What’s it like to be a perfume blogger?  Sometimes it’s like this.

Van Cleef & Arpels Cologne Noire.  I wonder sometimes whether a house, having released a line with two or three outstanding scents (Gardenia Petale, Bois d’Iris, and Muguet Blanc, depending) if the rest are guaranteed to be duds, if only by comparison.  Notes of ginger, cardamom, pepper, bergamot, bitter orange, mandarin, woody notes.  I’m having trouble putting my finger on what’s wrong with Noire, but something is.  The whole seems much less than its parts – disjointed and odd, with an aggressive raspiness and a pickled note that reminds me of the difficult Chanel Les Exclusifs – No. 18?  I tried to imagine whether I’d like this any better if it was at Macy’s and the newest offering from Britney.  And the answer, sadly, is no.  Why can’t I find those magnificent Dior colognes anywhere?  Why is life so unfair?  Why, why?

VC&A Orchidee Vanille – notes of mandarin orange, litchi, bitter almond, dark chocolate, Bulgarian rose, violet, vanilla pod, cedar, balsamic tonka bean and white musk.  Luca Turin in The Guide frequently describes scents as having a “candyfloss” note, and he often mentions a particular aromachemical component, which I’m too lazy to look up.  Orchidee Vanille is almost unbearably powdery at the top, after which it smells exactly like those weird, small bags of pre-made cotton candy that my kids buy at the corner market.  Not cotton candy + vanilla — just cotton candy.  It’s an interesting, sweet chemical smell, but not one I want to wear.  If I want to spray on an interesting, sweet chemical smell, I’ll take Gucci Rush, thanks.

Cartier L’Heure Brilliante – notes of lemon, flaxseed, gin notes and aldehydes.  Musette – I’m trying, I’m trying!!!  Honest to God! It’s very pretty, an herbaceous cologne smell on me.  I have no objections.  I just didn’t fall wildly in love as you did.  Don’t shoot me.

Cartier L’Heure Folle – this one was recommended by Carmencanada when I was doing my berry scent review last week.  Notes: redcurrant, pink peppercorn, grenadine, blueberry, blackcurrant, blackberry, violet, leafy notes, ivy, boxwood, shiso, aldehydes.  This is not berry nice on me.  There is an unfortunate canned-grapefruit note (sour/metallic) on my skin I can’t quite get past.  If you’ve ever eaten tinned citrus you know what I’m talking about.

Cartier L’Heure Promise – notes of petitgrain, fresh herbs, iris, sandalwood and musk.  I … oh.  Oh.  Oh my goodness.  Maybe I’ll talk about this on Wednesday.

Okay, your turn – what have you tried recently, maybe something raved about on the boards/blogs, that’s been a FAIL?  Go ahead, pick a fight with a fellow friend on the Posse!

Sources for all: private samples/decants.

March

Join me for a perfume ramble today, full of asides and opinion.  Since I generally deliver opinion by the shovelful, that should come as no surprise.

There was a confluence of events.  First, this is the time of year that the heart (at least my heart) cries out for big white flowers of the in-your-face variety – it’s something about the cold and the general dreariness.  These are not the sorts of things I want to wear … well, pretty much any other time of the year.  Lily?  Lily of the valley?   Er, no thanks.

Second – remember, waaaaaaay back last fall, when it seemed like between Van Cleef, Cartier and Francis Kurkdjian, we had a truckload of new scents worth considering dumped on us almost simultaneously?  It sort of bummed me out, that timing.  Then 20 seconds later we’d all moved on to Amaranthigh and … there’s something wrong with the new world order if I have a full set of decants for all three lines and never really spent enough time with them.

So I decided to revisit the three white florals from Van Cleef & Arpels — Gardénia Pétale, Muguet Blanc and Lys Carmin.

A general observation – it was brilliant of them to release these soliflores, in my opinion, particularly after the disappointing (to me) Feerie-thing, which I’ll stop ragging on because I know some of you loved it, and it’s not like I’m the Avatar of Good Taste.  Clawing my way desperately back on topic – these new Van Cleefs with their big ol’ single flower studies?  It sounds so old-school it seems new to me.  No, seriously, it’s almost … edgy.  Work with me on this one.  They could have gone with a white-floral and a fresh-floral and a man-scent and a floriental or three, but they come out with gardenia, lily, and muguet?  The old guard, people (unlike me) who actually shop at Van Cleef, likely aren’t offended.  And the rest of us, perfumistas all, get to wallow in single-flower studies that happen seldom enough in “modern” perfumery to get my attention.

I checked on MUA and there are hardly any reviews of these (although I see Feerie gets a crummy 35% rebuy rating, heheh, okay, I’ll stop) but if I’m understanding correctly, the two that have the most fans are Gardenia and Iris (with maybe Lys as the third?)  If you have a different sense of the popular perfumista opinion, weigh in.

I thought Gardénia Pétale was extraordinary the first time I smelled it, and my opinion hasn’t changed.  It’s both gardenia and Gardenia, the Ideal – enormous and glowing without feeling monstrous.  I’ve blogged on my gardenia lust in the past and I’m going to tentatively dub this my favorite in terms of (hyper-)reality.  If you look at the notes, you can see the bits that have been cobbled together to highlight what makes the smell of gardenia so haunting.  There’s the piercing orange-green note at the top, and the funky smell I think of as cheesy and others call mushroomy (and it’s that smell that makes gardenia something of an acquired taste.)  Then come the deep indolic notes that give it weight, jasmine and ylang, followed by a tuberose-ish powdery sweetness.  Notes are: citrus notes, green notes, gardenia, jasmine, lily of the valley.

Gardénia Pétale is a heavy fragrance with strong lasting power.  If you’re trying it out, it’s worth waiting for an hour or even two before making your decision.  It seesaws from the greener lily-of-the-valley aspect to the cheesier, riper notes before balancing itself out.  Like most heady white florals, I wouldn’t wear this to the office (lots of people hate gardenia, the same way they hate jasmine, lily or tuberose), but if you’re looking for the olfactory equivalent of tucking a gardenia in your hair before a party, this is probably it.  Put it on a couple hours ahead of time, and use a light hand.

My all-time-favorite gardenia is Strange Invisible Perfumes’ (sadly discontinued) Lady Day, which I love for its melancholy, but even I have to admit this is truer to the actual flower.

Muguet Blanc has been kind of a mixed bag for lily-of-the-valley lovers, mostly I think because it suffers in comparison to the now-bastardized Diorissimo; without the dirty base of civet that many love, muguet ends up smelling like the familiar smell of a household product, lily-of-the-valley soap with a higher price point.  While I am blessed/cursed with a lack of proper appreciation for Diorissimo, I can’t say I worked up much of an appreciation for Muguet Blanc either.  It’s an extremely cold fragrance, and on my skin it’s almost unbearably soapy (the neroli isn’t helping matters in that regard).  I grew up picking small bouquets of lily of the valley from the neighbors’ yards, and while it’s been eons since I smelled the flower properly, I’m remembering something greener and sweeter and less aqueous than Muguet Blanc, which does indeed smell like expensive soap to me rather than a proper flower.  It also has a musky base that throws me a little.  Patty loved it, so don’t take my word for it.  Notes: lily-of-the-valley, white peony, neroli and white cedar.

Finally there’s Lys Carmin.  If I liked the Muguet Blanc less than I expected to, Lys Carmin was a surprise in the other direction. Non-gourmand vanilla lovers alert – read on. I’m not a proper lily-lover when it comes to fragrance; I appreciate them in the abstract, but something like Donna Karan Gold, which I think is a great fragrance, tends to be migraine-inducing.  I can’t help but notice that Lys Carmin, of these three, adheres more to popular convention than the other two, with more spicy warmth than a “typical” lily fragrance, but it’s a convention I happen to like.  It’s sweetly woody and smells less like a soliflore than a cold-weather comfort scent, spicy/vanillic without being gourmand.  I can’t imagine this would be anything but a disappointment for anyone looking for a Stargazer-lily or Easter-lily scent.  Instead it smells like an extremely high-end version of the spicy vanilla trend, quieter and not stunningly unusual.  It’s woody rather than gourmand (that lush vanilla-sandalwood drydown — squeeeee!)  I moved this decant to my winter-comfort shelf.  It’s as cozy as a cashmere sweater.  Notes: lily, pink peppercorns, ylang-ylang, vanilla and sandalwood. ** Update — I swear this reminds me of something, it must be a niche vanilla, but I can’t think what.  Any ideas?

Source of decants: private samples from The Perfumed Court.

March

We have come to the last two in this series.

Notes of lily, ylang, vanilla, sandalwood and peppercorns compose Lys Carmin. The name is very apt. This is a spiced-up lily.  I get used to the more common pristine, virgin’ish lily, the one of Easter and springtime. This lily is more the in full bloom of summer.  It’s ripe and the stamen is spreading all of that yellow dust that gets all over your hands. It’s almost messy, but not quite. This is probably my least favorite of the six. Not sure why exactly, but I get almost a plasticky smell from it. I really like the spiciness and the angle they were taking, but it just doesn’t seem to work on my skin. If anyone else has smelled this and gets a different take on it, please post your thoughts.  After several hours, I did wind up liking it  more as that plastic smell seemed to fade, but the fading also muddied it a bit on me.  Liked it okay, didn’t love it.

Cologne Noire, while giving more of a nod to the masculine fragrances, is the one of the six that is the most unisex.  Created by Mark Buxton with notes of ginger, cardamom, pepper, bergamot, bitter orange, mandarin and wood notes.  Octavian reviewed it, and I’m not sure there is much I can add to his excellent review. It does carry the spiciness in a cool way. Not ice cold.  It dries down to a lovely woodsy scent, but still carrying the spices, deepened with incense.  It carries the Mark Buxton olfactory stamp, so if you already have a Mark Buxton that you love, you probably don’t need this one.  I definitely like it, but it fails to move me in some transcendant way towards my wallet.  If you were missing the Mosbudd whatever thing, this is pretty close to it.

So two of these that didn’t turn out as well on me. I guess it’s good that only four of the six won me over, but that’s a really good batting average.

Since the blog was down last week when I did the announcement of the drawing for two sample sets, I’m going to make it three and draw from commenters on this post and the one last week.

We do think the blog is working again. We finally got the upgrade notice to a new software version that’s been out a while, so we think some of the weirdness may be fixed.  I sure hope it is!!

Moving on.  Has anyone sniffed the Cartier things yet? I read a couple of quite notes on Basenotes that they were fine, but not that special.  At 225-250 (?) per bottle, I guess they have a higher bar to get over, but I’m still anxious to sniff them since Cartier’s stuff is normally pretty interesting, or has been.

Patty

I got my hands on another sampler pack of the VCAs, so we will have a draw today for two sets of samples of all six of the Van Cleef & Arpels Collection Extraordinare scents. Just drop a comment in and you’ll be entered.

There have been some great reviews of Bois d’Iris from VCACE (just abbreviating this).  Robin covered it, as did Octavian.  Iris and I have been constant companions for years. It is one of two notes that surprised me when I first got serious about perfume. The other note is violet.  Who knew I would grow to love those two notes so much when I’d never really thought about either of them for decades.

Notes for Bois d’Iris are sweet notes, frankincense, iris, driftwood, vetiver, ambergris, labdanum, myrrh, vanilla.  After all the iris perfumes I have known and loved – Serge Lutens Iris Silver Mist, Dior Homme, TDC’s Bois d’Iris, Chanel Bois des Iles – it never occurred to me that I could find another that was unique enough to add to my all-star iris lineup.  VCA did just that.  Bois d’Iris floats, but constantly calls up earthy components, so it never feels disembodied or ghost-like.  There’s a saltiness from the ambergris, joined by the smoky incense and wood that is warm and just whispers around the nose.  Although it has vanilla in it, which is noticeable, this is a far cry from a gourmand.  If you’re an iris lover, just go buy it, you’ll thank me later.  Everyone says it doesn’t stick around, and I just didn’t find that to be true.  As with all the VCAs, they emote softly and for a nice length of time on me.  So while I don’t get the whole when pressing my nose up to my skin, this one also just wafts as I walk.  I do get the smell of woody incense on the skin all the way through.  It’s persisted on my skin or in wafting for 4+ hours, which is pretty good in perfume years.

My father’s funeral was right before Christmas. Overnight it had misted and frozen all those droplets of water to the trees, the house, the grass.  I walked outside that morning, bundled up against that cold.  It was so cold, my tears would have frozen, if I’d had any left  The sun hit the blanket of tiny icicles covering the world, and the light exploded, shattering my pain in a blinding moment of beauty, leaving it forever etched in my head as the second in my life when sorrow and hope existed perfectly side by side without judgment or regret.

Muguet Blanc made me think of that second. It is breathtaking, its opening the perfect note soaring into the air on a cold winter day, something that feels like it shouldn’t exist, contrasts of cold and sweet and wood — conjuring up spring in your head where no spring exists.  As it dries down, it warms and softens into the skin and loses the chilliness. Notes of lily of the valley, peony, neroli and cedar are pretty simple, but rendered elegant.

It’s a stunnah.  And this last and lasts and emotes fairly loudly.  The first time I spritzed it on, the whole house knew in 3 minutes that a new perfume had arrived, they were all looking for it.  Several hours in, it’s still wafting and drifting and just being lovely.

A note on the VCAs that I got wrong before. It is $185 for 75 mls, which is 15 more mls than I thought was in the bottle.  That’s a better price point per ml, a little over $2 a ml.  You know.  I don’t have to say it anymore, do I?  If $200 is the new $100, then these are a bargain.

I’ve been thinking about this whole wafting thing.  Does anyone else notice that about a perfume?  There are some that it is hard to really get a nose-bead on if you snuffle where you sprayed it, but if you just walk through a room, you get the full effect. I often wonder if perfumers try perfumes that way to what kind of trail they have, or are some just a happy accident?  I adore the wafters, which I think of as different from sillage monsters. To me, sillage monsters are the ones that are overpowering and big. Wafters aren’t necessarily strong, but you don’t get how beautiful the perfume is until you smell it trailing off of someone.  I’d far rather a great wafter than about anything else.  I think it’s that effect of leaving ambience behind you that tickles a person’s sense, and they usually have no idea where it came from, they just know it is beautiful, and then it’s gone.

Patty

After reading some of the early reports on this new collection from Van Cleef & Arpels collection Extraordinaire, I wasn’t expecting much. Nieman-Marcus was offering a set of samples as a freebie when you buy something else, so I was happy to get them and see for myself. The price point doesn’t make me happy, $180 for 50 mls. Is this the new price hurdle? More importantly, are the worth it?

I had intended to blast through all six of them in one post, but I think it will take longer.

Orchidee Vanille was created by Randa Hammami. Notes of mandarin orange, litchi, bitter almond, dark chocolate, Bulgarian rose, violet, vanilla, cedar, balsamic tonka bean and white musk make up the perfume. Octavian has reviewed all of these perfumes, and if you look at the bottom of his post, there are links to the others. Like him, I was surprised. I don’t have his knowledge of the chemicals/ingredients that go into the perfumes, but this is clearly a well made perfume. I expected a much sweeter concoction, which is what you usually get if a perfumer/designer chooses to pair orchid and vanilla either in the notes or the name. This is slightly smoky, offering up the vanilla pod as the main feature, with a little bit of a booziness floating around. This isn’t the heavy gourmand vanilla scent, it floats like an evening on a tropical beach with the soft breeze blowing across your face. It reminds me a little of Le Labo’s Vanille 44. Some may complain that it’s just not strong, but it has that same wafting quality that I found in the Vanille 44. I’m a big fan of wafters, I don’t need the perfume to be completely present as I press my nose against my skin, but I do need it to gently scent the air so I smell this great echo as I walk through a room. I think it is so delicate and gorgeous. Like Octavian, if I hadn’t been told it was from Van Cleef & Arpels, I would have pegged it more for a Guerlain La Matiere scent, though a much lighter one, a more ethereal Spiriteuse Double Vanille. Spraying this perfume is essential. So if you get that little sample set from NM, get a sprayer. You’re welcome in advance.

Gardenia Petale has notes of green and citrus, lily-of-the-valley, jasmine and gardenia. Wow. The full smelly gardenia shows up on first spritz, but it’s tempered with the other notes so it’s not as bleu cheesey as it could be and as some are, like the Tom Ford. It just feels lush, like a fully in bloom gardenia. The gardenia always makes me think of ripe women. No, not like that. I mean, as women age, we get a softness, a decay that I’ve always thought is incredibly sexy, and the gardenia just seems to embody that change that women go through in their lives. Gardenia Petale blooms in the open, ripening until you’re thinking, oh, dear, and then it just pulls back into the lily, jasmine and tuberose. It’s not as sweetly pretty as the Isabey Gardenia, which is another gardenia that I love. I typically don’t like gardenia perfumes, Lady Day from SIP and the Isabey being two exceptions. This is another.

Okay, there you have it! I’d offer a sample set, but I’m clearly going to spray all of my little vials of this, sorry! From just the sniffing in the vial and these two, this collection clearly belongs together. I’m sniffing the Gardenia next to the Vanille, and they sit side by side beautifully. I’m pretty sure you could layer or combine most of these to create something else. I’ve heard some complaints about tenacity. These two seem to have good staying power. They aren’t muscle perfumes, flexing their little olfactory biceps all the time until you beg them to stop with soap and a scrub brush. They seem softer, but linger. The gardenia is pretty darn tenacious, though, but I expected that one to be the most tenacious of the six.

So Van Cleef & Arpels delivered with their big high-end launch for me. I’m hoping Cartier doesn’t fail me when they launch theirs. But is it too much to ask that they do a darn coffret of 1/4-1/2 ounce of all of them? I’m not sure I can answer the question if they are worth it or not. I think that price point is too much for any perfume, but I do understand when they do it because someone else has already been there. Would I pay that for at least these two? Yeah, but I’m an idiot that way (hey, Mon Precioux, I’m looking at you!)

Patty