This really is going to be one of those posts, and I do apologize, but I just have a bunch of stuff to talk about, some only a little bit about perfume.

First, I am going to just squeeze March to pieces for turning me on to these Not Your Daughter jeans.  If you are blessed with a figure that slips into 7 jeans, I’m pea green, but my boyish hips disappeared with the birth of my first son. These things are marvelous. I have hated to go jeans shopping forever because I hate the way they look, they fit or don’t fit. It’s just a trial and painful to shop for jeans. I ordered these without trying them on, just using the sizing guide, and they are perfect. Just enough stretch in them to be comfy, not enough that they are sloppy or loose. If you tend to wiggle around a size depending on the season/laxity of exercise, etc., these will accommodate those, um… size revisions.

Second, we need to organize all of you that are going to Sniffa so we can make sure we get together and meet.  March and I both are going, and it’s week after this, in NYC. If you’re going to be there, drop a note in comments, and if you put in an accurate e-mail address (which only we see), we’ll include you on an e-mail and try and plan a meet-up outside of Sniffa activities on Thurs or Fri or Sat or all three!!!  Like my life could get any better. I get to meet Chaya and lilybp and Neil Morris this week already, so I’m pretty jacked about meeting more of you next week.

 Third, it is your solemn, sworn duty as a perfumista to root for KU in the Final Four.  Well, okay, not really, but if you don’t have a team already picked, KU is a worthy team with a long, classy history of basketball excellence… and they are playing the coach that abandoned them IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT when he said he would stay — the Evil Roy Williams.  No, I’m not bitter, why do you ask?

A month or so ago, March sent me Estee Lauder Azuree to sniff because she thought I would love it.  She gets Aces for her powers of fragrant perception. Introduced in 1969, it has notes of Basil, Jasmine, Citrus, Armoise, Vetiver, Rose, Patchouli, Moss, and Amber.  It goes on like a moss blossom popped its little champagne cork, perfuming the air with lovely green bubbles.  It is your best day in the garden, your favorite, worn pair of leather gloves held up to your nose after you’ve been snipping Rose Bushes and catmint and lavender. If you are a fan of classic, timeless perfumery at its best, snag some Azuree for a run - it’s balls-out underneath a very gorgeous, feminime circle skirt — you know the one, it widens out for miles when you twirl around.

Image from Caryl Bryer Fallert

Warning: today is a really long post. Get your coffee first. This post was supposed to be an experiment, a rapid-fire sequence of impressions of a much-admired line I hadn’t tried yet, and will now remain nameless, a small perfumer. The scents are not me, and we’ll leave it at that. There’s a mini-review of something else at the end, you can skip ahead if you want, no hard feelings.

Instead, I’m going to post some notes I’ve been kicking around related to a post Robin did recently on Now Smell This, which I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it. I made some notes for this in the middle of the night. The link to her very interesting post is here, and the comments raise some good points too. The gist of it is, everyone has different tastes and she’s defending people’s right to like whatever they want (in part due to her own discomfort when she dismisses something popular, and people justify/apologize for their seemingly poor taste) but really it’s far more nuanced than that.

So. Here are my related thoughts triggered by her post, which I haven’t refined. And I invite your opinions and arguments as I flesh it out in my mind. Apologies for any typos or poor editing.

Classic perfumes are often admired for their structure – their composition, their architecture, their bones. Scents like Mitsouko or Jicky, or random Carons, can be discussed ad nauseam from the perspective of what they’ve added to perfumery, the characteristics that make them masterpieces, whatever. I love Mitsouko, and a lot of people don’t, and even I can see how difficult it can be. Mitsouko is to me a perfect example of the sort of fragrance about which one would say, I don’t care for it, but I admire it very much. Classic perfumes often become inextricably entertwined with their famous creators (Daltroff, Beaux, etc.). You are invited to admire the creation, to revel in it, even. But it does not bend itself to your whims — you must do the accommodating.

If classic perfumery is about the scent itself, then current mass market perfumery is more about the wearer. You may like Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue, or you may not, but I think most of us would agree: a) however you feel about it personally, Light Blue’s engineered to be appealing to a broad spectrum of people; and b) it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get into a conversation about the level of complexity of the construction of Light Blue in the same way you could talk about Mitsouko. (Here I will stop to argue with myself: at some point many of the “classic” fragrances of the past, like Ma Griffe, *were* the popular perfumes.) Mass market perfumery has its nuance – maybe it is supposed to make you feel sporty, or reflective, or happy, or be more successful on your booty calls, but ultimately you (or you, only better) are the focus.

Current niche perfumery falls somewhere in between (or combines both?) the focus on the scent and its wearer, and ranges to either end of the spectrum. I think I could argue convincingly that Serge Lutens did not release, say, Borneo 1834 thinking that it was going to be a blockbuster hit and make SL a household name. Some SLs are pretty (Rousse, Clair de Musc); some are not. Malle has some strange ones as well, although they can flirt with a popular concept and amplify it in interesting ways (Lipstick Rose, Une Rose.) Often, niche fragrances seem to be both about themselves and their relationship to you. Are you cool enough, or rich enough, or informed enough in terms of access? (Non export Serge Lutens, locally released Le Labo). Given the internet and the ingenuity of perfume fans, this hasn’t stopped many of us from, say, trying those limited releases, even if we’ve never been to Paris or Dallas. I wonder how much of our attraction to something begins with its inaccessibility. I also wonder how much the perfumers are in on the game. Do they erect obstacles for us to overcome? Do they know, or care, that we spread these things around?

Over the last couple of years, my admiration for some mass market and classic scents has increased, while my admiration for some of the niche houses popping up like mushrooms has waned. Okay, I hate x% of mass market women’s perfume, mostly because it’s too sweet and smells like something my daughter might like – I think of them as Barbie scents. But some of the niche stuff sucks too, not to put too fine a point on it. I’m going to pick on the By Kilians for a minute – which by the way do not suck, poor transition on my part. Kilian Hennessy is hot, and he’s also an heir to the Hennessy cognac family, which the fragrances tie into loosely (e.g., cask packaging, some of the notes.) I smelled these at Aedes, and they’re nice. Seriously, they’re really nice, and they smell expensive, however you want to define it. The packaging is gorgeous, and if you’re a packaging nut, you’re probably damp with desire, gazing at these. I think we’ve all had our little chuckle over By Kilian working its way from Rimbaud to Snoop Dogg in the marketing material, and I believe By Kilian at least partly inspired Robin’s Le Prix Eau Faux competition (where you make up laughably absurd perfume marketing material – and good luck competing with the pros on that one, folks.)

At the end of the day I’m left wondering, though, along the same lines as the Big Cheese and I (and a million other people) wondered – what did Eliot Spitzer get, sex-wise, for his five thousand dollars? Some of that dough was an advance on future sex, but still, that’s the big laugh – for five grand, seriously, you need a bigger imagination in bed than I have, and a larger cast of characters than I’m interested in. Apply that argument to niche perfumery – how much is too much? You can buy your own refillable mini-cask of fragrance from By Kilian, but do you need it? On the other hand, do you need any of this stuff?

While I’m dumping all this out of my brain for you to pick through, I’m going to mention Robin’s post on Tommi Sooni Tarantella. I love the fact that they’re producing a chypre for ages 25+ as their debut for their Australian niche line. I don’t find their marketing stuff any more over-the-top than most of what I read. Some of the comments suggested that the company should have made the scent more evocative of Australia rather than a walled garden in Avignon – you know, something they’d know more about. I take issue with this. Is the right to enchant the senses using “foreign” inspirations reserved for the refined noses of the French (and maybe the Italians?) Should perfumer Andy Tauer stop making his masterpiece Lonestar Memories, an amazing riff on America, cattle country and the Southwest, and replace it with something appropriately Swiss, like … edelweiss? Emmentaler? (I guess all that Moroccan stuff is off the table, too.) And what about American perfumers? Should everything American-made smell more like Tommy Girl and less like Donna Karan Black Cashmere or Estee Lauder Azuree? I’m thinking not.

Estee Lauder Azuree – the original from 1969 (basil, jasmine, citrus, artemisia, vetiver, rose, patchouli, oakmoss, amber, musk) They had it at Saks at the Tysons Galleria, so I gave it a whirl. Here, let me quote Rosarita: “My mother was an Aliage lady in the early 70s, but her crustier golfer sister wore Azuree. I remember it was hard to know where the cigarettes & bourbon stopped and the perfume began.” That gives you a pretty good idea of Azuree on the card. The SA insisted that I put it on my skin, and I’m glad I did. The sharp, smoky fizz becomes much more muted on the skin, and while this is a dark, leathery, aromatic chypre (it reminds me a little of Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir) it mellows significantly on the skin, in an interesting way.

Cribbing from the Estee Lauder website: “Azurée was inspired by the blue of the Mediterranean near Mrs. Estée Lauder’s vacation home in Cap d’Antibes, off the coast of France. The scent is radiant and earthy, with the subtle tang of citrus as if carried in from a neighboring orange grove. The feeling is light and sunlit, with a rich warmth.”

I thought the sole “connection” to Tom Ford’s version of Azuree was just the name (a convenient recycle).  Now I am not so sure.  Having smelled the original there is something peculiarly … and I am struggling with this … peculiarly “oceanic” about it. NOT aquatic. But in a way that baffles me, it works as described. Its herbal aspect, and some indefinable note in that drydown, make me think of the coast, and the sea, although seriously, at first sniff, beach is not what you’d think of. You’d think of leathery, tanned ladies at the country club, on the tennis court, smoking between sets. Still, though… I would love to hear from anyone who feels the wind and hears the surf in the background.  If you’d really like to mess with your head, try layering Bronze Goddess (the new iteration of TF Azuree) over the 1969 original.

image: Cap d’Antibes, petanque.org

Two scents today.

First, Lee blogged on Serge Lutens’ new ginger scent, Five O’Clock au Gingembre, yesterday. It occurred to me that this would be a fine time to plug Roger & Gallet’s Gingembre.

I love ginger – ginger tea, gingersnaps, ginger beer. Is R&G Gingembre a replacement for Serge, which I haven’t smelled yet? Of course not. But while you wait to get your hands on the Serge, R&G is a great ginger – somewhere between the rooty bite of raw ginger and the effervescence of ginger beer. (Digression: and you haven’t really lived until you’ve drunk a shandy, IMHO. Ignore all the disgusting recipes online; what you want is 6 oz. of a good ginger beer, and 6 oz. of your favorite lager). The web says something about “oriental flowers and musk” in the Roger & Gallet. I get a burst of ginger, some light florals, maybe bergamot, and a nice clean musk at the finish. A great spring spritz.

Okay, today’s focus is on…

Estee Lauder Bronze Goddess (and sorry for the lousy image, the best I can do, the lotion’s in the yellow bottle). A couple years ago, many of you flipped for the Tom Ford Estee Lauder Collection Azurees – the body oil and the Soleil Eau Fraiche, both of which have been discontinued as part of a limited licensing agreement with Tom Ford, if I have my facts straight. (And none of these bear any resemblance to the original 1969 Azuree, a leathery chypre as legendarily b@ll-busting as Private Collection and Youth Dew. It’s still in production and I’d no doubt have smelled it by now if they didn’t keep the bottles hidden behind the counters and deny its existence.)

TF/EL Azuree Soleil Eau Fraiche’s notes were gardenia, coconut, orange blossom, jasmine, magnolia, myrrh, bergamot, mandarin, amber, sandalwood, vetiver, and caramel. (In the interests of not driving myself crazy, I’m going to refer to that one as Azuree Soleil for the rest of this review.) Azuree Soleil sounds heavy, but it wasn’t – it was a light, beachy fragrance that smelled like what you’d imagine the world’s finest tanning oil might smell like, maybe with some damp hair and warm sand in the background. Lovely as it was, it wasn’t quite me. It was too … something. There was a note in there that put me off, and I wish I had a sample of it to remind me, as well as to better compare it to the new Bronze Goddess, a riff on the theme, so to speak. I look forward to comments from any of you who’ve done a direct comparison.

Having test-driven Bronze Goddess several times, I may have to pony up for a bottle. It comes in an Eau Fraiche, a body oil, and a Luminous Body Lotion. The Bloomies near me didn’t have the body oil (possibly my preferred concentration), but I was wowed by the shimmery body lotion, which generally isn’t my thing. The sheen is golden and subtle as these things go (no big glittery sparkles). I’m fair, and mostly past the glitter stage, if you catch my meaning, but I would love this on my collarbone, neck and arms in the summer. By the way, this is part of their Bronze Goddess makeup collection, which I believe has been around a season or two (correct me if I’m wrong). There’s also this hilariously ginormous mirrored compact, which I can’t decide if I like or hate – it weighs a ton, but looks kinda fab … wait, where were we?

The notes I have from the EL press blurb, stripped of breathy descriptors and other extraneous b.s., are: coconut milk, sandalwood, vanilla, vetiver, myrrh, mandarin, bergamot, lemon, orange, gardenia, jasmine, magnolia, orange blossom, lavender. Don’t let that list scare you; it’s as light as the original, and the notes are quite similar.

If I had to guess (and it is a guess, without Azuree Soleil in front of me) this is very close in smell, and if you liked that, you’ll probably like this. I prefer this one. It doesn’t do much in the way of development; again, it’s the world’s finest suntan oil, with that buttery, beachy note I love in Creed’s Virgin Island Water, although this is a much less tropical scent. The gardenia and jasmine are very muted and not indolic, and the coconut is not so pronounced as to give you that Hawaiian Tropic cheap tanning oil vibe. The whole herbal/citrus side of this is really subtle. Instead, I’m swept up in the emotion, which is, basically – let’s pull on the bathing suit and a kicky sundress, grab the new copy of Allure and a pack the cooler, and head to the beach. It’s not a Serge Lutens kind of genius, but it’s genius nonetheless.

What’s different with this one? Well, maybe nothing (again: please report in from the field!) But I’m reminded of a passage in Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses where she interviews uber-nose Sophia Grojsman, and Grojsman talks about searching for a kind of seamlessness when developing a scent, and how if something sticks out incorrectly it’s problematic. Something always stuck out in Azuree Soleil that I didn’t like, a perfume-y note that made it too much for the beach – like all the bugs would be after you. Too much amber? Gardenia? Bronze Goddess, on the other hand, is perfect. Pardon me, I have to go shave my legs and dig up my bronzer – summer is, apparently, on the way.

FRAGRANCE CHALLENGE – SHOUT OUT TO PATTY: Looking at the notes for the original 1969 Estee Lauder Azuree (basil, jasmine, citrus, artemisia, vetiver, rose, patchouli, oakmoss, amber) I decided it sounded like just the ticket – for Patty. Hey, she wore Private Collection back in the day, and I am pretty sure she likes the original Youth Dude. So, I have made an unsniffed purchase, which is on its way to Patty from Estee Lauder (and they better have thrown some extra crap in there, P!) and I want Patty to do an honest, no-holds-barred review when she gets it.