Monsillage sent me samples, including two larger bottles of fragrances that owner-perfumer Isabelle Michaud thought I would like. She was right: Eau de Céleri is a very refined, urbane, and charming spicy-herbaceous composition, the sort of fragrance you put on every summer morning as you would an Eau de Cologne. The difference is that the entire, and very clever, accord involves little or no citrus and achieves freshness by completely different and […]
Perhaps one of the most mysterious associations in all of perfumery is denoted by the term “powdery”. Why should one state of matter smell like another? What primeval talcum powder have we all inhaled that smelled like heliotropin? Was it some face powder in a circular box with a little dusting pad? Is it, perhaps conversely, the fluffy aspect of mimosa flowers that causes the association? Does everyone think powdery in response […]
Many years ago I was standing in line with my girlfriend in a dismal Chinese takeaway in South London, well past midnight, when a young, pudgy, pale-faced young man behind us caught sight of my companion’s face. He put his hand to his mouth, took two steps back and in a shaky voice said “Blanche….. you’ve come back!” He explained that he had an obsession with a Victorian murderess, rummaged through his […]
One look at the streetview of Rubini’s address in Mantova is enough to make you drool with envy at the thought that people actually live there. Apparently the Rubini perfumery was there in 1937, supplying fragrances, among other places, to neighborhood brothels. Nothing could be further from a tart’s handbag esthetic, however, than this odd fragrance. The top notes manage somehow to smell close to radish, the heart has a green banana […]
Ömer Ipekçi is an artisan perfumer working in Turkey whose work was recommended to me by Franco Wright at Luckyscent. At my request OI sent me five samples of his Pekji fragrances. My favorite is Rûh (soul, in Arabic). It is a beautiful accord of rose, coffee and cardamom that brilliantly conjugates three orthogonal senses of the word fresh embodied by those three materials: dewy rose petals, freshly brewed, and cool in the […]
I have admired Mathilde Laurent’s work for years, to be precise since she did Pamplelune in 1999, still in my opinion the best Aqua Allegoria of all. She then composed Shalimar Eau Légère and Attrape-Coeur, both perfect exemplars of the neoclassical Guerlain tradition. I had not smelled much of her recent work, but was alerted to L’Heure Perdue by Dali Nimer, a reader of this blog who described it as “one of […]
Rrose Sélavy was the pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp’s female persona. The old prankster made sure it could mean many things, possibly an ironic take on rose-tinted glasses commonly used to look at life. MCG has named her soliflore after her. The list of materials reads like a Dada poem: Rose petals Turkish rose May rose Rose accord Michelle rose Rose stems Rose leaves Rose is a hard thing to get right, because none […]
My Latin is sparse and rusty, but still good enough to know that stringing two nominatives together, as in Aqua Sextius*, will not get you into Oxford. But Guerlain (Aqua Allegoria) gets away with it, so why not? The fragrance, composed by Cécile Zarokian, is a technical marvel. I’ll wager that every oil house has analysed this one to death and told its perfumers to copy it. It belongs to that very small […]
When I lived in North Carolina I used to go at weekends to a spectacular grocery called Fowler’s, now sadly closed, smack in the centre of tobacco-town Durham. The place had the peculiar, eerie quiet of US downtowns outside working hours. Dotted all around were windowless buildings full of tobacco to the eaves. The rich, complicated smell of cured tobacco was everywhere, as always poised midway between delicious and poisonous. […]
While at Esxence, I walked past the Jacques Fath stand without stopping when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the name Green Water which I remembered from years ago as a complete joke. I was wrong: this was not the dismal earlier reissue, but an entirely different new thing done for Fath by independent perfumer Cécile Zarokian, together with three other fragrances. Her name seemed to be […]
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