Aftelier Perfumes

Taking Two


– a review of Aftelier Perfume’s ‘Tango’

Dancing, George Bernard Shaw once famously said, is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music. I could embroider on that slightly and add that the sad thing about my own inclinations toward the hairier ends of rock’n’roll means that gosh darn it, I never get to dance!

I was packed off to dancing school age 12, because that was what you did in those days, and so I was pushed around the floor by an eleven-year-old girl who stood half a head taller and loathed me on sight. Somehow, we both came out of that traumatic experience knowing how to two-step and waltz both English and Viennese, cha cha cha, bossa nova and samba. One dance I never did learn, and that was my favorite dance of them all.

The tango.

The perfect embodiment of Bernard Shaw’s statement. Unlike many other dances, tango is not two partners mirroring each other’s steps, but a leader and a follower who improvise as they go. It isn’t the tango of ballrooms, but the down-and-dirty Argentine tango of the streets of Buenos Aires, endlessly evolving and improvised on the fly in on the streets or in milongas, dance clubs where hundreds of people create hundreds of different ways to express social niceties, introduce themselves, or else embody the full range of emotions two vertical people can express. A lot of good can be said about a night you dance away. Like so many other of the best things in life, it takes two.

This is the kind of night Mandy Aftel pays homage to in ‘Tango’, and if ever a great night out could be contained in a bottle, the whirl of the dance floor, slightly too much wine and the 3 AM caffeine kick to keep you going, a delicious, subversive cigarette shared after that dance of passion and tenderness, tension and anticipation…this would surely be it. Corte and sacada, the cut and displacement, the sensuous slide of the gancho, that defining move of tango that hooks the follower’s leg around her partner’s, all of it summed up and encapsulated in a perfume as provocative, as evocative and contradictory as the dance itself.

So indulge me for a moment and pretend it is such a warm, steamy twilight in January under the stars on a leafy Buenos Aires square in La Boca. At a sidewalk café, an orchestra is playing the classics of Gardel and Pugliese, and on the cobblestones, Argentines look across to find a partner, leaders and followers alike, and with a sudden bolt of lightning, I’m caught in the delicious net of the cabeceo, a pair of chestnut brown eyes and a kick to my fancy by that sweet, spicy, fiery jolt of orange and ginger.

This will be good. I can always tell, I can see it in the self-assured way this dashing dancer deftly steers me through the crowd and through the dance, the way we walk in parallel and tandem, floating like a silky, complement of current over cobblestones for an hour, or is it more? There is nothing but the inciting rhythm of 4/4 and our flashing, light as air feet, nothing but this moment that stretches beyond the twilight and before I know it, it’s night beneath the Southern Cross and night in La Boca.

A whisper of coffee wafts from the café, and for a time, we sit over coffee, Juan Brown Eyes and I, and laugh at life in his halting English and my displaced Spanish, displaced like the cortes and sacadas of the dance itself, that erotic push and pull of the dance, the will-you-won’t-you-will-we-maybe?, to catch our breath and breathe in the flowery, coffee-flavored night in La Boca, ah, but Señora, we must have a little wine and maybe a little more, and as the orchestra plays on and the stars whirl above us, the displacements are rather less, the ganchos more elaborate, and surely I’m not so bad at tango as I like to think back home?

Certainly not, for now, as we share a cigarette or two between, the perfume goes darker, the dance more intense, for now, we have it all in the little space between us as we dance, the woody, smoky choya and tobacco-scented air speaking in fluent Spanish with the tonka bean that says…this dance may end, yet it never does. That push and pull, that lead and follow from spice and fruit through coffee, through flower and on to a drydown sometime after midnight…this dance will be another dance, and this moment another kind of time, and this perfume will be all of that, as we turn and glide and swirl over the cobblestones and down the street and look, the sun is rising over the river and we danced the night away!

But I can remember it all in the blink of an eye and one deep breath by opening a vial, remember one unforgettable night on the cobblestones of la Boca and my favorite kind of dance, the kind that always takes two to do…

Tango.

Disclosure: Sample provided for review by Aftelier.

Image: redbubble.com

Notes:
Top: Wild sweet orange, fresh ginger
Heart: Coffee CO2, champaca
Base: Choya, blond tobacco, tonka

Tango is available from the Aftelier website, from Scent and Sensibility for UK customers, and from Sündhaft.

Natural Luxuries


Aftelier Spotlight Week

– a spotlight on Aftelier Perfumes

Last night as I went to collect Spider-Man Jr. from saving the neighborhood from Green Goblins and other hazards, I noticed what had been bubbling away at the back of my consciousness for a few days. Suddenly, I was surrounded by the most heavenly scent. A combination of blooming elderflower and mock-orange wafted its way into my nose, the musky, fruity scent of the elderflowers mingling with the heady aroma of mock-orange, that we here in Denmark call ‘fake jasmine’, perfuming the air with its distinctive, unmistakable scent. Jasmine will only grow in sheltered conditions at this latitude, but mock-orange blooms everywhere here, and when it does, I know that high summer has arrived.

Those ubiquitous mock-orange bushes with their white, bridal flowers and their heady, heavenly scent are an example of natural perfumery at its finest. So I thought on a warm summer evening, which brings me to the topic of this week’s spotlight and one of the biggest seismic shifts in my own perfumoholic perspectives – Aftelier Perfumes.

Mandy Aftel – writer and perfumer extraordinaire – is rightly considered a pioneer of the natural perfume movement. Perfumes created with all-natural essences and oils, perfumes every bit as luxurious, special and rare as anything we perfume writers know, love and afford as we can. I knew of Mandy since her collaboration last year with Andy Tauer in creating a linden blossom perfume, Tauer’s ‘Zeta’ and Mandy’s ‘Honey Blossom’, but I had until recently never tried them, or indeed any natural perfume at all.

Natural perfumes came to my attention with the Outlaw Perfume Project’s ‘Mystery of Musk’ last year, a defiant stance in the face of IFRA restrictions and an important political perfume statement of its own. In the process, many perfumes were created that were, in a word, staggering for their breadth of scope and execution and to the best of my knowledge, no participant or human test subject broke out in hives because of it.

There it was. There I was, with my hard-wired preconceptions of ‘natural’ perfumes and unfortunate associations of bad patchouli and inferior blended scents, scents I would find in health food shops and artisanal markets that really didn’t impress me much, and certainly not with any associations of ‘luxury’.

So I was rather excited when Lucy of Indie Perfumes introduced my writing to Mandy, and in no time at all it seemed, a small collection of samples arrived. I can still feel my excitement as I looked at that pretty tin with its tiny treasures packed in orange and purple tissue paper, wondering what secrets they held.

Little did I know that the moment I unscrewed the first of those sample vials, my world would change…forever.

The Japanese have a Zen term called ‘satori’ – an instant where your entire perspective shifts and whirls and changes, when your horizon is forever broadened in a heartbeat and you get it, all of it…

That was me the night I opened up ‘Cepes and Tuberose’, and that cold chill of satori, something powerful, numinous and soulful wafted out of the vial and into my consciousness, and ever after, my world has not been the same that it was. It was the rush of something infinitely strange yet hauntingly familiar, some secret I knew but had forgotten.

I have been swiped sideways by perfumes not a few times this past spring and summer. That is nothing new. Never in my life was I blasted to olfactory bits to bedrock as I was by ‘Cepes and Tuberose’. For here was everything I had looked for in natural perfumery but had yet to find. Peerless beauty and the underlying hint of strange that accentuates it, the sleight-of-hand of a true and committed artist, a statement and a unique identity, all contained in a tiny sample vial.

I’ve since reviewed ‘Candide’, equally stunning, and thanks to Mandy’s generosity, more reviews are coming this week, starting with her justly famous ‘Tango’.

Because I’ve come to realize that natural perfumery – not something many of my fellow Danes are much aware of, if at all in this conglomerate-dominated age – is the one thing that gives me hopes for a future of perfume – to remind us all of the beauty that surrounds us every day in everything that grows and lives. When scents are prohibited in the workplace, when natural essences used for thousands of years are banned, ostensibly to protect the allergy-prone but in reality to promote proprietary synthetic blends, in some cases with unknown side effects, when the world we live and breathe in is farther and farther removed from anything truly… ‘natural’ – we need an artist like Mandy Aftel, an artist committed to a vision of what perfume should and could be, a perfumer who believes that ‘natural’ and ‘luxury’ are not mutually exclusive.

Once upon a time, perfume was an attempt to capture that moment in a garden or the woods when we breathed deeper and happier and felt elevated above our humdrum human existence and our everyday selves, out on a summer evening to collect a little boy for bedtime, when suddenly we realized with a shock to our awareness…

The elderflowers are blooming, and the mock-orange, too.

And elsewhere on Planet Earth, an alchemist is hard at work to freeze that moment in a perfume…

Coming Attractions


– The thrills, spills and chills ahead!

Ladies, gentlemen and sentient lifeforms, it has been…an amazing spring and early summer for Scent Less Sensibilities. I have tried things I never would have thought, loved what I never would have thought I could, expanded my own olfactory universe in ever-larger quantum leaps, and more than anything, I’ve been completely flabbergasted by the responses, comments and support I’ve received. Thanks to some Great Facilitators – you know who you are and that I adore you, right? – and some equally fantabulous ‘fumes, SLS, which started as a sort of joke almost a year ago, has taken off in ways both great and small and all of them appreciated, but the fun just never stops, does it? I’ve come to realize that a little (well, make that a lot!) of discipline is in order, so now I’ve begun to map out my reviews in the weeks to come. If I don’t, I’ll surely go down in flames…

Here’s a sneak peak at some of those coming attractions:

Once upon a time, I was an Amouage ignoramus, and willfully so. One look at those price tags, and …no. Just no. Nothing could ever be that good. I have never been so thrilled at having to eat my own words. Well, as some of you know, not a few of them…are. That. Good. The one that made me cry, the one I was helpless to resist, the one I loved but couldn’t wear, and the collection that surprised me so much, I’m still wondering how to find the hooks to describe them. Next week is Amouage Week. Tomorrow morning I have a heavy date with ‘Memoir Woman’, to be followed throughout next week by Memoir Man, the Library Collection of Opus I – V, and the much anticipated Honour Man and Woman. You might be surprised. I know I was.

The brave new world of natural perfumes has been a revelation in all the best and most luminous, numinous ways. I can thank Lucy of Indieperfumes for introducing me to these new marvels, and for introducing me to Mandy Aftel of Aftelier Perfumes, for which I can never, ever thank her enough. I’ve reviewed Mandy’s astonishing ‘Cepes and Tuberose’ and ‘Candide’, and you can expect to read more of her breathtaking, faint-making perfumes in the weeks to come. If you haven’t read it yet, beg, buy or borrow a copy of her book ‘Essence and Alchemy’. Suddenly, everything perfumery makes sense – and scents, too!

Another prodigious talent will also receive her own spotlight – the prolific Dawn Spencer Hurwitz. I had read so many things about her, I didn’t know what to think, but it had to be good. It was better. When your favorite perfume genre is resurrected from the cold, dead IFRA ashes and is as gorgeous as Vert Pour Madame, you know it’s all good. Dawn has recently collaborated with the Denver Art Museum on their ‘Cities of Splendor’ exhibition of the Italian Renaissance, and I get to try her recreations of Renaissance perfumery. And…

Liz Zorn of Soivohle is another natural perfumer and undiscovered talent here in Europe, but that won’t last if I can do anything about it. Likewise, JoAnne Bassett, whose ‘Sensual Embrace’ convinced even this anti-musk rat that maybe I was…wrong? What have I been missing all these years?

One toothache that won’t go away is my leaden guilt over not yet reviewing several from a line I’ve loved with a fury all spring: Ormonde Jayne. Something must be done! So it will. Read all about it!

In the eleven months of SLS, I have to the best of my knowledge only reviewed one perfume that left me completely cold. Just to stir up a little trouble (a favorite occupation!), I have plans to review one I absolutely hate. You might be surprised!

I have a busy summer ahead of me. So perhaps I had better clam up and start writing…:)

The Best of All Possible Worlds


– a review of Aftelier Perfumes ‘Candide’

We humans have an unsettling propensity to never quite…be here now. Here in this moment in time, in this company, in this place. We always seem to have one foot, one half or one important part of our minds in either the past or the future, preoccupied with what we have done, should have done, should be doing, would be doing if only, if not…Or else we fret about a future that has yet to arrive – a deadline, a project, an event to come that may or may not turn out to be what we expect, a meeting with someone who may surprise us.

Because we do, we also tend to grow ever more disillusioned and stressed out, and as that happens, pessimism, that dreaded slayer of hopes and possibilities, kicks in and takes over, and so life becomes an ever-perpetuating cycle of doom, gloom and a whole lot of headache full of more stress, more down, more… regret. Before we know it, the corners of our mouths descend all the way to our shoulders, and our shoulders and our very attitudes droop too.

OK. Stop right there. Sit down. Here, take the most comfortable chair in the house. Put your feet up. Now, close your eyes. I have the anodyne for those blahs, I have the cure for those indigo blues and I tell you from the bottom of my inky, witchy heart that this will work, this will change you, this will shift your perspective, your outlook, and your entire life around if you let it. Are you up for that?

Good. First, you have to…breathe as deep as you can. All the way through to your fingertips, all the way down to your toes. Keep your eyes closed. No cheating!

Let me just unscrew this little vial for you and dab a little on your skin. Breathe this in. All the way to your toes! Uh, uh…don’t open your eyes just yet! There’s no rush, nowhere you have to be except n-o-w.

Heavenly, isn’t it? That bright burst of sunshine citrus, that little kick of pepper that wakes you up, that furry raspberry current dancing underneath it.

I knew it! You’re smiling already! See? We’re getting somewhere. We’re not there just yet. You’ve been through a lot lately, and there’s still a way to go.

I can tell, you can already sense the cushions at your back, the throw over the armrest, the lingering traces of the cinnamon incense I burned last night. Give it a few minutes, and even Hairy Krishna will be curious enough to jump up and settle on your lap. Be warned. He has a very loud purr.

What’s this? You’re breathing easier, you say? The stresses of your life aren’t quite so acute? It’s that astounding jasmine, puncturing all your lead balloons. Work got you down? Bang! What work? Work was so four hours ago. It will return tomorrow, and Scarlett O’ Hara said it all – tomorrow is another day. Is life too short for bossy little boys? Poof! He’s asleep, lulled into dreamland with Looli the Tiger and a whisper of rose saying…sleep, little one.

Strange, isn’t it? You don’t feel sleepy in the slightest. Open your eyes.

You feel awake, aware, watching the candle move in the breeze from the open window.

Happiness is a blooming jasmine, ethereal in the moonlight. But before you float on those gossamer jasmine wings right out the window, frankincense makes its entrance – yes, I know it’s one of your favorite notes, and so do oppoponax and myrrh, soft and sweet and haunting as the moon outside, two days from the full.

You can feel the chair beneath you, feel the memory of that happy citrus-pepper kick to your senses, feel the lift of all your cares and worries, feel the atavistic, primal surge of a summer night on your skin, in your bones, in that indigo fog in your mind that has strangely vanished without a trace, leaving only moonbeams behind.

Where did all the worries go? Who knows? Who cares? That was then. This is you and this is now, a blissful moment of solitude and quiet on a moonlit night in June when all possibilities can happen, where dreams can come true, where you can do anything, achieve anything you desire.

Go ahead. Ask for what you need. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Surely it won’t! Assume they will say yes. And if they don’t, there’s always a Plan B that also assumes only good things and good times.

Did you know that optimists live longer? Did you know that if you do radiate positive vibes that is precisely what you will attract? You might as well, you know. Lead balloons are so overrated.

Live a little. Love a lot, and laugh no less! Dare to be a little silly, dare to have a lot of fun. What have you got to lose? This moment won’t return, so you might as well.

As you stand in that moonbeam, with a smile on your face and a hope in your mind that jasmine brought to bloom, you are all of a piece, you are completely at peace, and you can entirely believe, from your bone marrow all the way to the attitude you project…

This is the best of all possible worlds, and you are the best of all possible yous.

Don’t thank me. Thank the alchemist and quantum mage who is Mandy Aftel of Aftelier Perfumes. She created this perfume, named for Voltaire’s famous novel, as an ode to eternal optimism and an aria to hope, and even you will confess you were not what you were two hours before. You will not be that shade of blue again, and all you have to do is breathe all of it in, the sunshine citrus, that luscious berry tone, that whisper of rose , the glorious, gleaming jasmine and the frankincense that lifts those lead balloons and says…

You are the best of all your possible selves in the best of all possible worlds, and everything you dare to dream can happen, so long as you can hope!

Notes according to the Aftelier website: Pink grapefruit, blood orange, black pepper, jasmine grandiflorum, Moroccan rose absolute, frankincense, oppoponax absolute, myrrh.

Disclosure: Sample provided for review by Mandy Aftel. I am a changed woman now…;)

Aftelier Perfumes ‘Candide’, ‘Lumiere’ and ‘Honey Blossom’ were all nominated for the 2011 Fifi Awards in the category ‘Best Indie Brand’.

Aftelier ‘Candide’ is available through the Aftelier website, at Scents & Sensibility (for UK customers only), and at Sündhaft, who will ship to anywhere in Europe.

For that Perfectly Pretty Day


– a review of Illuminum ‘White Gardenia Petals’

A little girl plans it in her head for years and years. That perfect, perfect day where she gets to star in her own movie of being the eternally adored center of attention, surrounded by her fawning family and friends, lavished with presents chosen from a carefully compiled list and registered at all the right stores, wearing her ultimate whipped-cream-and-meringue fantasy of silk and lace.

Her wedding day. Somewhere is a groom of course, like all Prince Charming fantasies, but he’s nearly incidental. After all, on this perfect day, this perfect fantasy is all about her!

Somewhere and somehow, that little girl grows up, outgrows her Barbies and mostly her Disneyfied fantasies about that perfect, perfect day. Prince Charming may evolve into Charming Only After That Third Bottle of Champagne, or devolve not just into a frog, but an entirely new sub-species of amphibian loudmouth.

Unless she never does outgrow the Disney brain damage, in which case, she may well turn into Bridezilla.

Not all that long ago, Catherine Middleton slayed cake-eating viewers and hopeless romantics all over the planet on that perfect day she became the Duchess of Cambridge, perfectly composed, perfectly attired in a stunning Sarah Barton wedding dress for Alexander McQueen. I didn’t watch the wedding itself (mea culpa!) since I had a deadline and other preoccupations. I saw pictures and sent the radiant bride and bashful groom only my very best well wishes.

This being the perfumosphere, of course, it was a matter of minutes before every perfume blogger on Planet Earth was asking…

“What perfume did she wear?”

The dress was British, so we all mentioned our favorite British perfume houses and suitable-for-wedding perfumes…Ormonde Jayne, Penhaligon’s, the newly resurrected Grossmith, who went one step further and re-orchestrated ‘Betrothal’.

She wore ‘Illuminum White Gardenia Petals’, by perfumer Michael Boadi of Boadicea the Victorious fame, we learned, and soon, we were all scrambling for a sample.

Here it is on my desk as I type, and I can tell you this… it is indeed perfectly…well, the word ‘bridal’ does come to my cynical mind. It is soft, sweet, and very, very white. I do not, at any stage in its development, smell anything like gardenia.

Instead, what I sense is…something I might call first plastic doll, then ‘tropical accord’ that quickly fades away and cedes center stage to lily of the valley and jasmine without so much as a whisper of indole.

This is where my inner cynic shows her true colors. No gardenia, with that undertone of skank and Roquefort, and a jasmine that has been sent packing to reform school to learn proper, ladylike behavior, to sit up straight, mind her p’s and q’s, speak only in well-rounded vowels and never, ever, ever make a public scandal.

It’s perfectly demure, perfectly appropriate and I must say it, pretty in white. I could see why this would be a good choice on a day when over one billion people on Earth are parked in front of TVs with champagne and cake and all-out British mayhem to stare at you and take apart every element of your wedding. It’s not the kind of perfume to call attention to itself, it’s not old-fashioned but rather very modern in a clean, white manner, and somewhere well before that pianissimo, indistinct amber wood drydown, I’m well and thoroughly…bored.

I wouldn’t mind this on someone as elegant as the Duchess, in fact, I wouldn’t mind it at all on anyone else but me. There is not one jarring note, nothing except a smooth, white, floral seamless blend that reminds me of nothing so much as scented feminine hygiene products.

That alone should make it huge in Japan.

Meanwhile, I sit here and contemplate…weddings. I wore vintage Magie Noir to my own almost eleven years ago, a hastily arranged affair orchestrated by the mother-in-law-Zilla in her living room, where the bride wore a black suit and sandals one size too big with five-inch heels, so I wouldn’t look too embarrassing beside the 6’ 6” groom.

Now, that part of my own life is over, and in the highly unlikely event I ever say ‘I do’ again, I wouldn’t wear Magie Noir, and I could never wear white. I would want something rich and complex and even indolic. Say, Serge Lutens’ ‘Fleurs d’Oranger’ for instance, which does have wedding associations but is not demure in the slightest. Amouage ‘Ubar’ is another complicated joyride I might consider, or Ormonde Jayne’s ‘Frangipani’, perfect for a barefoot ceremony on a Hawaiian beach with your feet in the surf.

But in my own perfect world, saying ‘I do!’ to someone as idiosyncratic, complex and iconoclastic as myself, I’d choose something else. I’d want something to reflect the complicated woman I am now and the challenges we would meet. I would honor, cherish, respect and love – if never obey! – and I would wear Aftelier’s ‘Cepes and Tuberose’. It suits my sensibilities in a way White Gardenia Petals doesn’t. I’m not tall enough, thin enough, young enough, idealistic enough or nearly pretty enough to wear it, but I’ll bet plenty of women will.

Illuminum White Gardenia Petals should be a smash success. And huge in Japan!

A big fragrant hug to Thomas, who made it possible!

Notes according to Luckyscent: Lily, white gardenia, muguet, jasmine, amber wood.

Illuminum White Gardenia Petals is available in the US at Luckyscent, and at Roullier White in Europe.