Kenzo has a new fragrance out.  And it’s everything we hate – only 1,000 of them made, special freaky bottle, $188 for 40 mls – well, the price has certainly been worse.  You know how this goes.  Kenzo?  I thought they made all the super-cute, incredibly wearable perfumes that wound up at discounters for $30 a bottle.

Let’s get the particulars.  Ron Arad was commissioned to design the bottles, and they’re pretty cool little twisty silver ribbed thingies with the pumping mechanism buried in the bottle.   Aurelian Guichard composed the perfume, and it was to intended create the scent of skin, while avoiding the traditional scent pyramid scheme.  Notes are orange blossom, Bulgarian rose, frankincense and vanilla; the press release also talks of UFO having “a balance between a powerful heart, the ‘marble accord,’” and the other notes.

Expensive?  check.

Weird bottle?  check.

Limited edition?  check.

Fragrance live up to the rest of the hype?  Believe it or not, in this case it actually does.

Patty says: From the second I smelled it, I was in love.  I sprayed it on (I’ve been doing that a lot since I got it) when my youngest son, Harry, was in the room. He decreed that Harry’s Rules would now include that all women had to wear UFO.  Every time I walked by him this weekend, he would swoon over how UFO smells.  Remember, this is a young man that has been raised around perfume, he’s used to all sorts of smells.  I also burn incense and candles in my home.  It takes something pretty special to get his attention. In fact, I can’t ever remember him ever commenting on any scent I put on before except the ones he hated or if I wore aldehydes in the car when I was driving him to school.

UFO has this warm vanilla floral start that quickly, yes, seems to avoid the normal pyramid and moves right into the incense.  All the notes just dance on the skin together, blending a little, but still distinct’ish.  Lasting power is fabulous on me.  I can still smell it the next morning, though it’s mostly the incense that’s left.  Do I think they hit the scent of skin?  They did okay. There’s a slightly salty feel about it, but I’d never mistake this scent as someone’s skin – it’s just way better than that!  Given the limited number of bottles, I’m hoping they intend to only do 1,000 bottles of those modern colly ones, but release the fragrance in another bottle for, well, ever. Please don’t make me stockpile $188 bottles of perfume.

I tried to think of Guichard doing Bond’s Chinatown and UFO, they are pretty different. The more I thought about it, though, the more it makes sense. Chinatown has a weird duality about it that, love it or hate it, it gets your attention.  Chinatown ultimately wound up much too heavy for me to wear, the scent would get stuck in my nose.  UFO has that same duality of sweet and incensey, but without the heavy patch/floral.  It’s lighter, but keeps the same tensions in the perfume. Where Chinatown is languid and makes me think of Opium dens, UFO is the Angels singing and cavorting in the sun.

March says: I remember reading about this months ago and then I forgot all about it.  I decided to go at it blind and not look the notes up before I tried out my sample atomizer.  Can I just say?  Non-pyramidal structure aside, putting this on my skin and breathing it in for the first time made my heart soar the same way it did the first time I smelled Andy Tauer’s Orris.  In fact, my first sniff of UFO brought Orris to mind (UFO has a hint of the same incense/rose dynamic when it opens), only the Tauer has a bunch of other, heavier spicy stuff.   UFO is cleaner, airy and very much about the incense at the center, along with a musky warmth that I’m assuming must be the “marble accord.”

As the PR stuff suggests, this is a pretty straight ride.  I get a ton of incense, a little vanilla for warmth and roundness.  There is rose in there but (happily) in this case it doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment; it provides a sweet floral dimension rather than a thorny wallop.  The fragrance does seem to fluctuate slightly between a sweeter side (like Orris) and a drier side (reminds me a teensy bit of CdG 88 8 in terms of mineral clarity and weight.)   I definitely feel the “mineral character” in there, the same way 88 8 renders spices as slightly metallic.  After a couple hours the vanilla gets this smoky thing going on which I am very fond of.

For something that doesn’t wear that heavily, and seems to float in and out on me (nose fatigue?)  the sillage is tremendous.  I put two sprays on the back of my hand (which, yes, subsequently got washed a few times.)  Five hours later my daughter commented in passing how much she liked my scent; I am not always a crowd-pleaser in that regard.  I held up my hand to her and sure enough it was UFO she was admiring.

UFO is full of joy to me — that’s the most appropriate word.  There’s something radiant and uplifting about it.   The press release says Guichard “drew on the olfactive memory of his mother who was a sculptor working with marble, and has recreated the scent of marble powder against a woman’s skin.”   This fragrance has tremendous heart.  I like thinking of it as a reflection of his love for his mother.

Of course we’re going to give away some samples.  Just drop a comment to be entered for a chance of winning one of 3 samples.

Patty

When I popped by Sephora last week to check out their new fall nail colors (see post yesterday), I ran into KenzoAmour Florale, which I am pretty sure was a spring release but has just shown up in our local stores.   I can´t resist pasting in the Sephora online blurbage for this: “In Asia, the light is written in flowers that whisper their solar freshness onto your skin. This scent’s gently dazzling impression begins with a luminous, airy top. The essence reveals its luminous, floral heart and comes to completion with a clear, sensitive base. The hours pass by gracefully, given away by changing light, enticing you to fall in love.”

Perhaps I´m becoming a bitter hag prematurely, but does that mean anything to anyone reading this?   I recognize the words as written in English, and yet.  The whole thing makes me tilt my head to one side in bafflement, like my dog when he´s watching the television.   My six-year-old could write something more edifying.

I am something of a Kenzo fangirl.  KenzoAmour is probably my favorite, with Flower Oriental, Flower (Le Parfum) and Indian Holi not far behind.  There is nothing out there quite like KenzoAmour when I need comfort on a miserable winter day.  If it is ever discontinued, I will mourn its passing.  The KenzoAmour LP was interesting, but what it gained in benzoin-ambery yumminess it lost in luminous transparency, and it never replaced the regular in my affections.  Also, I know that, for those who can work with the weight of Kenzo, scents like Amour and Oriental are surprisingly tenacious.

Notes for Florale are neroli, grapefruit, blackcurrant, cardamom, frangipani, rosebud, gardenia, white musk, cedarwood.  The original KenzoAmour is built around woods, incense, and rice steam.  So, you might take a guess that the Florale flanker doesn´t have much in common with the original beyond the bottle (and more about that bottle in a bit.)  In this case, you´d be correct – Florale is, as its name implies, a floral.  It is sweet without being sweeeeet - certainly by the standards of much of what lurks on the Sephora shelves, it is relatively restrained.  The fruit and citrus is around only briefly, although the cardamom adds a welcome, nuanced spiciness.   The florals read as an indistinct, pale haze rather than as individual accent notes.  As it dries down it gets a bit muskier and woodier, and despite the list of notes I don´t find the fragrance particularly “feminine.”  The musk is a little sour on me.  Florale is a light skin scent after a couple of hours.  I found it a disappointment, although I’m having trouble deciding precisely why.   It’s not like I find Kenzo scents (collectively) provocative or awe-inspiring, and I’m not saying they’re genius.  But for what they are, they are often delicious little things.  This one, not so much.  It’s the sort of scent that is just good enough to remind me that I could be wearing something better, but not comforting or warm or X enough to justify its floral-musky existence.

Online photos like the one at top really don´t do the KenzoAmour Florale bottle justice.  It´s clear glass at the top and bottom, while the center portion appears etched on the interior, with the clearness slowly fading into the etched (frosted?) portion, which looks like milk glass.  Unlike the Amour parfum gold bottle, which looked  kind of cheesy (in my opinion), like it had been spray-painted in a craft shop, the varied glass of Florale works beautifully with the clean, organic lines of the bottle.  Assuming you find that iconic bottle attractive in the first place — and you´re forgiven if you don´t — rendered in a heavy, frosted glass it is eye-candy in a refined, less-is-more way.

Trying to figure out how I felt about Florale, I retried Kenzo Flower (technically, I think: FlowerByKenzo) for the umpteenth time.  I appreciate the irony of my long-standing dislike for Flower, which must surely be Kenzo´s best known and best selling scent.  Its popularity remains inexplicable to me.  I can´t say that I liked it this time, either, but repeat exposure means that I dislike it less, and I definitely prefer it to Florale.  Part of it is smell dissonance; the first 20 minutes of Flower on my skin is almost pure baby powder, and baby powder to me doesn´t mean pampering – it means babies, and babies are pretty much nothing but crying and work, no matter how much you love them.  It´s like the people who smell eugenol (cloves) in fragrance and can´t think of anything but toothache and miserable trips to the dentist.  Our smell memories are so individuated – on vacation in Maine, we were giving all the kids baby aspirin for their sunburn one day, and my sister-in-law mentioned how much she hates the smell of baby aspirin.  To her, the smell is unhappy because it is associated with being sick as a child and needing medicine.  I have the same association but in my mind it´s a happy one – baby aspirin is the smell of my mother taking care of me when I was sick.  In other words, the smell of baby aspirin is the smell of being lovingly tended to.

The drydown of Flower has really grown on me, though -once the violet and rose blow off I´m left with the funky, resin-y kick of opoponax, musk and hawthorne, along with the luminous glow of hedione, and what´s not to love about that?  I wonder if I keep trying it whether I´ll find myself wanting a bottle in a year or two.

March

You know what we need?  We need a break from March´s ponderous explorations of 80s big-hair scents and her other navel-gazing posts, complete with lint.  Well, thanks to a mercy box from someone (not naming any names) March can pull her head out of her Poison and report on the first hopeful signs of spring.

1) Snowdrops all over the neighbor´s yard.

2) These three new Kenzo Eau de Fleur dealies.  You know what a Kenzo gal I am, right?  (And no, they do not send me this crap to review as their BFF, although frankly they should.)  According to their website, “Kenzo flower waters are picked from Japanese trees.” {Note from me: one assumes this is not literal.}  “Each eau de toilette in the collection evokes a delicate trail of tree blossom. Three new fragrances made of natural, clear and streamlined floral notes. Every year, Kenzo will enrich this collection by picking another flower.” 

Let me point out (courtesy of NST) that the perfumers are: Jean Jacques (Soie), Aurelien Guichard (Tea), and Francis Kurkdjian (Magnolia), which might slow down any instantaneous dismissal of these as duty-free dreck.

So, we have:

Eau de Fleur de Soie Silk – look, they do the Franglish translamation from the Japanese for you right there on the label!  Fleur de Soie’s “shameless allure conceals its secret charm: a crimson floral note with a tender, fruity heart.”  As far as I can tell it´s an impression of Silk Tree mimosa (Albizia julibrissin, not to be confused with regular mimosa) with some watery notes and slightly tart fruit.   In Japan, silk tree is used for bonsai.  If you google you get gardening sites of people begging you not to plant silk tree mimosas – lovely as they are, they reseed rapidly and are considered an invasive exotic throughout much of the U.S.

Eau de Fleur de The Tea – “special edition.  Musky green floral. A white cowbell with a heart of gold. Sheltered under its leaves, the tea flower diffuses a floral concoction with notes of green tea and a hint of musk.”  Um… okaaay.  This is a floral tea.  It´s delicious.  This made me so happy because I had to grab several tea scents at random to compare, and what is more sprightly and happy and evocative of warmer weather than tea?  Anyhow, this Eau de Fleur is: less sweet than Nicolai Fig-Tea; not as weirdly rubbery/black as the Speziali Fiorentini (which is $24 and rocks at BE, here’s the link); kinda sorta in the direction of Bvlgari White without the herbs; heavier than L´Artisan The Pour un Ete.  I´m not sure I´ll run out and buy a bottle, since I have a lot of tea scents already, but if it appeared on my dresser I´d wear it.

Eau de Fleur de Magnolia – “Perched on their branches, magnolia flowers flaunt their dignified and willowy allure. A radiant floral bouquet, bursting with hesperidian notes, dances beneath a cloak of petals.”  A citrusy floral with a slightly funky undertone, which makes sense – magnolias smell weirdly lemony/mushroomy.  In my opinion. 

What did I think of these?  I thought they were a nicely done, in a cheerful, Kenzo-esque way.  If you think Kenzo is an inexplicable waste of time, these aren´t going to change your mind.  If you appreciate Kenzo´s lighter scents and slightly offbeat whimsy, they´re worth sampling (they´re on the Nordstrom website, not yet in my local store, but I assume they will be.)   Magnolia was my least favorite, the drydown being slightly murky-woody.  I found the Silk Flower surprisingly wearable – it´s less sweet than you´d guess and lasts decently without becoming cloying or edible, although please note that I was dabbing.  The Tea was my hands-down favorite.  It has an attractive musky base and doesn´t do any of the odd things tea scents can do on the skin (too sweet/sour/bitter/dank).

Kenzo bottle image: Nordstrom

P.S.: if you´re dying to feel the vintage YSL Paris love all over again – I bought an older bottle on eBay, please look carefully at this image at left.  I don´t know when they changed the box, but the newer ones are all pink, whereas the older ones have that wide black stripe down the middle and across the bottom of the box.  They show up pretty regularly on eBay, be sure to ask about the box if they’re using a stock photo.  I’m not sure whether there’s anything about the bottle that’s different, but this is definitely the box I remember.

My new, vintage EDT was the same nuclear blast from the past I remembered, and I couldn´t be happier.   The ones currently stocked in stores with the all-pink box are wan dupes of old Paris, and shame on them.

March

As regular readers know, I am an unaplogetic fan of the original KenzoAmour.  I think you either like it or you find it completely boring.  As Robin (a fellow fan) notes in her thoughtful review on Now Smell This:

 “Amour is, if anything, an extraordinarily tame fragrance: there is nothing to ruffle the surface other than a persistent undertone of dark wood and a dash of incense. But as with rice pudding, it is the blandness itself that is compelling; it just smells nice, and there is something rather calming about it.”   

Which pretty much captures the allure of KenzoAmour for me.  I wear it the way I drink tea – without a lot of thought, on a regular basis, in pursuit of comfort.  Maybe KenzoAmour isn´t that scent for you, but I think many/most perfume fans have a fragrance that does the same basic job for them.

So I´d been waiting impatiently for the new KenzoAmour Le Parfum to arrive in stores.  It went “live” in the online Sephora store several weeks ago, but I refused to order it because my unsniffed-purchase track record is so terrible it approaches jinx level.  It´s like the fragrance fairies put a curse on my unsniffed buys.  Even something that looks like a sure thing, and that I could return to Sephora if I didn´t like, would almost certainly be a failure.  So I haunted our local store like a cranky ghost.  Just when I gave up in despair and begged a sample off Robin (thus avoiding the curse) it showed up in our mall, and I´ve had the chance to try it several times.

I thought this would be a Venn-diagram-type review, where I´d be discussing where the two scents overlap and where they differ, but instead I´m left with the persistent image of two distinct musical pieces being played on opposite ends of the piano. 

The original KenzoAmour EdP´s notes are cherry blossom, rice steam, white tea, frangipani, heliotrope, thanaka wood, incense, vanilla and musk.  It´s played at a higher pitch – the sweet, cherry opening smell of flowers and heliotrope giving way rapidly to the heart of the fragrance, woody and with the smell of cooking rice, followed by vanilla, soft musk and incense.  It´s not remotely foody, despite that list of notes – there´s nothing there you would eat – but if it works on you as it does for me, it is a day-long skin scent, and extraordinarily comforting.

KenzoAmour Le Parfum, in a matte gold version of the same funky, modernist Karim Rashid bottle that the original came in, might have been simply a stronger version of the original.  Here´s the blurb from Sephora: “The gold of the East dwells at the heart of KenzoAmour le Parfum—a woody, oriental fragrance composed of rich and precious ingredients: Patchouli, Benzoin Balm of Siam, Amber, and Incense mixed with the original KenzoAmour notes.”  Sephora lists the notes of Le Parfum as incense, rice steam, amber, patchouli, frangipani, benzoin, vanilla.   Regardless of what Sephora says about mixing in the original notes, the old, sweet heliotropin top of the EdP is missing – probably a blessing for those who found it either too sweet or too evocative of Play-Doh.  Instead, Le Parfum takes place on the low end of the piano.  I get very little development – some (clean) patchouli, almost no florals, the original, lovely rice steam, lots of benzoin, and a dark vanilla over a woody, ambery base.  My favorite part of the parfum is that benzoin.  Le Parfum is hardly masculine, but it´s considerably darker and more unisex than the original.  It´s a little burnt, in an attractive way, like a flan instead of rice pudding.

Out of curiosity I did one of those seven-spritz numbers on myself one day in Sephora, including my hair, just to see what would happen – and it was fine, other than the SA looking at me strangely.  I thought at a higher concentration I might get a hint of the Play-Doh that Robin mentions in her review of the parfum, the heliotrope of the original having been supplemented/replaced with the even more Play-Doh-evoking amber.  I don´t know how you make “amber” in a fragrance, and I assume there are different choices for the chemical construct, as there are for musks.  Thankfully (crossing myself frantically and spitting over my shoulder) I, who have brought out the Play-Doh in more than one otherwise attractive fragrance, get none here.

I thought Le Parfum might resemble Kenzo Flower Oriental in its woody masculinity, but a resniff of Oriental proved me wrong.  Oriental is much more floral with the incense grafted on.  KenzoAmour Le Parfum and the EDP get closer together in the drydown, and I can´t help but think they´d layer beautifully.  As with the EDP, I find the lasting power very good  for a scent that does not wear heavily.

I delayed this review for a week, pondering the questions:  if the original didn’t do anything for you, might you like this any better?  I’ll offer a tentative yes — assuming you get benzoin and not just, say, ambernilla.  Which did I prefer?  Honestly, I’d have to say the original.  Lovely as Le Parfum is, without its peculiar, sweet milky-floral top, it doesn’t comfort me quite as much.  For others, that same lack of sweetness might be just the ticket.

The gold bottle´s getting some love on the blogs and boards, but seeing it at Sephora next to the others I admit my heart sank a little.   I came to appreciate the original, distinctive bottle shape, although it looks a little odd in my collection.  To my eye, the exterior finish for Le Parfum seems better in the concept than the execution, and is darker in real life than in the photo above.  It´s small (only 30ml) and ideally the matte, dark gold exterior would look like painted, burnished wood – my idea of what they were maybe going for.  But instead it looks a little cheap, like that spray-on antique-gold-leaf you´d find in a craft store.  A bright, shiny, mirror-finish plasticized gold might have been another fun option with that mod-design bottle, or black, which I think would be quite elegant.

top image: KenzoAmour Le Parfum, online at Sephora, $65, free shipping, and I feel compelled to point out they have the wee bottle gift set of the regular KenzoAmour again, 3 mini bottles for $38, image also included here because they are so darn cute.

March

While waiting impatiently for KenzoAmour Le Parfum to show up at our local Sephora, I got bored and ordered up a reasonably-priced bottle of Kenzo 7:15 AM in Bali, which I’ve seen random nice things said about on Basenotes, MUA and elsewhere.  I didn’t really even look at the notes; I knew there was some vanilla, and it sounded like a comfort scent.  Nobody loves some Kenzo comfort more than I do.

I am not sure what, precisely, I was expecting a fragrance evoking morning in Bali to smell like — woods?  Rice steam? Beach?  Anyhow, this definitely wasn’t it.  I went online and looked it up. The notes are very simple:  jasmine, vanilla, orchid and passionfruit.  Done by Daphne Bugey, it’s classified as a fruity floral and seems to be exclusive to duty free shops, as reviewers keep mentioning that’s where they found it, and I think it’s first in a travel series concept.

7:15 AM in Bali opens with a strongly citrus note, somewhere between grapefruit and orange, and a not particularly sweet or gourmand, slightly powdery vanilla.    Over the next 10 or 15 minutes the strongest citrus fades and I am left with the vanilla overlaying something sweet-tart and powdery, which I assume is the passionfruit, and that’s … pretty much the whole story for the rest of the day.  It’s not overwhelmingly strong, but it’s not exactly fleeting, either, a characteristic it shares with KenzoAmour, at least on me.

Full disclosure — I have no idea what a passionfruit smells like.  I spent some time online, and it’s humorous — you get the “passionfruit smells like passionfruit” problem, like “describe the color green.”  But passionfruit is apparently used to create a grapefruit smell in some body products, and I saw various descriptors evoking citrus, tartness, and creamy exoticism.  So I’m going to guess that the unfamiliar smell that coexists the entire time with the vanilla is passionfruit.  That non-vanilla part is a blend of grapefruit, cranberry, tangerine and mango, and that’s about the best I can do.  There’s a minuscule amount of gaminess in the long drydown (this thing lasts 16 hours, easily, on me) and I don’t know whether that’s the jasmine talking or the passionfruit.

Over the past year I’ve turned into a huge fan of vanilla, which probably surprised me as much if not more than it might have surprised you.  I like vanilla with all sorts of things, including smoke, wood and leather.  But not, as it turns out, with citrus.  Vanilla and citrus just smells … wrong to me.  I think it’s what I find so troublesome about actually trying to wear Shalimar Lite.  It’s the olfactory equivalent of biting into a chocolate from the heart-shaped box and discovering you just snagged the lemon cream.  Ugh.   I hate those things.  It’s a matter of personal taste, obviously, but I don’t think vanilla and citrus play nicely together on their own.  Dark smells like leather and woods damp the vanillic sweetness down.  Citrus doesn’t give vanilla anything substantial to anchor itself to; if anything it magnifies the cloying aspect.

So I shopped it around.  I wore it on and off all week, asking friends, family and (heck, why not?) random strangers what they thought.  It’s not difficult to wear, just a little peculiar — that unfamiliar sweet smell along with the vanilla.  Maybe they were just being nice to the crazy lady, but they loved it.   Women thought it was “sexy.” One man said, “delicious.”  So what do I know?  I guess it’s all that and a bag of chips (or more accurately, a bag of foreign candy.)  It’s an odd little thing, and I have to admit it grew on me.  This morning I was done fiddling with it, but I put it on anyway.  Just because I wanted to.

Outside of airports, 7:15 AM in Bali can be found without too much difficulty at various e-tailers for around $40 for 50 ml.  Image: fragrantica.com

March