Hi there Perfume Posse. It’s a new year and I wish you all a good one. Black Velvet Cafe comes with a very engaging blurb from 4160 Tuesdays :We made this as a one off for a Dubai friend of ours who shared some of his best oudh with us. Then we allowed a few others to smell it and the next we know, it’s joined the range.

Often I read about people being sick of the oudh explosion. I have a thought about why it’s happened, other than that it smells amazing or exotic, is typical snob talk “Well if you don’t get OUDH then you’re hardly a perfumista” or the price and scarcity of the real thing. My thought is that we have lost almost all of our base notes. They’ve been cut to shreds by animal welfare, IFRA, costs, corporate greed and the rise of the synthetic. Once we lost them there was a big blank where our perfumes used to go on smelling interesting for hours. So we have a super rise in the synth remakes of the originals now outlawed: white musk, clean patchouli, bro woods, oudh and others. It’s probably a thought proposed and expounded by many others but it rattles around in my head and I wanted to share.

Black Velvet Cafe by Sarah McCartney for 4160 Tuesdays 2017

Olfactif

Olfactif gives these featured accords:
Woods, tobacco, coffee, leather, dark chocolate, oud

OOOOH! Oudy birch tar opening with the thick Turkish black coffee that your spoon basically stands straight up in. So real! I love the smell of that coffee but can rarely drink it. The oudh is rich and thick, a bit medicinal/band aid and the birch makes it dark, with woods, leather, smoke and freshly dug humus rich soil. Much darker than other coffee scents.

As the initial extravagance burns off leather and vanilla wrap themselves around a sweetly honeyed tobacco, dry and resinous. The size of the fragrance lessens considerable about now too. Quite suddenly the overpowering density becomes manageable, the notes create some space and there is a breath of air. Still fully fragrant but less obnoxious.

Suddenly the name Black Velvet Cafe becomes clear, the whole fragrance becomes smooth and plush as the most expensive German cotton velvet. I can imagine it, deep blue with some silver and gold flitter glitter sparkles giving a dazzling zing as the body moves.

WikiMedia

As we head further in the coffee becomes bitter, the leather dries and cracks and my man smell seems to blend with it all giving a lived in humanity to the whole fragrance. It lessens and fades but never stops being interesting.

4160 Tuesdays starts at £20/9ml
IndieScents has $110/50ml and ships worldwide

Have you tried Sarah McCartney’s 4160 Tuesdays? Black Velvet Cafe seems a pretty good place to start.
Portia xx

Portia also writes for Australian Perfume Junkies