Black No. 1


– a review of Narcisse Noir by Caron

A few days ago, I was cleaning out the Augean stables of my storage room, and found a few scant drops of early Eighties vintage Narcisse Noir stashed away at the bottom of a box full of odds and ends. I had completely forgotten I had it or had even managed to hold on to it for this long, but one pull at that black stopper, and out floated memories and words…

In my novel, “Quantum Demonology”, which I’m currently revising when I’m not writing perfume blogs, my protagonist has a nemesis named Melina.

“Melina was the product of a Greek father and a Danish mother who had met on Santorini and never quite recovered. If you ever wondered what a Greek Goth Goddess looked like, there was Melina, all six feet of sheer drop-dead intimidation.”

Melina, we find out later, has a weakness for Caron, which is currently not available in Denmark. Our heroine bribes her at one point in the story with a bottle of urn extrait Narcisse Blanc, later followed by Narcisse Noir, with ulterior motives, of course!

Which is precisely how I think of Narcisse Noir – a perfume with ulterior motives. Think of the associations…Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard”, worn by Anaïs Nin in the 1930s, created in 1911 by Ernest Daltroff, the notes of narcissus, dark rose and orange blossom, incense and civet.

If any one perfume embodies Gothic femininity and sensibilities, the quintessence of Goth, it would arguably be Narcisse Noir. My vintage version was dark, dark, dark…smoldering and sexual and dangerous even, with that animal incense drydown that lasted forever and a day.

This stuff should be banned. It smells the way I imagine taking laudanum feels…floating away on a dark and dismal cloud of dangerous bliss, the kind you could never, ever tell your mother about. Unless you actually stole this from your mother, as I did.

My mother was all her short life the total perfume addict. Her list of fragrant loves was as elegant as it was classic, and I’m rather disheartened by the fact that I can’t wear them because she did; Mitsouko, Joy, Jolie Madame, Shalimar, First, Bal à Versailles, Fidji. As a Scorpio, she was no stranger to the Femmes Fatales of perfume and indeed was rather fatale herself.

One day, long after I had left home to make my way in the world, I came by to say hello, and in the course of the evening I discovered the most fatale of them all – stashed away nearly behind her vanity mirror was a bottle of Narcisse Noir. I had heard rumors of this one, seen “Sunset Boulevard”, knew it had been worn by Anaïs Nin. This was history, pedigree and devastation all in one small bottle.

I stole it. It took a few months before we were on speaking terms again.

Meanwhile, there was havoc to wreak, so I did. In that Stygian abyss known as the Goth underground in the mid-1980’s, Narcisse Noir had one of two possible effects on the opposite gender. Those guys either ran for the hills or the Himalayas, whichever was furthest, or they fell prey like so many drugged fruit flies. There was no middle ground.

This is one of the few perfumes that to me encompass everything “black”. Black suede, black velvet, black satin sheets. It takes no prisoners, does not take no for an answer, has all the attitude issues of black widows everywhere. Come closer. Dahling. So I may eat you alive. You will love every excruciating minute, I promise. Dahling.

The perfect scent for a succubus!

Perfect for the Capa of the Black no. 1 Mafia in my story, Melina. And perfectly described in female terms in the song “Black no. 1”.

I’m stashing it away behind lock and key, where its radioactive charms can be contained. I could be forgiven for wearing this at age 22, before I completely knew what it meant to be a woman. I’m now 47, and I know exactly what would happen if I ever ventured out wearing Narcisse Noir. I’d drape myself languidly over the stairs, sweep my hair back with one crimson-nailed hand and say:

“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. De Mille!” Or else just ready to eat the next hapless male unlucky enough to walk by…

My version was a mid-Eighties vintage parfum, and the notes below are for the reformulation – I’m guessing the latest one, since my version definitely contains civet. I think there may be about ten drops of it left.

Notes according to Fragrantica:
Top notes: African orange flower and narcissus
Heart notes: jasmine, orange and tincture of rose
Base notes: vetyver, musk and sandalwood

The Red Velvet Revel


– a review of Olympic Orchids’ ‘Red Cattleya’

Yours truly is a biohazard. I have ten black thumbs not counting my toes, and my one living houseplant is a rose geranium named Vibeke, who resembles something out of a Dr. Seuss story, smells utterly fantastic and is nearly immortal. Like her inconstant gardener, she has a post-punk attitude problem. She simply refuses to quit.

So you can imagine my profound admiration for Doc Elly, who not only grows orchids in Washington State, she makes perfumes out of them, too. One of those was a sample of her ‘Red Cattleya’.

Scented orchids, I’ve come to learn, change their scent as they bloom, growing headier or heavier, fruitier or more indolic, evolving much the same way a perfume does on your skin. You would think that with an orchid such as the all-out velvety onslaught of that Red Cattleya pictured above, the perfume itself would also be something out of the ordinary.

You would be right. It is.

Right out of the bottle, and with no preconceived notions whatsoever, I’m very much reminded of a classical French perfume, the kind they used to make before the big, bad IFRA restrictions took over. Back in the days when perfume was opulent and rich and rewarding, the ultimate gilding of the lily, or as Coco Chanel put it so succinctly, the only accessory that mattered.

Dream of a time when being a woman was a Serious Business, ca. 1950s, say, when getting out the door in the morning involved things like foundation garments and heels, eyebrow pencils and pancake makeup, hats and gloves. You know, back when women were supposed to look like women rather than overgrown schoolgirls playing with Mommy’s makeup.

Just as a red cattleya is a glamour puss of an orchid, Red Cattleya is a glamour puss of a perfume. I wouldn’t wear this to the office, but I’d certainly wear it to the opera. Provided the opera were something romantic like Verdi or Mozart, rather than Wagner. This is a done-up, updo orchid in a French twist, diamond earrings and an opulent 1950s Balenciaga creation in red silk velvet, strapless, naturellement!

It is intensely, opulently fruity, Floral with a capital F and more than a tad exotic – there is spice in the mix somewhere. It is, in fact, every bit as gaudy and showy as the orchid that named it. In fact, I could well imagine this orchid – or this perfume – scenting the conservatory that is part of the setting of Oscar Wilde’s “A Picture of Dorian Gray”, where Dorian in his innocence makes a terrible mistake…A Victorian conservatory, then, with blooms pillaged from the far-flung ends of the Empire, outrageous, show-stopping blooms that command your attention in an instant, and are ever so slightly unsettling in their overt sensuality.

Fruity, yes, but please forget everything you know about that horrid category “fruity-floral”. This is so heady, lush and ripe I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone under at least twenty-five.

I detect apricot, a whiff of heliotrope, perhaps, vanilla, rose, violet, and raspberry, all of them blended so well and so smoothly that they are a lot more than the sum of their parts – just as women should be. I say this not because I make any distinction between the masculine and the feminine, but because this is incredibly…femme, incredibly alluring, all dressed up in that glorious Balenciaga and with everywhere to go!

The sillage is stunning, even when dabbed with a cotton swab, the lasting power fully up to an evening at the opera and cocktails beforehand. What happens after that is entirely up to you!

I could imagine this being worn by Lisa Fonssagrives in her day, in that breathtaking Balenciaga gown, the epitome of feminine devastation and elegance with a capital E. For my own part, I begin to wonder about the strangest things…something in this perfume makes me want to…sit up straighter, wear gloves (because a lady must be careful where she leaves her dabs!), put up my hair in a French twist and finally hunt down that perfect shade of red lipstick.

Or maybe not. Maybe I should wear this the next time I go out for a date and report back on the results. Too bad the date is platonic, although he is a Scorpio, so you never know…

Red Cattleya is Red. Lush. Female. In the flower, and in real life!

Above all, I can remember a quote I wrote down a long time ago, which jumps into my mind as I write, and which seems perfectly appropriate for Red Cattleya:

“When two friends understand each other perfectly, the words are soft and strong like an orchid’s perfume.”


Like this orchid, and this perfume!

For another angle on “Red Cattleya“

Image of Lisa Fonssagrives, 1951 by Horst P. Horst

Where the Wild Things Are


– a review of Olympic Orchids’ “Olympic Rainforest”

Surrounded as we are by all the questionable odds and ends that in the Western hemisphere encompass the term “civilization”, it can sometimes be easy to forget that in spite of all we do or have done to “tame” them, there are still wild and untouched spots on the globe where the wind still whispers, and trees still gather to sing the songs trees always seem to sing to me.

When I think of primeval places, wild and untouched forests without the human stain, places that epitomize “forest”, an immediate picture springs to mind – the temperate rainforest. They are nothing like the tropical jungles we normally associate with the term. Mosses and ferns grow so prolifically they almost take on a sentient life form of their own, ferns so lush, so large and so green it seems they could easily eat you under a full moon, and a few hours later, all that would remain would be one heavenly scented fougère burp, a sigh, a rustle of the trees above and order is once again restored – the order of the forest, where humanity is but a passing intrusion, until the next full moon. If any location on Earth could embody J. R. R. Tolkien’s Entwood to me and make me utterly believe in the existence of Ents, it would be a temperate rainforest.

Such a forest is what Doc Elly of Olympic Orchids pays homage to in her perfume “Olympic Rainforest” – an ode to the Olympic National Forest of Washington, and the largest expanse of temperate rainforest anywhere on Earth. I have never been to Washington, never seen that timeless forest or those monster ferns and mosses, but it just so happens that a member of my household went to college at Evergreen State in Olympia and has many happy memories of the Olympic peninsula. He was the obvious test subject. With no knowledge of perfume as such – beyond the standard male “I know what I like”, and with only the name to go by, his first statement was: “Oh. Oh! Oh, I like this! I’d wear this! This is great!” He promptly demanded I apply more – so I did. These few hours later, I have not heard a word of complaint, apart from the occasional “I still like it”.

“Olympic Rainforest” is a fougère. Indeed, with those full moon man-eating ferns, how could it not be? But unlike so many other fougères of tarnished reputation and cursed ubiquity (Drakkar Noir, I’m looking at you!), this has nothing of the barbershop vibe so many of them nosedive into. This fougére is not your standard Harris tweed-wearing, well-mannered British gentleman exuding stiff-upper-lip suavity.

Instead, this fragrant green imp likes to take a walk where the wild things are, out where nature is never tamed or subjugated. It walks that verdant, fern-encrusted path where nature awes the human with its scale, its greenness and the splendor of its trees, that atavistic breath of growth and life that seems so much larger and more timeless than our own, exhaling the kind of oxygen that really does recharge all your interior batteries. And did I mention that just like the Olympic peninsula itself, it is…green?

Straight out of the bottle, there is that kick of lavender that characterizes so many fougères, but also a citrusy swirl, too, not lemon but bergamot, a bergamot with teeth, and I like bergamot with dentition. Beware the ferns!
Juniper sneaks in on stealthy feet, waking me all the way up to that atavistic forest, and a hint of wood, old-growth wood, rich in the centuries-old sap of the seasons, the quickening of spring and the slow drip of autumn, the deep, deep sleep of winter and the still of a breathless, warm summer day in the shade. There are florals in the mix somewhere, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you precisely what they are. Cedar I found and maybe a dash of pine, a smooth, fresh cedar without any of that pencil-shaving edge that Atlas cedar can have. It smells redder and somehow richer, the pine without any aerosol associations whatsoever.

I’m reminded of a few lines from an old, old Welsh poem…The Câd Goddeu, or The Battle of the Trees, from the Book of Taliesin:

When the trees were enchanted,

In the expectation of not being trees,

The trees uttered their voices

From strings of harmony,

The disputes ceased.

Breathe in. Breathe out. You are at one with the trees, the ferns, with every living thing that grows around you.

‘Olympic Rainforest’ is incredibly well-blended and tenacious – there are still verdant, woody traces over nine hours after I applied it on my skin.

If you love fougères, if you love to evoke that call of the wild and take an olfactory hike in a virgin, untouched forest, you will love this. I do, but it veers just a little too masculine to my nose. On my roommate, it’s heavenly. It must be all that testosterone. Call it the Green Man.

Thank you, Doc Elly, for that walk on the real wild side, and I enjoyed every minute of it! Somehow, ferns will never appear quite the same again…

If this is a taste of things to come – as indeed it is, since I have plans to review as many of Olympic Orchid’s scents as I can – then my nose is in for several treats. Doc Elly is undoubtably a perfume talent to watch for – and I haven’t even started on those orchids yet!

When I do…watch this space! 😉

Image: The Quinault Rainforest, WA

A Numinous Light


– a review of Olympia Orchids’ ‘Kyphi’

A while ago, I commented on Doc Elly’s blog, Perfume Project NW, on what constitutes “art”, prompted by the heated debates on many blogs over Juliette Has a Gun’s launch of ‘Not A Perfume’. For doing so, Doc Elly was generous enough to send me a bunch of samples, and despite the deluge of international Christmas mail, it arrived today. There was a lot of goodwill and no fewer goodies in that box, goodies which will be reviewed here over the next few weeks, and that, dear readers, is a definite promise!

Meanwhile chez Maison Tarleisio, I had a dead-curious six-year-old and a no less curious cat – the fiendish ginger Hairy Krishna – all over the box. The boy was disappointed it was full of “girlie stuff” (“Eww!”), and the cat wanted to eat the Styrofoam packing peanuts and chew the bubble wrap, before trying to plant his not inconsiderable backside inside the box, which he did – and promptly got stuck. As the cat took off with a cardboard box attached to his posterior, the kid took off after the cat, and at long last I had a chance to study the contents. One of them in particular caught my eye – her recreation of “Kyphi”, the Greek name for an incense and perfume formula that the Egyptians called Kapet.

Given I’m the kind of ancient history and/or ancient perfume nutcase who reads Dioscurides and Theophrastus for fun, this was quite possibly the Best Belated Christmas Present ever.

In his “Travels”, Plutarch mentions that three types of incense were burned in Egyptian temples – frankincense at dawn, myrrh at midday, and kyphi at dusk. Kyphi was also used as a medicine and a perfume. The earliest extant recipe – and there are a few – dates to 1500 B.C.E. Kyphi recipes contain mastic, pine resin (or wood) camel grass, mint, sweet flag and cinnamon among them, and all recipes feature some variety of wine, raisins and honey.

Well, dear readers, it was time to take the plunge…and delve into the riddle that is “Kyphi”.

So I did, and in nothing flat, a drab, frosty and foggy late-December day disappeared in a flash, along with drooping Christmas decorations, a cat in a cardboard box and the boy trying to catch him.

Do you believe in ghosts, or in the ghostly auras the past can leave behind in certain locations? The centuries-old atmosphere of an old, old European church, the very walls breathing in devotion, exhaling calm. There is a very particular atmosphere associated with such places – not just churches, but stone circles and nemetons and even – coming from one of the world’s leading bog body locations – bogs and marshes and forest groves, a definite delineation of sacred space apart, of other…otherworldy, otherwise, non-mundane.

The Romans, not the least superstitious people in history, had a term reserved for that which is so sacred, it can’t be contained in an image or a statue or indeed anything manmade. The especially revered was called “numen”, which gives us our present word of numinous – that which inspires devotion and awe and an uneasy tinge of fear of the supernatural.

I visited one such numinous place, a place so powerful, it hit my consciousness like a bell being rung loud and clear, the stones, the thyme growing in clumps between the rocks, the very mountain – Mount Parnassus – behind me emanating sacred space. That was Delphi, famous for its oracle, its prophetess, famous as the location where the god Apollo slayed the monster Pytho and established his temple. With one spray of an atomizer, I was back there in an instant, standing at the spot in the Temple of Apollo above the crevasse in the rocks where the Pythia inhaled nebulous fumes and proclaimed her oracles to the listening priesthood who interpreted them for the pilgrims.

Doc Elly’s “Kyphi” smells like nothing else I have ever tried, and I’m getting slightly jaded by now. Not like “perfume”, not like incense, not like anything earthly, which makes it a howling success right there. It is time travel in an atomizer, taking me back to a different time and a different world, a world where there was less of a disconnect between the human and the divine, a world less sanitized and deodorized, when scent was the original hotline to the Gods and the original sacrifice. There is frankincense in there, certainly, and I’m guessing myrrh which adds a contemplative air, and something that reminds me of fresh laurel leaves – galbanum? A touch of pine or cedar? Cinnamon too, I think, but forget everything you know about cinnamon and pomanders – this is a dry, airy cinnamon that hints of desert and sand and time. Above all else, forget everything you know about perfume categories – this is not floral, not green, not resinous (although that likely comes closest) or aquatic. If I had to put a label on it, I’d say it smells human in the best sense of the word – toiling below time, but aspiring to the stars above. It put me in touch with memories I had all but forgotten, a place I remembered and times I surely never did, but there is some ancient soul memory in that little bottle, some golden, shimmering thread linking me to the best of my aspirations and abilities.

If this version of “Kyphi” had another name, it should be “Namaste”, which just to mix metaphors translates from Sanskrit as “I salute the divine within you”, and so it did.

In a mundane world that sometimes threatens to smother me in the ordinary and everyday, that is no small feat. Just as I treasured the trip through the warp and weft of time and space, I shall treasure this little bottle – for saluting what I had evidently forgotten.

Wow. Doc Elly blew me away and blew my mind today, and that happens not nearly enough any more. Such a talent should be appreciated, but don’t take my word for it. Get thee posthaste to Olympic Orchids, dear readers, and try them for yourselves! You won’t regret it, that I can promise you.

I shall be reviewing more of Doc Elly’s perfumes later – watch this space!

Image: Lord Frederick Leighton, ‘The Spirit Of the Summit’ (1894)

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly – of 2010


Time for the nostalgia fit that is…the end is nigh! The end of 2010, the end of another year, yet another drip down the hourglass of the days of our lives. You will see it on virtually every other blog, the best, the worst, the fantabulous and the craptacular lists of things we loved, things we hated and things we hated to love and loved to hate.

Since this is me and I am nothing if not different, I decided to veer off in a different direction. Below, you’ll find my own list of things I loved and loathed in 2010, why I loved – or loathed – them, and what I’ll be looking forward to in 2011. Tomorrow is another day, as Scarlett O’Hara used to say, Saturday is another year, and when all is said and done, hope springs eternal and what lies ahead can only be an improvement on all I left behind.

The Best Reason To Be A Perfumoholic For Life:
The joy of new discoveries. Good, bad, terrible or indifferent, there’s always something New! Improved! Spectacular! Or…spectacularly over-hyped to be discovered, another blog that makes me think, laugh and try to track something down from my remote corner of BFE Planet Earth, another scent, another perfume, another way to slay the unsuspecting! How can that be bad?

The Worst Reason It Sucks To Be A Perfumoholic:
So many bottles, so little cash. So many difficult choices. The entire Amouage line, which I’m dying to try and haven’t…yet. On the upside, maybe that’s a good thing? Would there be anything worse than to fall in love – requited, if I’m lucky – and then not be able to afford it?

Best New Launch of 2010:
It was love at first sniff. The kind that made me slightly uneasy, the kind I’m not sure I should do, the kind of woman I’m not sure I am, but I don’t care, I don’t care, I want to throw all caution to the winds of fortune and fling myself right in the hurricane center path that is…Boxeuses, by Serge Lutens. The Serge Lutens line is no stranger to the Sex in a Bottle concept (which is another blog right there!), but Boxeuses is so totally, utterly not me. Yet it is. Totally. Utterly. Me. In leather and lace, being ever so nicely naughty…Some day, these plummy, smoky, leathery lady combatants will be mine. I shall henceforth leave a wake of devastating femme fatalities in my wake. Gentlemen, take note. Or take cover, your choice! I pack a punch, it will be fatal and resistance WILL be…futile!

Most Over-Hyped Launch of 2010:
Here’s something I don’t understand. You are a designer with a certain reputation for…iconoclasm, let’s say. In the clothes you once designed, in the perfumes that you launched, including the one that spawned a million imitators and created whole new trends in perfume. They love ‘em or they loathe ‘em, but they are not…indifferent. Or if they are, they certainly don’t blog about them! So then…time for the next surprise to spring upon an unsuspecting world – time to define…woman, bottled. Good luck with that one. They’re still digging for the last guy who tried. You then settle down with your perfumer (Fabrice Pellegrin) and you come up with…“Womanity”. The name is great, the bottle amazing in its sheer H.R. Giger-esque weirdness, but a name like that delivers certain expectations, expectations the juice alas did not deliver. What surprised me most is that it was so unisex. I could well imagine this on a whole slew of exes – the clean-cut, not-too outré gentlemen I used to go for. Sweet, citrusy fig. Salt/Caviar. It coulda been a contender, yet I am not…contented. For shame, Monsieur Mugler. Back to the drawing board for you. Now. Woman is spelled f-e-m-a-l-e. Write it down one hundred times on the blackboard. And start over. You gave us Angel. And Alien. You can do better. Prove it!

Most Unintentionally Hilarious Perfume Ad:
Marc Jacobs ‘Bang’.
Dude, I get it. You’re hot. Tattoos and all, and I like tats. You are not, however, channeling the immortal Yves Saint Laurent in that ad. He did it first – and also, I have to say, best, by applying a certain modicum of restraint and his own slightly geeky allure. On the other hand, who says it never pays to advertise? And with a name like ‘Bang’…I’d wipe the smirk off my face, but it refuses to budge…

Worst Flanker In Existence, As Well As A Terrible Idea, Terribly Executed:
YSL Parisienne. If the world had never known the violet-rose splendor that was ‘Paris’, this would not have been quite so painful. Alas, we did. Alas, it was. The murder/reformulation of the original ‘Paris’ was quite bad enough, but ‘Parisienne’ added insult to injury and rubbed salt in it, too.

Best Perfume Note I (Re)Discovered:
Incense. Oh, how I love thee. ‘Magie Noire’ was my gateway drug into all things smoky and fiery, but thankfully, it didn’t stop there. Andy Tauer’s ‘Incense Extreme’, Via del Profumo’s ‘Mecca Balsam’, CDG ‘Zagorsk’ and ‘Avignon’, Lutens’ ‘Encens et Lavande’ or just a few smoldering nuggets of real Omani divinity, spreading peace and contemplation and goodwill towards humanity – there’s no such thing as too much incense. It didn’t help I wrote a Faustian tale and gave the Devil an incense-heavy, heady scent which totally ruined my protagonist – for life. And that scent has yet to be created. So, darling Andy, I have this idea…

Most Overdone Perfume Notes:
Anything berry-fruity aligned with anything patchouli. I. Am. Not. A. Twenty/Teenie Demographic. I. Am. A. Woman. Damn. It. Read. This. Roar. Why do perfumers – most of them at any rate – appreciate us so little, when we have loved you so long? And….Ambroxan. Skin. Amber. Floral. All in one handy combo that’s added to everything and clean musk, and makes me want to hurl bricks at glass facades, starting with Juliette Has A Gun. JHAG gave me the dearly beloved dark red-velvet Goth rose that is ‘Lady Vengeance’, so ‘Not A Perfume’ happened because…why? It’s ‘Not A Perfume’ I’d ever buy.

Best Idea In The Perfume World, Ever:
Outlaw perfumes! All-natural, all artisanal perfumes created with the kind of dedication, love and care that perfumers used to have, but in this day and age of marketing brief, sadly no longer do. (For one, it doesn’t pay.) An extended middle finger (bear with me and my shady past as a punk, please) to IFRA regulations and restrictions. Sock it to me with oakmoss, people! I promise to claim full responsibility for any adverse effects, but I suspect only my credit card will break out in hives – or my bank manager.

Best Reason To Become A Perfume Blogger:
I have opinions and I’m not afraid to write about them. I have a lot to learn and I’m not afraid to learn. I love new discoveries, new words, new worlds, new connections and new friends with a common passion. How can that be bad? It gets even better. Dimitri of ‘Sorcery of Scent’ was courteous enough to tell me where to go for niche in my perfume desert. Bless you, Dimitri – and bless you, my fellow perfumistas, bloggers and readers! – for proving the thrills, the spills and the perils of living dangerously – through our noses!

Here’s to the many discoveries we have yet to try, to ponder, to discuss and to argue about – in 2011!