August brought samples which turned out to be mostly a string of duds, and I was losing heart and readjusting my expectations downwards, both ultimately bad ideas. Then came a parcel from perfumer Antonio Gardoni, and my spirits lifted even while unpacking, because the wrapping paper smelled great, I assume from having absorbed ambient smells in his workshop. I had occasion to review Gardoni’s spectacular Maai two years ago, when I […]
Dominique Dubrana sent me two bespoke perfumes he did for clients and found especially satisfying. He is a French-born self-taught perfumer working in Italy, and spends a lot of his time in the South Sahara building water pumps for local villagers. I have been fond of his work for years, not least because he embodies the fact that the most important thing for an artist to have is talent. You can learn […]
One of the things I find hardest to do in my lab work (apart from keeping my mouth shut) is changing only one thing at a time when trying to perfect an experiment. If you make several changes, you’re not quite sure which made things better and you have to backtrack. The same applies to exceptional meals. If you go to a great restaurant and you order a dish you never […]
Jolie laide is a reputedly untranslatable French expression that means ugly-pretty. It and its old-fashioned sister tag beauté de singe denote the fact that Frenchmen used to find it inexplicable that a woman might exert compelling charm while not being obviously pretty. JL sent me seven samples of oils in lovely tiny roller bottles. They are all named after Nouvelle Vague movies, and merely reading the labels brought back delightful memories of the golden age of French cinema. These are botanicals, […]
When I was a schoolboy in Paris, I and my classmates would say to each other that we belonged in Charenton, site of a famous upper-crust mental asylum, even though it had lost that name decades earlier. CM chose the name because D.A.F de Sade spent time there (and wrote no doubt tedious things, now mercifully lost). Another patient was the great Paul Verlaine who, unlike Sade, wrote far too little. All […]
LO sent a neat box containing fourteen fragrances released between 2010 and 2016. The look is reassuringly, indeed soporifically hip, complete with slightly moth-eaten Courier typeface, square-format leaflet, Byredo-type bottles, lots of white space, nice photos. In short, all the perquisites of a niche firm that wishes to be carried in respectable stores, bought by young women in white Capri pants and Superga shoes, and one day be acquired for an eight-figure sum by L’Oréal. […]
Murphy’s Law. A long-awaited box of fragrances arrives from Canadian firm Libertine. First thing I do is break one of the bottles by opening the box too enthusiastically, manage to dip two smelling strips in what’s left and curse myself for being impatient and clumsy. That would have been Soft Woods, mopped up off the floor, its lovely smell mixed with the weird hospital waiting room smell of wet kitchen paper. On […]
Some things are sent to try us in the department of open-mindedness and forbearance. The blurb for Therapeutate —awkward neologism, btw— blithely describes the company’s botanical products as the “grass-fed option to other brands filled with petrochemicals and animal-by-products”, which would be laughable if it wasn’t sad. What is wrong with petrochemicals that isn’t also wrong with plants? If nature knows best, how come smallpox and hemlock? What animal byproducts? Does the whale […]
Andy Tauer and I go way back: I’ve loved his fragances right from the start, i.e. late in 2005 when I first smelled his Le Maroc and wrote about it in glowing terms. Then when Tania Sanchez and I wrote our perfume guide, we gave his L’Air du Désert Marocain five richly deserved stars. I like to think that we had a part in Andy quitting his day job and becoming a […]
The process from a good idea to a great perfume usually goes through a stage of broad strokes followed by a long, slow and painstaking stage of refinement. This is not unlike editing a text, where you may, in a burst of activity, write a couple of thousand words in a morning, then find yourself messing with one small thing or another for weeks. Half-way through the refining, you become thoroughly […]
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