Month: September 2011

The Crimson-Petaled Dark and Light


– a review of En Voyage Perfumes’ L’Emblem Rouge

Without roses, there would be no perfumes. Roses are the heart and soul of more great perfumes than you could possibly name in one breath, in grand, opulent soliflores and classical florals, in chypres and Orientals…there’s always, but always… rose. One niche line – les Parfums de Rosine – does nothing but interpretations of rose in all its myriad glories, and others create entire Wagnerian operas of rose, such as Serge Lutens’ staggering Sa Majesté La Rose or Amouage’s equally titanic Lyric Woman.

Once upon a time, I loved a rose perfume so much, I moved on to other things when it was reformulated rather than be bitterly disappointed. Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Paris’ – or should I say, the memory of what it used to be – will always be very dear to my heart. Since then, I’ve loved a few, but these days, I have a caveat…I like my roses dark, rich and complex, roses with a definite Gothic vibe, and such roses are not so easy to find.

Or so I thought until I received samples of En Voyage Perfumes’ L’Emblem Rouge eau de parfum and the accompanying hydrosol.

Shelley Waddington, the Carmel-by-the-Sea based perfumer behind En Voyage, has thoroughly impressed me before, when I encountered her Vents Ardents. Vents Ardents, which I reviewed briefly here, is a tropical citrusy tobacco vacation in a bottle, the Montego-Bay-in-a-spray that takes me away…so much, I’m saving it for those really wretched November and January days when I need all the help I can get.

The eau de parfum of L’Emblem Rouge is an altogether extraordinary rose. If you think you have rose perfumes all nicely categorized, if you consider rose perfumes to be rather insipid, old-fashioned or…perish the thought – boring, then I beg you to reconsider. L’Emblem Rouge is not…that kind of rose.

A bal masque is in full swing as I open that vial, swirling and sparkling in the light with all the èlan of its many characters – all of them different aspects of the star of the show. You know she’s there, but first, say hello to the many parti-colored dominoes she likes to wear to the ball…the spicy, warm spark of cinnamon, mace and cassie, and next, the dusky twilit greenery of citrus, green pepper and galbanum, adding yet another facet to the velvety depths that draw her out and lure you in, one plush crimson petal at a time. And such petals they are!

Whatever the quality of the organic Iranian rose otto that’s listed in the notes, it must be truly spectacular stuff. Hidden in those crimson depths is an all-star cast of supporting roles, some of them easily detectable, such as the ylang ylang, a whisper of jasmine sambac with its intimations of sensuous green, and violet that makes every rose bloom more opulent than before. But the overall impression, that heady, audacious, silky-velvety rose in the darkest, deepest shades of crimson never wavers and never falters, it just opens and blooms for its long, lovely entrance, and there it stays, finally giving way to an equally luscious drydown of woods, benzoin, tolu and a mere touch of vanilla and ambergris, all of them somehow adding up to a memory of a rose you’re not likely to forget anytime soon.

L’Emblem Rouge also comes in a hydrosol – the watery end-product of essential oil distillation, but here enriched and accentuated by master distiller Dabney Rose by further additions of rose…and I suspect a few drops of moonlight, too! I’ve sprayed this in my lingerie drawer and I’ve sprayed this on my pillow, and it was never less than a sheer, rosy delight to encounter. But rose water is one of the oldest cosmetics in the world, and on the recommendation of Trish of Scent Hive, I sprayed it on my foundation brush the other morning. I knew she was on to something when a colleague complimented me at work. Of course, I’ll never tell that for an ordinary Thursday, I borrowed just a little beauty….from an extraordinary rose called… L’Emblem Rouge.

I’m never happier than when I get to prove Gertrude Stein wrong. This rose is no mere rose, no run of the mill garden mainstay. This is an altogether different velvet-petaled crimson promise, and something in L’Emblem Rouge makes me want to paraphrase a few lines of one of my favorite poets, who was never a stranger to roses such as this one.

What was said to the rose…
That made it open
Was said to me
Here, in this vial…

Five percent of all L’Emblem Rouge proceeds are donated to Broadway Cares, a leading non-profit AIDS fundraising and grant making organization.

Notes:
Top: Cassie, mace, cinnamon, bitter orange, juicy grapefruit, green pepper, Iranian galbanum, violet, cistus
Heart: Organic Iranian rose otto, ylang ylang, heliotrope, French jasmine sambac, violet and honey
Base: Gaiac wood, sandalwood, capaiba, vetiver, cedarwoood, tolu balsam, Siam benzion, tonka, vanilla, ambergris

L’Emblem Rouge and L’Emblem Rouge Hydrosol are available from the En Voyage Perfumes website.

Disclosure: Samples of the eau de parfum and the hydrosol were provided by Shelley Waddington of En Voyage Perfumes for review.

Snake Oil, Inc.


– On the unintentional consequences of…words

There’s one irrefutable fact of life that every writer will have to come to terms with sooner or later, and always when you least expect it:

Your words can come back to bite you.

This was brought home to me the day before yesterday, when I was clearing out messages on Facebook. I discovered not only that I had a folder titled ‘Other’, it even contained something I hadn’t read. The horror! A writer who takes a great deal of pride in answering all her email, Tweets, and FB status updates/comments/messages in a timely fashion had somehow managed to miss this one.

It was a cease and desist order of a particular and actually quite arrogant kind, demanding I immediately remove all references (all two of them) to a joke name in a blog I wrote…in 2008. This personage claimed not only to have a trademark for the title (actually, it would have to be registered to be valid, according to my source), but also that my way-beyond obscure blog entry would be deleterious and harmful to her business and reputation.

Incidentally, this was the very first-ever perfume blog I ever wrote on my grab-bag anarcho-feminist/musical miscellanea/verbal test lab blog known as MoltenMetalMama. I wrote it as a joke in a reference to a recent scientific study about the aphrodisiacal properties of …bacon. I wrote it years before I had the harebrained idea to write about perfume in earnest, and strangely enough, I’ve never had the urge to write about bacon ever again. I had…five regular readers at the time, three of whom were bribed. I never gave it a second thought. Until Wednesday.

Out of idle curiosity, I Googled the offensive title. Countless song titles, an episode in a soft-core porn TV show available on cable, the aforementioned personage, her company and her product, and somewhere between page 20 and 29 of the search results, my heinous, stupid and long-forgotten joke blog.

Deleterious. When the first twenty pages of search results are soft-core porn TV and more song titles than I can sing before I run out of breath?

Fair’s fair. I’d much rather spend my pitiful disposable income on perfume than on litigation. I changed those two references. I even wrote her back and told her. That would have been the end of it, live and learn, except she wrote me back and really cooked her goose.

‘Thank you for acknowledging that I’m right, and by the way, since you’re a perfume blogger, you should try my stuff. It smells really good!’

So does quite a lot of the stuff they sell at my local mall for the first five seconds, and then, they don’t. They smell like the uninspired, poorly constructed mass-market messes they are. I am no longer interested in anything that ‘smells good’. I’m seriously spoiled by now. With a name like her product, I want Triple-Distilled And Enfleuraged Essence Absolute of Aphrodite.

To be a bit more precise, I want…’Let me rip off your clothes. With my teeth.’

It so happens I’m lucky enough to own a few of those, road-tested by yours truly through years of experience and some serious worship at Our Church of Diehard Dedicated Hedonism.

I’ll be getting back to those in a future blog post. Back to the hapless personage who messed in all the wrong ways with the wrong blogger.

The fact is, any perfume with such a spurious (non-registered) trademark name is basically selling snake oil on a par with that wonderful electrical belt pictured above than cures not just impotence and seminal weakness but rheumatism, too!

There’s no such thing as a universal aphrodisiac. Men – and women too – are pesky individualists who are imprinted by association. If roses were blooming at a particular romantic moment in your life, chances are, you will associate roses and romance ever after.

Perfume is nothing if not aspirational. We are all of us searching for that magic philter of love (or its sibling, lust), that magic carpet ride, and while we do, perfumers are hard at work creating bottled aspirations in their infinite variety, since they are well aware of that short-cut through our labyrinthine brains that perfume can affect.

It can be distilled into the daisy chain of cause and effect. You come across a perfume that makes YOU…weak in the knees. With the simple application of a dab or a spray, you…walk taller, you feel better, you are suddenly aware of your sensual self and your own allure in ways you weren’t mere moments before. What-the-hey…you put it on for a date or an assignation, along with whatever clothes and appurtenances have a similar effect. Because of how this perfume makes you feel, you act in ways that further your nefarious purpose. Let’s say it does everything you possibly could have hoped for.

Henceforward, you have now found…your Essence Absolute of Aphrodite. Application, affect, association. ‘This one always works’.

What works for me is a little space for my own imagination. Whether a perfume is called Bandit, Magie Noir, Cabochard, Tango, Dirty Sexy Wilde, Tabac Blond or Ambre Sultan, to name but a few of my own smash successes, I prefer inferences rather than the obvious, because that’s how it works – for me. Your mileage may vary and your perfumes may be different – and so may your associations.

What doesn’t work is having someone else’s associations rammed up my nose, or being told in an arrogant, better-than-thou manner that whatever I think – or write – is wrong. I dislike my own words taken out of context, and above all else, I detest people without a sense of the ridiculous. Frankly, I think it is ridiculous that a long-forgotten blog post, buried in the flotsam and jetsam of the Net almost three years ago which was a humorous take on perfume advertising should be deleterious to anyone’s business – especially a business that likely didn’t even exist at the time of writing which I obviously couldn’t even know about.

If the personage had been a tad more polite about it, then who knows? I might have been curious enough to investigate further. As it stands, she can kiss this potential customer goodbye for good.

I’ve been very privileged to meet and establish rapports with some epically talented perfumers, and all of them have unparalleled imaginations, a literary bent that strikes very many chords with this writer, and an inclination to give their customers a little breathing space for their own associations. They have all of them spoiled me for life, and ‘it smells good’ doesn’t even begin to cover the complexity of their work. If the juice is good enough, the concept true enough, trust me, the customer will know if there’s carnality in that content. The genies in those bottles never lie.

The rest of it is just…so much snake oil, false advertising and not nearly enough imagination!

Image: The Washington State Library

Fleur Fatale


– a review of Opus Oils’ ‘Flapper’

In a side street behind the Plaza and the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico lies the location of one of my biggest fragrant epiphanies – the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Here, in a small courtyard beyond a gallery, something stopped me cold in an instant. It was a faint scent trail of something so haunting, so evocative, so unlike anything I had ever encountered before, all thoughts of art appreciation went right out of my head. I sniffed. It wasn’t the overall ambient scent of New Mexico, with its dusty heated smell of sagebrush and broom, ponderosa, mesquite and cottonwoods or roasting chiles.

I remember that I stood, held up my hand to stop a conversation and sniffed the air like a bloodhound on a scent. Which was when I found the source.

Off in the furthest corner was a small clump of otherwise unremarkable weeds to my untrained Northern European eye, unremarkable if not for rather showy, white, trumpet-shaped flowers I instantly recognized from so many paintings. It was such a galvanizing shock to my senses – that coming together of artistic vision I knew from so many favorite paintings and a living reality blooming unheeded in an adobe courtyard – with the unreal, ghostly perfume of the humble jimsonweed, datura stramonium, quite literally fragrant like nothing at all else on Earth.

For the rest of my years in New Mexico, I would follow that trail when I found it, as I so often did…in overgrown lots and empty arroyos, nestling in the sunlight in hidden canyons in the Jemez Mountains, and always in the twilight hours when it bloomed…that visceral olfactory punch of datura.

Every part of the datura plant is poisonous. Datura brings delirium and madness, bizarre behavior, amnesia and even death. Every year, livestock die and humans too from datura poisoning. Legend has it that breathing the very scent of it will bring visions, dreams, intoxication – and obsession. I’ve been obsessed with datura ever since that first encounter in a Santa Fe museum courtyard, I’ve even met a few perfumes that attempted to recreate that fragrant flowered swoon… and all of them disappointed. Beautiful, yes, complex and heady, yes, but a rendering of Georgia’s beloved jimsonweed? No. So it was…

Until I discovered Opus Oils, Kedra Hart, her soliflore ‘Les Bohemes’ collection…and her ode to datura…’Flapper’.

Flapper, as Kedra says, is the Belle of the Les Bohemes ball…and what a belle she is! Sweetly disturbing, a little fruity, a little wild, her initial innocent aura is dangerously deceiving. I inhale her luscious perfume, and think nothing more edifying than ‘heavenly’, but Flapper hasn’t finished singing just yet.

She Charlestons fully into the room in her flashing satin heels with her flirty dancing eyes, and right when you summon up the courage to look her beauty full in the face, right about when that datura really begins to bloom beneath the moonlight, that heady, seamless bouquet that all equals ‘datura’ winks…rustles those velvety ghostly petals and you are so entranced, so bewitched, it’s all you can do to simply breathe the visions in that follow.

You have now been spancelled, you are under her spell, and now, she will never, ever let you go, and you will never, ever want her to! As she blooms, as the night grows older and the moon ever bolder, as she opens that white, haunting trumpet wider, she grows cooler and lusher, fading to a satin soft whisper of tobacco and tonka bean, white musk and vanilla, as gossamer as the moonbeams that slowly fade away with the dawn, the cool of the air closing up her petals, keeping all her narcotic, alluring secrets until night descends again.

She is called Flapper, but I would give her another name that suits her equally well, a name that for me encapsulates all she is and all she does…

Fleur Fatale.

So fatale, she and I suit each other very, very well. You see, we have a history, she and I…from a Santa Fe courtyard and into a memory of carefree, of happy, of dancing though the moonbeams together to entrance and ensnare all who catch a haunting trail they will never forget!

Opus Oils ‘Flapper’ is in the ‘Les Bohemes’ collection, available as an alcohol-based perfume and as a perfume oil in a fractionated coconut oil base from the Opus Oils website.

Notes: Sweet lemon blossom, clementine, tangerine, pink peppercorn, perillla leaf, mango absolute, ginger lily, datura, gardenia, jasmine, vanilla, white musk, blond tobacco, tonka bean.

The Twilit World of Falling Wisteria – Maiko



– Part Two of Aroma M Geisha Perfume Oils

In this part of the Gion district of Kyoto, the atmosphere is different. Here you will find all that is traditionally associated with ‘geisha’ in the Western mind, the elaborate hair with the cascades of ‘falling wisteria’, the graceful white-painted face with the alluring neck left semi-bare, and the elaborate folds of obi that designate not the geisha, but the maiko, the geisha-in-training who are learning all the geisha art. Artlessness, they well know, must be learned by first studying artifice, so in these tea houses, you will find a younger vibe, more in tune with twilight than night.

In this twilit world the maiko show their skill and are eager to entertain and to please. Here, the perfumes are lighter and airier, but no less complex and certainly no less surprising than their sisters among the geiko.

Follow me down this Kyoto street and into this tea house, and meet the maiko of the twilit world, a world where even the wisteria sparkling in its ebony hair knows to dance a singular tune, and the rustle of a heavy silk kimono contains a music like no other, artless in all its studied, careful art.

Geisha Green

Absinthe, the famous La Fée Verte, has been used in several modern perfumes, but this is no regular wormwood scent. It starts with a sweet, deep viridian kick to the senses, sharp with mandarin and blackcurrant yet none of blackcurrant’s sometimes animal vibe, and dries down in the course of several hours into another, equally haunting green fairy, the kind that won’t quite let you go, not that you mind. Apparently, the aroma of absinthe is known for not just being a famed aphrodisiac (I’ll attest to that one!) but a creativity enhancer, and I can see why. I put this on, and find myself daydreaming the story arcs of my next two novels…

Notes: Absinthe, blackcurrant, mandarin, violet, amber and tonka bean.

Geisha Blue

I had a day last week that qualified as a Day To Forget. The kind where nothing works out, no one understands you and might as well be speaking in ancient Sumerian for all you understand them, the kind where the kid won’t cooperate no matter what he’s bribed with and the day’s miseries drag unending on…and on. When peace and quiet finally arrived, I was so frazzled and exhausted, I didn’t know what to do. I applied this blue-green wonder on the strength of Lucy of Indie Perfumes’ beautiful review, and for the first time in over twenty-four hours, my shoulders sank down to their proper place, I could breathe, think and…relax. So much, I went to bed and slept like a happy baby, even with two cats on top of me. Valerian may work for you, but Geisha Blue is my new favorite chill pill. Some days, you need all the aromatic help you can get, and relief gets no better than this.

Notes: Blue chamomile, green tea, leafy greens.

Geisha Pink

The sweet fruity perfume is a genre much maligned among perfumistas, mainly for being so ubiquitous. In the case of Geisha Pink, that’s a shame, because Pink is a several miles above anything sold to garrulous mall-rat teenagers at Sephora. It is indeed sweet, fruity with plum and orange, and with a long, soft, vanilla cashmere-ish drydown that lasts, but not so long you get bored with it. I may feel too old and jaded for Pink’s girlie vibe, but I happen to know the perfect teenager, who will now receive a perfect – and perfectly unusual – Christmas present. She’ll be the envy of all her Cosplaying friends with Geisha Pink!

Notes: Sugared plum, orange, vanilla.

Geisha Blanche

White in many cultures symbolizes innocence and purity, and the white collars of a geisha’s inner kimono accentuate the erotic appeal of the neck. Geisha Blanche is a stunning, summery, airy floral scent with a special touch of lychee which elevates those white blooms and makes them dance above your skin. Dance they certainly do – this is the happiest, coolest summer day in a vial, and even if you’re not a fan of white florals, that lychee might make you reconsider. It’s nothing like the insipid floral blends you see and smell everywhere yet perfect as it is – and as perfectly feminine as you can make it! Wear it for a June wedding, even if you’re the bride!

Notes: White flowers, lychee.

There’s very much to love and admire in all the Aroma M Geisha Perfume Oils – their truly unique hybrid West-meets-East approach to perfume construction where they evolve in surprising and delightful ways, the underlying uncompromising aesthetic idea behind them, and the sheer range of scents in their stunning Yuzen paper packaging. Whether you’re a diehard Oriental fan (Geisha Noir & Rouge), you’re a Green fiend (Violet, Blue and Green) or you like your florals light, airy and a touch eccentric (Geisha Blanche & Pink), there will be a Geisha for you. I’ve read reviews that said something about ‘plastic doll head accord’, but I don’t get that at all.

What struck me most, apart from their evident beauty and surprising longevity, is their extraordinary ability to evoke or promote a mood. All the perfumes I love with a fury evoke certain moods and ambiences, aspects of persona, situation or moment I wish to enhance or tone down, yet all the Geisha line went straight for the jugular and created moods I wasn’t even aware I wanted. Noir…a night to remember, Rouge…a spicy, hot, invigorating kick to my writer’s block, Violet, a singing Mallarmé poem in a perfume, Green…la Fée Verte, which makes you dream visions and think possibilities, Blue, a calming, relaxing, centering deep, deep breath of a perfume that was the perfect ending antidote to an awful day…Blanche and Pink, floral, flirty and girlie, the perfect present for a floral, flirty, young girl I know who loves all things Japanese.

As for me, I know I’m in deep, deep trouble when I look at my scribbled wish list in my perfume notebook – and find six names!

For a magic carpet ride into another world I never knew before, and an experience I know I’ve never had before, I thank Maria McElroy. And Lucy, who introduced us!

So I come across another waka poet from another time and place, the lady Otomo of Sakanoue, and echo these words…

“How fine you are

So thinks my heart

In a rushing torrent

And though I

Dam it up

Soon, it is sure

To burst…”

The geisha, meanwhile, walk the streets of Kyoto’s Gion in the Floating World to this day, still weaving their enchantment for all to see in this compelling video.

Image: Wood-block print by Utamaro, c. 1820, ‘Geisha and Maiko’

Disclosure: Samples provided by Maria McElroy/Aroma M for review.

Eau de Perdition

– a review of Opus Oils’ ‘Dirty Sexy Wilde’

Ever since a boring, windy November night almost two years ago, my dreams have been haunted by a phantom….perfume. A perfume I have never encountered in real life, never even thought about before that night I was visited by a relation to Edgar Allen Poe’s Imp of the Perverse and fell down a rabbit hole of my making.

See me as I was that Friday night…thoroughly, emphatically bored. Some idea bubbled away at the back of my mind, something nailed my posterior to my Balinese cane chair and sent me looking for an image I came across a few days before, something made me drum my desk as I looked and thought that heretical thought…

“What if…”

“What if” is how stories are born, books are written, things…happen.

I plugged into my iPod, unplugged my inner censor, and wrote a story about a woman much like myself with nothing to lose, a woman with a dream of doing and becoming – and the Devil in disguise in a midnight café who makes her an offer not even she can refuse. Woven into the storyline in a way I wasn’t even aware of doing was…that phantom perfume, the Devil’s scent, dark, erotic and dangerously alluring. It weaved and bobbed throughout the storyline that followed, as warning and premonition and button pusher, and the Devil that I conjured knew everything about pushing my protagonist’s buttons – good and bad.

Since then, I’ve often asked myself when I sniffed something new…would this be it? I have a current project – in dire need of resurrection at present, I freely admit – called the Devil’s Scent with Doc Elly of Olympic Orchids, I’ve met a few candidates…but none of them came so close to that olfactory image in my mind as Kedra Hart of Opus Oils did with ‘Dirty Sexy Wilde.’

It’s all Carrie Meredith’s fault. Without her reviews of Opus Oils and my own relentless curiosity, I would never have known. ‘When you get your samples, girl, I want you to pour half that vial of ‘Dirty Sexy Wilde’ all over yourself and let me know what happens’, she wrote me in an email.

So when they arrived after over a week of anticipation that nearly killed me, that’s exactly what I did. I’m so glad I was alone that Saturday, or my sanity would have been in question. The only word that bears repeating (this is a perfume blog, after all) is…OMG!

‘Dirty Sexy Wilde’ is Kedra Hart’s ode to Oscar Wilde and Dorian Gray, both of whom are very, very dear to my writer’s heart, so with a name like that, there’s something to live up to – an aura of Oscar’s rapier, elegant wit and verve and that underlying hint of horror that lurks between the lines of ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’.

There’s nothing in the slightest horrific about DSW, but by golly, this is one of the most erotic things I’ve ever had the pleasure to inhale. It starts off green and slightly soapy in an elegant scented lace-edged Victorian handkerchief way, but it takes no time at all for it to begin asserting itself in all the best and most anticipatory ways. This is where it’s closest to the elegant Oscar, the aesthete Dorian.

Before long, that fatal combination of tobacco, oakmoss, coumarin, musk, civet and ambergris – a blend that surely equals ‘sexy beast’ if anything does – makes itself known in no uncertain terms, and it moves far past anticipation and well into bedhead territory. Dirty. Sexy. A night to remember.

As my nameless protagonist says in QD of the aftermath:

My brain wasn’t located until Friday morning. I felt like a major railroad disaster.

‘Dirty Sexy Wilde’ is a major railroad disaster perfume, in the sense that it practically evaporates inhibitions and distills desire with a capital D to a sharp and shining point. It isn’t obvious, yet it’s not understated and it’s perfectly balanced and flawlessly composed for what it is. I call it Eau de Perdition.

Your idea of the Devil’s perfume might be different, more understated, a touch less, well… animal. Since I wrote QD, I know my Devil well, and I tell you from the bottom of my black and highly depraved rock’n’roll heart…

My Devil would wear this for his first encounter with my protagonist at the Chelsea Hotel, he would wear it to burn away every last shred of doubt or inhibition she might have, every objection she could hold, and every onion layer self she would want to peel away forever. And he would wear it again much later, when he says:

Until there is nothing more to say, not vertical, not in words, not in anything other than the language she and I had spoken from that very first moment in a café at midnight. This one. This skin, this touch, this scent, this mind, this woman, this dissolution, this mouth, this conversation. Oh, yes.

Eau de perdition.

As for this lowly perfume blogger, desperately trying to write a semi-coherent review, I can only be grateful I have yet to encounter it on either my Devil or his lookalike.

If I ever did, I’d eat all three of his femurs alive and entire, more than once, and by Golly, he’d walk differently the next morning!

As it is, I’m so very, very grateful to Kedra Hart for putting my Devil into Dirty Sexy Wilde. For which I can only thank her from the bottom of my black and depraved rock’n’roll heart!

Notes: Galbanum, red mandarin, violet, rose, jasmine, blond tobacco, oakmoss, coumarin, musk, civet, ambergris.

‘Dirty Sexy Wilde’ is available in many permutations from perfume to bath salts from Opus Oils.

Image of Tiger Powers as ‘Oscar Wilde/Dorian Gray’ used by permission of Opus Oils. There was a picture of Oscar that I found, but Tiger’s was so much better!