Rosy Outlook: SL Rose de Nuit, Atelier des Ors Rose Omeyyade and Tom Ford Rose Prick

It is not exactly a state secret that I love roses. I know they’re almost the cliché of the flower world but I love them in all of their permutations: the big jammy spicy ones with blooms practically bigger than your head, the ones with the tiny buds either single or in profusion, the ones that smell delicate, the ones that smell so strongly it’s like getting smacked across the chops with ROSE!!! and even the ones that don’t smell at all (although those a bit less.) My friend Sue for years lived in a rented bungalow in West Hollywood with a fairly useless driveway that she turned into “Rose Alley”- pots and pots of them lovingly tended and timed so that there would be blooms from spring until well into fall. It was a sad day when they had to move and a lot of the roses had to go. Luckily a co-worker of mine had just bought a pretty house with a lovely yard in El Sereno and gave a good home to the orphans: 20 years later they are still going strong and Sue’s lemon trees, transplanted from pots, are huge.

I was actually on the committee that chose the centennial rose in celebration of the 100^th birthday of the city of Beverly Hills, the final choice being planted in Will Rogers Park across from the Beverly Hills Hotel (infamous for being he site where George Michael was arrested for cottaging. Who knew I lived in such a sexual hotbed? I thought that was WeHo?!) The rose we finally chose was a salmon pink one (which I pointed out matched almost perfectly the color of the Hotel when we were selecting) and a spicy fragrance. Oddly enough, the photos in this post showed up in my Facebook “memories” just today, Monday. Rosy Kismet.

Rose de Nuit is also one that has come up a lot on my radar lately, mainly since Serge Lutens is kind of pushing it in direct emails. Now, I don’t need to pop $300 or so for a bell jar of this, certainly not unsniffed, so it was on my list of roses that I had to hit up StC for. Dabbing it on from the wee sample I have it seems like a big rose- the opening on me is jammy and boozy and in-your-face in that classic Serge Lutens kind of way. Then it starts to get musky, and that’s when I really start to love it. It almost seems to be the Yang to MKK*‘s Ying, where MKK is in-your-(ahem) face musk that goes to roses. This is rose, rose, ROSE that goes to musk. Maybe I do need a bell jar? (EDIT) it’s later in the evening and I keep getting whiffs of this. Yes I need it. Who needs car insurance?

Now just this past week Portia reviewed Rose Omeyyade by Atelier des Ors, which was the impetus for this trip to StC. Wonders of skin chemistry I guess: I do get the oudh in the opening that Portia does, oddly mixed with raspberries. Not fresh ones, jam. Really good jam, like the one my mom used to make. Not sweet, but definitely cooked. Then I start to get the rose. It’s kind of odd- it’s almost a ghost rose- you smell it, you try to parse it and it’s gone, just to reappear when you stop trying. It’s like the rose equivalent of the Museum scene in “Dressed to Kill’ where Angie Dickinson is trying to catch up to the stranger she just met- she follows him through the labyrinthine rooms of the gallery, always catching a glimpse of him just as he is entering another room. Like Angie and her stranger, just when you think you lost it you turn around and there is is: like the Centennial Rose served on a raspberry tart on a charger plate made of peppery oudh. A lot more appetizing than that reads and it settles down quite a bit as it goes along, but I don’t think I am going to need this one.

And then there is Rose Prick.

The Centennial Rose, because it’s prettier than Rose Prick, and smells nicer.

I have to write that in some ways Tom Ford annoys me. He is thin, handsome, talented and relatively young. He has done some great things is fashion, in scents, and even in the arts (I thought “A Single Man”, while flawed, was brilliant) But then there seems to be the Tom Ford who is the brilliant marketer. The one who will take a slightly outré name, stick it on something that seems to have been designed by AI, in this case with a brief “Make me an expensive smelling perfume with rose that will sell well but not offend anyone.” If you told me this was from Lancome, or Estée Lauder I wouldn’t have blinked. If you told me Avon even, I’d have thought “good for them.” Rose Prick is just so.. Sephora friendly Johnny Ross should put it in one of his YouTube videos. Frankly, Tom could have more accurately called it Cash Grab and stopped there..

Okay, so, what are your favorite roses? Rose scents? Cheap and cheerful or ruinously expensive? Please let us know in the comments.

Rose de Nuit is available at the Serge Lutens website (now thankfully shipping bell jars to the US) for $305. Rose Omeyyade by Atelier des Ors is available at online retailers lie FragranceNet for about $150 at the time of this writing, $275 retail at LuckyScent. Tom Ford Rose Prick is available at the usual suspects $250 for 1oz. My samples are from Surrender to Chance. Photos are mine and from Pexels.

*Has MKK been renamed? G-D forbid reformulated? It’s now just called “Koublai Kahn” on the website- if you know, please chime in