Iris

Black Satin Bloom


– a review of Ormonde Jayne’s ‘Orris Noir’

With all the flowers used in perfumery and aromatherapy, there is one flower I truly worship and adore.

Not orange blossom for its instant-happy vibe, not the endlessly elegant lily with all its fragrant glories, not tuberose for its come-hither siren song, not jasmine sambac or grandiflorum, beautiful as they are, not rose in all its infinite variety, nor even violet, although I love violet, too.

Of all the blooms I love, there’s something about…iris. Some element of mystery, some near-indefinable cool I can never quite grasp and find eternally fascinating, and I own not a few irises. Chanel no. 19 in EdT and EdP, Dior Homme and Homme Intense, Guerlain’s Iris Ganache, Serge Lutens’ Iris Silver Mist, Odin NY 04-Petrana, Miller Harris Terre d’Iris…oh, yes, I love iris!

Orris butter, which gives us that haunting scent, tends to add elegance as well as a touch of restrained, chill aloofness, never more beautifully than in Chanel no. 19 and Iris Silver Mist. The point is – both of these immortal irises are cool, distant, even a touch intimidating.

Still another iris has made it into my iris-centric Hall of Fame, an iris – or should I say, an orris – neither cool nor intimidating, and yet…it has to be one of the most sublime iris perfumes I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet.

May I introduce you to Orris Noir by Ormonde Jayne.

The first time I tried it, it was indeed swoon-worthy, so I did. I was not completely discombobulated until a few days later, when I was about to wash what I dub the Holey Cardigan of Alexandria – an ancient, gray wool cardigan that has been part of my lucky/superstitious writing uniform since I began to write in earnest. As I was about to toss it in the washing machine, I noticed a trace of scent so utterly haunting, it stopped me, well, cold. That chilly finger of perfumed epiphany raced down my spine and made me shiver in my laundry room, trailing goose bumps of a kind dedicated perfumoholics will know.

Orris Noir is that rarest of rhizomes – a warm, decadent, sensuous, come-closer kind of iris. It starts out spicy, warm with davana, coriander, pink pepper and a bright burst of bergamot that keeps everything suspended in air, before it settles down in to the main attraction, an iris so sumptuous and opulent with the added touch of jasmine sambac, pimento berries and bay, so plush it might as well be olfactory silk velvet in a singular hue somewhere between purple and black. The heart of this orris continues to sing well into its dark, smoky drydown of incense, myrrh, patchouli, Chinese cedar and gaiac wood, and if those notes read like a recipe for the very best kind of trouble, you would be right.

It takes a certain level of confidence and experience to wear Orris Noir, or I could easily see it wearing you. This is not a perfume for shrinking violets or demure demoiselles. It’s a purple-black velvet aura, or if you prefer, a thick, voluptuous swathe of midnight-black satin that glows on your skin like a hint of anticipation, a spicy suggestion of promises you might want to keep. Orris Noir will most emphatically get you noticed, but what you do with it is up to you! No other iris I’ve encountered is so warm, so inviting and so all-out seductive, not just to your surroundings, but to you as well. Wear it to make an impression, wear it for a special night out, wear it when you need just that little bit of extra oomph, wear it when you want to feel…fabulous, warm, spicy and above all else, when you want to feel feminine with a capital F, or woman with a capital W!

On a big night out a few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to road test Orris Noir. How well would it hold up under the harrowing, sardine conditions of a very hot, humid rock concert with about eight hundred metalheads, rockabillies and Gothaholics? Would it last long enough to make any impression if I did manage to make it backstage?

I applied half a sample vial, just to make sure. I wore Orris Noir in my hair, my pulse points, a few more I invented just for the occasion and my clothes. My companion mumbled something about not being responsible for the consequences if I got too close, which could explain why he spent most of the show at least nine feet away. But last it did and beautifully so, through the opening act and the headliner and through eighty loud, glorious minutes, blooming all the way on to a tour bus with four flirting testosterone bombs who definitely noticed the perfume a certain blonde in red and black was wearing. A woman knows how to tell. The blonde meanwhile – that would be me – felt audacious enough, sexy enough, even confident enough to flirt right back.

Thanks to Orris Noir, which forever after will have associations of a night to remember. If that’s not the right kind of association to have with such a haunting, seductive perfume, then, pray tell, what is?

Notes:
Top: Davana, pink pepper, coriander seed, bergamot
Heart: Iris, sambac absolute, pimento berries (allspice), bay
Base: Incense, myrrh, patchouli, Chinese cedar, gaiac

Orris Noir is available from the Ormonde Jayne website.

Disclosure: Sample provided by Ormonde Jayne for review.

Image: Black Iris Publishing

Bearded Ladies


– Reviews and reflections on iris

It’s spring, says my calendar, and spring is the time of year to dig all my favorite flowers out of hiding to celebrate. It’s spring – so bring on the fancy florals, those fragrant florid fantasies that I try to conjure before flying out the door in the morning with Spider-Man Jr.

Any reader of this blog knows my predilection for orange blossom, and Mademoiselle Orange still reigns supreme, no question. But in these heady days of early spring, she’s sometimes a bit too…girlie for my taste. Girlie is fine some days, the days I wake up happy and want to shout it to the stars. Since daylight savings time arrived last weekend and I realize that technically I’m now getting out of bed at 4 AM when it is still pitch-black outside, those days have yet to arrive.

For mornings like these and the days that stretch out in front of them, I want a flower that says ‘w-o-m-a-n’, preferably with a capital W. And no flower known to man or Woman in my arrogant opinion says Woman (capital included!) like that bearded lady known as Iris Pallida.

Iris is such a stunning flower, a showgirl in the spring parade with her white or purple frills and that laughing slivery shock of yellow. In perfumes, however, she comes across very differently. Iris can be chilly, slightly intimidating and even haughty, but she is always, always flawlessly turned out and always exudes…elegance and class and a slight distance to other merely mortal flowers. She has been known to devour roses, unless Madame Rose battles it out, all thorns included, and refuses to be intimidated. As for the rest of them – well, they’re not her, are they?

‘So not my social register, dahling. You can do better. Your stock has gone up.’

I listen to arguments like these every morning in front of my perfume cabinet, I swear.

Recently, I decided to explore this bearded lady in all her many glories a bit more. When a sample package arrived from Olfactoria recently, she included a few versions of Madame Iris, and instead of doing separate reviews of each, I decided to compare them – just to start another catfight in my cabinet. I love it when the djinns in those bottles begin to argue, and argue, they do. My stock is going up, and they know it!

The Queen of Faërie
Iris Silver Mist, by Serge Lutens.
Created by Maurice Roucel in 1994, this is iris at her strangest, her eeriest, and her most mercurial and ethereal. There really is nothing else like it. Chilly spring earth with a whisper of green, a hint of carrot, and a shapeshifter of an iris that peeks and hides, hides and peeks – and then jumps out at you when you least expect it with such mind-blowing beauty you want to cry. Right at the moment you get it, you get this iris in the bedrock of your very soul, she disappears laughing below the ground, and all you’re left with is a memory. You give up. You forget about her, and resign yourself to that melancholy echo of the earth breathing on a spring day. She waits, and then jumps out of the forest, shouting ‘BOO!’ I like surprises, but few perfumes have surprised me so much and so continuously as this one.

28, La Pausa, by Chanel (2007)
If like me you love iris, then this is a no-brainer. It’s iris. Iris in all its glory, iris from start to finish, it’s all about iris, and it’s gorgeous, green, breathtaking and heartstopping in its very iriscentricity. The problem is, it disappears in nothing flat. WTF??? Jacques Polge, how could you DO this to me? If Chanel – who would surely know how – would amp this up to eau de parfum or parfum, it would never leave my cabinet or my spring rotation, ever. Christopher Sheldrake, are you listening? Do something. We iris lovers deserve that much!

Infusion d’Iris, by Prada (2007)
If some of these bearded ladies are buxom, fully grown women who know how to wear haute couture, walk in stilettos and behave in ladylike fashion when confronted with whole cooked artichokes, then this is Iris as Supermodel. Not above age 20, not with a hint of curves and not too much personality, either. This is an iris with not much meat on her bones. She photographs well, it must be said, but this woman doesn’t deserve that capital W. For the longest time, all I got was Elnett hairspray whenever I tried it. I tried it again today, and while I didn’t get the Elnett, I got a pallid, bloodless, slouchy iris, a wannabe iris, a wimpy iris I’m not sure I have time enough for. I like to make a statement, and the only thing IdI states is ‘well, at least I tried to be what you wanted…’ in her breathy, little voice. Sorry, baby. You should go play with your Barbies now. They’ve been missing you.

Iris Nobile, by Acqua di Parma (2004)
At the opposite end of the scale is Acqua di Parma’s Iris Nobile, who is all Woman, all the time. The kind of woman who would never dream of venturing out in public without every hair and eyelash in place. She is very beautiful, slightly haughty and very, very restrained. I wore jeans and a sweater the day I took her for a test drive, and she was not very pleased. Not by the music on my iPod, not by my attire in general and least of all by those jeans. ‘A proper signora would never wear those!’ she shouted, ‘and certainly not without more foundation garments! And heels! Signora, you are small! You need heels! A pencil skirt at least, and a suitable blouse, silk of course, and…’
And I’m just too much of a Viking slob for Signora Nobile…

Terre d’Iris, by Miller Harris (2005)
Miller Harris is a line I’ve had a slightly uneasy relationship with. I once owned a decant of Citron-Citron, and although I liked it quite a lot for hot, carefree summer days, it vanished almost before I knew it was there. Not so with TdI. This is an iris with titanium ovaries and a built-in attitude, and it caught me by surprise. Elegant, but not so elegant she can’t stand my beloved jeans, and with just enough wood to keep me intrigued. (All puns intended!) Oh, yes, she’s a keeper. She can wrestle that Prada wimperella with one hand behind her back and an elegant toss of her hair, and take on all the snooty Lutens ladies who roll their heavily made-up eyes at the plebes who share that cabinet. I liked her, really I did. With that much attitude, I suspect she wore safety pins in her attire in her wanton youth – and rest assured, it was…wanton. All that wood…

I still have a few more bearded ladies to try. The question is, what catfights will they get into on the shelves of my perfume cabinet? I can’t wait to find out!

Ms. Frigidaire

A review of Chanel no. 19

Indulge me for a moment. Imagine the year is 1982. The location Copenhagen, Denmark. Nothing like the Hipsterville it is today, nothing like the romantic, copper-roofed old Nordic city seen in movies, but a dire, dour downer of a town. Unemployment is high, spirits are low, and an entire generation is busy declaring they have no future at all with all the passion of the very young and disillusioned.

Picture this: Hanging around the fringes of political activism, underground art, the squatter’s movement and general malaise is quite possibly the world’s cleanest punk. Second-hand Doc Martens, fourth/fifth and sometimes sixth-hand clothes hanging by one thread, black of course. This young lady – for that she is – has few hopes of anything much at all, and maladjusted doesn’t even begin to describe her. She’s eighteen going on nineteen going on a very crotchety ninety, a dangerous age, getting into scrapes, getting into trouble, getting arrested at demonstrations for her fast and furious mouth, hurling old toilet commodes out of the windows of squatted buildings at the police who are there to kick her out, along with her closest eighty rabid activist friends.

When she’s not wreaking havoc with her fellow anarchists, she hangs out in one haven for the misfits and Misfits fans, a book café in a side street that never sells that many books, but people club together for vegan potluck lunches, argue about music and political theory, and where to run if the cops crash the next squat.

Remember, she’s arguably the world’s cleanest punk. Despite her demeanor, despite the forbidding eye makeup and the safety pins and the scuffed boots and bitten fingernails, she is scrupulously clean. Her beloved grandmother did not crawl out of the gutter of the working class just so she could wallow in her own brand of dirt. That, too, gets her into trouble, because soap and water are so oppressing, so bourgeois. So not punk. And there’s that other thing, that other not-cool thing to do that she does – she wears perfume.

One day, when no one is looking and she has a little cash that didn’t go into the communal anarcho-syndicalist potluck/LP/herbal tea kitty, cash she didn’t say she has, she sneaks into a local department store feeling in the mood for something sneaky and stealthily subversive. Two hugely guilty if very happy hours later, she leaves – with a bottle of Chanel no. 19 eau de toilette.

Sure enough, one warm spring day just after her nineteenth birthday, her sometime boyfriend notices an aura that has nothing in common with stale beer, herbal tea or cigarette smoke. Being her boyfriend, he makes a comment, and the poor girl is instantly lambasted for supporting such a capitalist, commercial enterprise as Chanel. Suddenly, even her very political stance is called into question – because of her perfume. She may be a punk – but she’s also a g-i-r-l. At age nineteen, someone finally notices!

Stealth subversion at its finest. A punk in French perfume, and not just any perfume, but Chanel no. 19, as opposed to the far more common no. 5.

These far too many years later, and the former punk is no longer quite so angry or so defensive. All these many years later, she still wears Chanel no. 19, whenever she’s in the mood for a little subversion. It calms her, grounds her and focuses her attention on the things that really matter.

Taking over the world, for instance. She can name at least two occasions where her qualifications – and possibly her Chanel no. 19 – landed her some very high profile jobs.

Chanel no. 19 is a chilly, green and even slightly intimidating perfume. The kind of perfume you’d imagine Sigourney Weaver wearing in ‘Working Girl’ – not compromising on femininity, or much of anything else, for that matter. It’s a take it or leave it scent, from the first cool, muted burst of galbanum to the far dry-down of earthy vetiver, and all the silky-smooth stages of iris and rose in between. It has no need to be loud, no need to wear its heart on its dark green sleeve, but you will notice it, you will pay attention and you will do as she bids you – or else. The perfect scent for Ms. Phrigidaire.

The different concentrations offer a surprising evolution of the same scent. The parfum is like cold, slippery, gray-green satin, emphasizing the happy marriage of iris and rose. The eau de parfum is less focused on the rose/iris and more on the leathery, vetiver and oakmoss base notes, whereas the eau de toilette is lighter, with more of a galbanum kick and a flirtier, more lemony iris middle.

It has certainly been reformulated due to IFRA restrictions. The Chanel no 19 I remember at age 19 was much richer, more faceted and less fleeting than the one you can find today, but having said that, some loves last well beyond the age of nineteen. Even this one.

Notes according to Basenotes

Top notes:
Galbanum, Bergamot, Neroli, Hyacinth .

Middle Notes:
Rose, Orris, Jasmine, Narcissus, Muguet, Ylang-Ylang.

Base Notes:
Musk, Sandal, Oakmoss, Leather, Cedarwood .

Image: © SexyEyes69/redbubble.com