Her Fetish Perfume

Les Parfums de Rosine has hacked out their own section of the niche perfumers' market by doing nothing but rose fragrances. I approve. I also approve of their English-language website, which is hilarious. They may just have a translator who is not all that native-fluent in English, but I suspect that at least some of the time they're using computer translation. Add to this the very French method of describing each fragrance in terms of the woman who uses it, and you have some delightfully fun reading. The fragments below don't do it justice. Go and read.

They begin by telling you a little about the perfumer:

Marie-hélène Rogeon was born into a family of perfume makers and her grand grand father Louis Panafieu was creating Eau de Cologne for the Emperor Napoleon III and a famous Pommade des Mousquetaires for his lacquer like finish moustaches.

They also tell you about their production method:

Every product is scrupulously packed by experimented workers.

And they tell you about the perfumes. This is from my favorite description:

A new fragrance for spring, DIABOLO ROSE, a joyful combination of rose and mint.

She always moves. On a fine and fresh face draged out an impertinent smile.
She drinks sparkled waters, mint lemonades (lemon soda flavoured with mint syrup), green ice tea.

She walks in the street with her favorite purse, crouched under her arm like a charm.
She arrests and looks for DIABOLO ROSE, her fetish perfume.

When she was a child, she played diabolo, now she plays another game. To charm amuse her. She attracts attention. And hearts fly.

I've been experimenting with the Rosines to see if they make my rose-loving heart fly. Here's the results from the first five products from the hands of the experimented workers:

1. Zeste de Rose ("On a fresh and delicate note, Un Zest de Rose gives the feeling of being neat.") This is a citrus rose, very fresh and in-your-face to begin with, and developing a sort of tea-rose (or Tea Rose) quality. Almost apple-y, although I don't think there's an intentional apple note. Very summery, clean and not too sweet. I like it.

2. Rose d'Ete ("Rose d’Eté is wearing by a blooming and happy woman whose beauty is natural and sensual.")At first sniff I did not care for this as much as the Zeste. It has lotus, or something, one of those watery-smelling things I usually do not go for at first sniff. It smelled a bit--unfocused. Not so much rose. I kind of shrugged, and went out wearing it--and it bloomed. I was getting lovely wafts of it, and it was mixing in with the wafts from people's gardens as I walked, and it was just cool, and pleasant, and the absolute soul of summer. I REALLY like it. Possible purchase.

3. Rose Kashmirie ("She is so baroque and loves to be exuberant.") This is supposed to be an oriental, with rose attar, and saffron, and God knows what else. A "wintery" rose. I was hoping for a slightly more affordable and functional something-something like the great YOSH Winter Rose disaster. I get baby powder. Nice, slightly rose-scented baby powder, but baby powder all the same. I have put the sample aside, wondering if it may develop better on me during cold weather.

4. Rose de Feu ("Her universe is intimate and is only revealed by the firelight.")
Spicy rose, and I may return to this, because I haven't really worn this all day yet. It is indeed spicy, and seems nice. I suspect it's another cold-weather fragrance. Look for later commentary.

5. Poussiere de Rose ("She may be nostalgic, also she is very active. Her world is the soft elegance of her apartment.") I had to look this one up, "poussiere" means "dust". It's a woodsy, incensey, floral, rather subtle, and it does dry down to a sort of dry quality, which is indeed more like incense dust than powder. It's got some of the qualities I was looking for with the Shaal Nur, and I really do like it.

More to follow--I have ten or eleven of these things to go.

Safran Troublant

Splashed Safran Troublant by L'Artisan all over me, and went about my business.

First things first--Safran Troublant makes me smell like a Persian dessert, with all that saffron and the rose backup. I have no problem smelling like a Persian dessert. It was pleasant. I like saffron in food, and I found it kind of nice to have floating around me.

I do not understand the name. 'Troublant', if I understand correctly means 'troubling', 'disturbing', something like that. L'Artisan translates the name as "Saffron Spell". All of this led me to imagine something deeper, more acrid, more intense. Naah. Iranian dessert treat. I think Mashti Malone makes an ice cream that tastes exactly like this smells, with pistachios in it. It's sweeeeet saffron, that's the strongest impression I get from it. Innocent. Kind of charming.

I like it, I do. The saffron smell is awfully nice. I guess I was expecting something dryer and darker. I can see wearing this again--it's a nice sort of weekend smell. It's also inspired me to make risotto milanese some time soon, so this is an all-around win, no?

YOSH? OMG!

So, OK, somehow I become fixated on descriptions of the YOSH Winter Rose perfume oil. Everyone keeps commenting on how expensive it is, and indeed $200 bucks seems quite expensive for a full bottle, but I figure it sounds really good, and I should smell it, so I order up a sample from Luckyscent.


Now, eight bucks is more money than I have ever spent on a perfume sample, but what the heck, so I order me my sample, and they deliver it, and I notice, you know, that it's a very small sample.


Oh hell, smell it, says I, so I smell it. And I hope, by now, that it will not smell nice, so that I can stop being obsessed with this stuff.


But it smells nice. Dear God it smells nice. Apparently cardamom and rose is, like, the world's most inspired combo, like chocolate and peanut butter, or Lucy and Ricky.

It makes my heart yearn and calm at the same time. It smells super. And I smear on a bit more, and go about my business.

And the smell vanishes.

I mean, vanishes.

Now I normally do not like perfumes to stick and stick, but this stuff simply vanishes off the face of the earth, like five minutes after application. So I apply some more, and it is really nice. But after about two minutes I can smell the oil base more strongly than the rose and cardamom and this continues until the scent completely vanishes at about minute seven and a half.

OK, so it's a lovely smell, but not really suited for wearing, and expensive--strike this one off the list, reluctantly. But then, somehow, I go back to Luckyscent to read the reviews--discovering in the process that I am not the only one this fades on--and I suddenly realize something.

That $200 bucks? That's for EIGHT MILILITERS.

OK. This is simply a scam.

But the rose/cardamom is amazing, really amazing, and I may try to recreate it with cheaper oils at some point--it's kind of wonderful.

Two Plum Fragrances

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

-- William Carlos Williams

I have now sniffed something from L'Artisan. (It's a momentous moment in a wannabe-perfumista's life.) The something that I sniffed is Voleur de Roses, which is apparently a rose/patchouli fragrance with a plum 'note' or hint. At least that's what I get from various online readings. You couldn't tell by my nose, which informs me that this perfume basically smells like a plum. A superlative plum, with some rose and patchouli making it even better.

The straight juice in the teeny-tiny vial smelled awful to me, chaotic and very alcoholic, but as soon as it was on my skin it relaxed and began to smell wonderful, plummy but, at this point, with a fair amount of rose, and something I identified as violet-like. It smelled goooood at any rate, mysterious, but simple and serene.

I spent a few minutes sniffing my wrists while I did my morning before-work stuff, and determined that all the bloggers who said L'Artisan scents fade quickly seemed to be right. (This is OK with me. Perfumes that cling and cling tend to make me crazy.) I put on some more, several dabs more, and headed off to work, smelling serene and mysterious.

By the time I started work, the smell had turned into a clear, vibrant, plum scent, sweet but with a sharpness that reminded me of that sour taste that stays around a plum pit no matter how sweet the fruit. Just a little floral, and a little patchouli. It smells amazing, fruity but not too sweet, like the smell of an orchard with rose bushes and cold dew-soaked grass under the trees, with just a little wet dark earth.

Somehow it felt like a very deep and emotional smell, but serene, super serene.

Later that evening, after the last of the vibrant, emotional, plum serenity had wafted away, I tried Keiko Mecheri's Ume. This is a totally different plum, spicy and salty and reminding me a great deal (as I had hoped), of the little sweet-and-salty plum candies I remember from when I was a kid, that they still give you after your meal at the King of Thai noodle places. Definately a plum candy rather than the straight plum off the tree. It's rich, and has a kind of deliberately exotic smell to it--sort of 1920s Orientalesque adapted with a little modern Asian-American irony. It's cheerful and sexy, maybe even sassy, and it made me smile.

Oddly enough, thinking about where I would wear these, I came up with New Years', but in a very different context. Voleur de Roses, I thought, would be great for Rosh Hashanah, with that harvest-fruit scent, and the deep calm that goes with it. Ume I could see wearing either to a secular New Years' party, or for the Lunar New Year in February. It would be a great winter smell, as spicy and warm as it is, and I can see wearing it while eating Chinese food and toasting the new year with plum wine that smells a little like my perfume.

Funny, I never thought fruit perfumes would be something I would go for.

Eau d'Italie

I am still in the newbie stage of perfume addiction, where I want to smell everything, and I keep reading all the blogs, and getting excited about each new brand and scent I hear about. I want to smell everything. It was while I was trawling around for rose perfumes--I love rose scents, and haven't actually found The One I want yet, that I learned about Eau d'Italie, from someone who was reviewing their Paestum Rose perfume.

Apparently, Eau d'Italie is the brainchild of a woman who is part of the family that runs the world-famous (although I'd never heard of it before) Le Sirenuse Hotel in Positano, Italy. Eau d'Italie (and why does it have a French name, pray tell?) is a series of perfumes meant to evoke various parts of Italy. I was sold. For one thing, the whole set-up seemed like the setting for a Judith Krantz novel, and for another, I could hardly think of anything cooler than smelling like Italy. (There IS nothing cooler than smelling like Italy. Really.)

So I ordered me some decants.

The concept behind the first fragrance, Eau d'Italie seems to have been to capture the scent of the Amalfi coast in summertime. I have never been to Amalfi (alas, alas), but the Mediterranean summertime smell of this fragrance was incredibly familiar and resonant for this Northern California girl. "Angel Island!" I said after wearing it for a while. "Marin!"

It's the smell of clay and soil baking out in the summer heat, just a note of citrus from someone's backyard, a million herbs and flowers, dust kicking up under your hiking boots, and a chorus of insects screaming in the hills as the Pacific rolls silver-bright downhill from you. Well, it is for me, anyway.

I guess this makes sense. I live in a region with a Mediterreanean climate, and I suppose it is natural that some of the natural scents and aesthetics should overlap. The note that seems to make this perfume stand out for me is the red-clay smell that I get most strongly from it. Per fragrantica.com, "The accord of soil or the mineral accord of clay (argile in French) is the central note of the composition." It reminds me most of the summer smell of the hills around here, and I got another strong whiff just yesterday when I accompanied students from the school I teach at to a park with a baseball diamond. The red clay smell hit me in the face, and I said "Eau d'Italie!" And grinned.

I also got a little decant of Sienne l'Hiver. This did not require any time to get to know it and think about it. I had a visceral reaction to Sienne l'Hiver. Synapses went off. Pleasure centers in the brain lit up like fireworks. And I had to crack down on my first instinct, which was to drink it. Swear to Bob, as my students say, I almost poured out the decant straight onto my tongue.

Having avoided this, (what happens if you drink perfume, anyway? I grew up on stories of drunks in the U.S.S.R. drinking cologne for the alcohol content--but I made myself fairly queasy accidentally swallowing a slug of mouthwash a while ago) I am still experimentally taking the top off the Sienne l'Hiver every couple of days and sniffing it, just to get that "Uh huuuuh!" reaction from my brain again. It's so totally a fall/winter smell that I haven't been wearing it, although I sometimes dab my wrist so I can sniff while I watch TV or grade papers.

I get a lot of roasted chestnut from it, and smoke and incense. Apparently there is a black olive note--perhaps that's the slightly salty-rich smell that seems to underly the whole thing. I think the concept is to evoke a winter day in Siena--the chestnut vendors and the historical churches and such. For sure it's less familiar a smell to me than the Eau d'Italie is, but it evokes a wonderful sense of comfort and wonder combined--and I have a dreadful feeling that I will buy a whole bottle. I can hardly wait for November, just so I can wear this in cold, bleak weather. Mmmm. Good.

Now, the scent that actually brought me to this line, you may recall, was the Paestum Rose. To which my reaction was, in the words of Bart and Lisa Simpson, 'meh'. It's nice, but I basically smell heavy sweet roses and incense. I have no problem with either smell, but I am willing to bet I could find a body oil that smells exactly like this in a store on Telegraph Avenue or the Haight for seven bucks. It seems pretty strong for anything except a rave, (which I so rarely attend ;). There's something old-fashioned about it to me--it either evokes hippies (one of my students, who love Led Zeppelin could wear this), or very old-fashioned indeed--it seems Roman, possibly. Something ancient, and interesting, but not something I could wear any more than I could wear Liz Taylor's eye makeup from Cleopatra. (I bet Cleopatra would have gone for this fragrance, though. It is pretty sexy.)

I totally want to try the Magnolia Romana and Bois d'Ombrie scents.

The packaging, as you can see, is pretty awful. WHY have a line evoking all the regions of Italy and then package them in generic hairspray bottles? Oh well. When I have my own hotel in Italy I can put the signature perfume in anything I want, I guess.

Gunmetal Rose

In my first round of decants ordered from Perfumed Court, I decided to try out Creed's Fleur de The Rose Bulgare. I have a fondness for all things rose, you see, and I'd heard such lovely things about this fragrance that I just figured I had to check it out.

The problem I've found is that, rather than the pure fresh rose I was expecting, the effect is rather like a pure fresh rose mixed with metal, and not nice metal. (What would nice metal smell like?) That smell your hands get after you've rolled all your loose nickels into rolls for the bank? It's that smell, compounded with flowers. Roses pounded with dirty nickels. Floral base metal.

Ghahhah. The mind rebels. I actually pull away from the smell of this, with my face screwed up, trying to avoid it. Apparently I am not the only person afflicted with this problem. One commenter at Now Smell This writes: "For some reason, that one came off metallic, like tin, on me. It smelled like a rose wrapped in aluminum foil."

Now Smell This sensibly replies: "It is a wonderful thing when something expensive smells horrible on the skin, no?"

Oh yes. I still have the better part of a milliliter of this stuff left. Send me an SASE, and it's yours. Now I have to go and scrub my wrists. I put on one last dab of the gunk before posting, to see if the earlier impression was hasty. It was not. My wrist smells like gunmetal and dying flowers. Soap! SOAP!