We recently had a discussion about Etat Libre d’Orange here and that sent me to Surrender to Chance to get a few samples.
Etat Libre popped up around 2006 if I remember correctly and back in the day Patty sent me samples of the line. I do remember liking a few, loving one (Rien) and being pretty “meh” about the rest. Since then they have added ones that I have really loved (Like This, Eau de Protection) but on the whole I don’t think I’ve ever really fallen for them. I do remember having a vivacious time with my dear departed scent twin Gaia at Bendel’s waiting for some unsuspecting Scarsdale matron to give herself a big spritz of Secretions Magnifiques (even facilitating if necessary) but we got bored and went for lunch before hitting Barneys, hard. In any case, the ones that I sent off for were two that seemed innocuous and one that I had loathed, just to see if I still did.
(SPOILER ALERT) I still did.
The Ghost in the Shell Portia wrote about a few years ago and you should take a moment to go back and read it. Because I don’t have a heck of a lot to add, except that for me it seems like a brighter, metallic version of Lostmarch Laan-Ael. I have a bottle of that (somewhere) so I don’t need to spend $125 for 50ML. I am also not sure I need to smell like Froot Loops and milk served in a stainless steel sink, recently scrubbed.
I see looking back that I actually wrote about You or Someone Like You back in 2017 so I can (I suppose) be forgiven for forgetting about it. You can take a moment to click through and read my deathless prose on there. My impressions now aren’t all that different, just that I get more of a Doublemint vibe out of the opening, before it settles into the fresh muddled mint. I did not go back and buy this one and sort of wish I did, since it’s now $35 more (at $125) for the 50ML bottle than it was then. Inflation. Yippee.
Now onto the main event.
Secretions Magnifiques was part of the original release of their line in 2006 and I just remember thinking “g-d why?” I wrote on PST “Old, stale seawater evaporating on a hot summer day. The smell of the great Salt Lake, or the funk of seawater under a pier, left over from high tide and becoming more and more funky as it becomes more and more concentrated by the hot sun. Dead shellfish. Aquatic distilled to it’s quintessence” I pretty much hated it from the jump and washed it off fairly quickly. I’d been told by others that you have to stick with it and it gets better, and I tried. Oh, yes I tried. It only got worse. It went to CSI: Coney Island. Then Coney Island sex crime. I was told years ago that when this came out les Garçons in the Marais just loved it and practically bathed in it. I thought it smelled like you needed to thoroughly shower everywhere after a night at the Mineshaft, the trucks, and the tubs. (ooh, not only dating myself, but giving a TMI window as well!) If this works for you then I’m happy for you. I had to use Lysol to get it off my wrist, and even then.. So I now smell like the trucks after the Hazmat team cleaned up.
EDIT: I could still smell this on my wrist a good 12 hours later, even after using hand sanitizer, soap and water, and lord help me, Lysol disinfectant. It had calmed down a lot, to where I could smell the “secretions” portion of the program. Still not sure why anyone would need to smell like this. I don’t.
Have you smelled there? Does SM work for you? I honestly would love to hear from someone it does work on. Share in the comments.
Etat Libre scents are available all over including some discounters. My samples came from Surrender to Chance
Photos: my iPhone, Pexels, Wikimedia Commons
I remember when Etat Libre d’Orange came out. All the blogs were talking about their perfumes. The only two I tried were Putain des Palaces and Secretions Magnifiques. They were just uninteresting and not particularly pleasant smells and certainly not what I wanted in my perfumes. BTW I never did put them on my skin.