Vacher.  And that’s weird – but not too shabby!

And now a question for you:  are you still in possession of Beginner’s Mind?  Do you think it’s even necessary for a Perfumista, once s/he’s gotten past a certain sniffage point?

You can get it at SFA for $90, 3.4 oz.     My decant came from a split.