Mandy Aftel

Bite me!


– a review of Aftelier Perfume’s ‘Fig’

Some people, I’m told, are only able to associate a certain brand of cookie with the word ‘fig’. I feel sorry for them.

Not only are figs one of the oldest cultivated plants on Earth, grown before we even grew wheat according to archaeological evidence, they are also surely among the most maligned. They bring up associations of those lunchbox staples of my childhood, or else sorry, solitary dried Smyrna figs left over on a Christmas platter after everyone plundered all the dates and nuts, somehow reminding us of a future we try to keep at bay with sunscreen and retinoids.

Unwanted, unloved and taken entirely for granted, what could one possibly love about figs? I’ll tell you.

On a scorching hot day in August the year I graduated, I found myself in a fig grove on a hillside in Arcadia in the Peloponnese – in Arcadia ego – with a German engineering student from Stuttgart I somehow acquired in a Bern café and a bookish Swiss philosophy student who joined us on the ferry in Brindisi. This fig grove faced south into the sunshine against a vertiginous mountain, and I can close my eyes and recall that breathless heat beneath the shady fig trees that seeped into our bone marrow as we polished off the last of our lunchtime wine-with-no-label, the entire landscape around us eerily silent in the siesta. It was too hot to move, too hot to think, and yes, it was much too hot for that, too. So as we lay back and peered up into that green canopy above our heads, I realized that some of those figs were ripe, that a few were about ripe to bursting in that timeless August afternoon. The only figs I had ever known were dried, and here they were on an Arcadian hillside, sun-kissed and whispering loud enough to be heard over the goats’ bells in a distant field…

‘Bite me.’

Something about that purple-red flesh beckoning under skin the color of a livid bruise, something I needed to know. I reached up and plucked it, and as I felt it drop into my hand with a velvet soft thud, while the German watched with one eye open and the Swiss philosopher snored away his wine against a tree trunk, I finally understood how Eve felt, not long before she invented the world’s first sustainable fashion line.

In a ripe fig straight from a sunkissed tree is the sum entire of purple sunshine, an empire of sweet and savor, no relation at all to anything in dire need of a facelift on a Christmas platter. Fig contains hints of spice and earth, sweet and very slightly bitter to offset it. It’s the kind of fruit that practically begs you to tear your teeth into that oozing, seedy, perfumed flesh and immerse yourself face first into a whole new sensory geography of ‘luscious’. Add in the thyme-oregano scent of the Arcadian countryside, the still air of siesta in August, and the pungent aroma of rock rose that grows everywhere on the hills like weeds, and it all adds up to one seriously wicked indulgence.

This is what comes to mind when I wear Mandy Aftel’s ‘Fig’. That first, fatal fresh fig in my life, when my horizon shifted, my world grew larger and my taste buds were realigned.

I’ve worn and loved several fig scents, among them Diptyque’s ‘Philosykos’, all bitter-dry heat and Grecian sunshine, and Olympic Orchids’ ‘A Midsummer Day’s Dream’ which is far greener and grassier. Both are great for different reasons, but ‘Fig’ is something else.

Mandy Aftel’s version seems… red-purple like the flesh of a fig itself and it smells purple, too, with that fruity pink grapefruit tang and grand fir, say the notes, but there are no spikes in this evergreen tree. Woven around it like a promise is a green ribbon that must be the fir my head tells me, but my amygdala tells me otherwise. ‘Fig’ gives my amygdala ideas that are all kinds of fruity truths with consequences.

If gourmand is a perfume category based on sweet, edible-seeming perfumes, then this gourmand is the first ever perfume I’ve nearly wanted to eat. Every hint of fruit and spice a fig can contain is found here with the pink pepper and the viridian jasmine sambac that keeps it from ever once nose-diving into lunchbox cookie territory, blooming away on my skin with all its seductive anticipation.

All the while, this luscious purple-hearted perfume sings sotto voce of breathless August afternoons beneath the green canopy of an Arcadian sky, and right before I’m about to gnaw off my wrist, a heady drydown of Africa stone and fir absolute decide to do me in. Fig jam, says Mandy Aftel’s website, and if that’s what it is, I want to be tarred and feathered in it, I want to wallow in it, I want one fig grove instant to live eternal in my mind these thirty years later, when a velvet-soft, bruise-black fig fell into my hand to such fatal effect, bursting open to show itself, that fragrant, sweet, luscious, jammy, spicy, sexy red-purple flesh that whispered…

‘Bite me.’

Notes:
Top: Grand fir, pink grapefruit
Heart: Pink pepper absolute, jasmine sambac
Base: Africa stone, fir absolute

Aftelier’s ‘Fig is available from the Aftelier website, from Scent and Sensibility in the UK and from Sündhaft.

Disclosure: My sample was provided by Aftelier for review.

Image: visualphotos.com

Honeyed Blooms and Meadows Sweet

– Reviews of Aftelier Perfume‘s ‘Honey Blossom’ and ‘Wildflowers’

Last night, trying to ground myself after a frantic Saturday that completely conspired against me, I went out for a walk in the summer twilight, which this time of year is well past 10 PM. As I walked around my neighborhood on a Saturday night, noting the honeysuckle blooming on walls, the elderflowers with their musky, earthy scent that my compatriots like to convert into a favorite summer drink, breathing in all the ghostly aromas of a summer night in July, a luminous, intoxicating ribbon of something green and unmistakable wove its way into my awareness.

High summer is finally here, and the linden trees are blooming, and if ever a high summer night had a signature scent, linden blossom would surely be one of them. There could be no better time to review Aftelier Perfumes’ ‘Honey Blossom’.

‘Honey Blossom’ was created as part of a unique perfumer’s collaboration with Andy Tauer to highlight a linden blossom CO2 extract. Last year as the project unfolded, readers of Nathan Branch’s blog were able to get a unique look into the process of perfume making and the challenges both Andy Tauer and Mandy Aftel encountered along the way.

Andy Tauer created ‘Zeta’, which I reviewed in late April, and although I can certainly appreciate its beauty, I couldn’t wear it at all. I had no choice but to dub it the Honey Monster, because it very nearly ate me alive.

So I was more than slightly apprehensive when I opened up that tiny vial of ‘Honey Blossom’, wondering if this one, too would devour me whole and entire.

In a word – no.

‘Honey Blossom’, I’m thrilled to say, is an entirely different perfume, for all that it highlights the same linden blossom CO2 extract. Mandy Aftel chose mimosa, with its particular sunshine-yellow sweetness to highlight it, and these two, the mimosa with its almond/marzipan facets and the linden blossom with its green, heady character dance a perfect waltz in tandem, seamlessly whirling on towards a dizzying orange blossom heart that never dominates or takes over. The orange blossom opens up its doors and joins in that mimosa and linden blossom waltz and this somehow becomes linden blossom but better, a unique twist on a beloved summer perfume accord that normally tends to take the alternate name for linden – lime – a little too literally.

There is no lime in this linden, just the near-narcotically addictive, sweetly dripping nectar of the blossoms themselves that teeter towards honey but never do fall into the beehive, waltzing their sweet, joyous ménage à trois with the mimosa and orange blossom on my skin in dizzying figures that whisper of warm summer twilight and puffs of sunshine caught in thousands of creamy yellow blooms. As it dries down, a downy accord of ambergris and benzoin with its vanilla touch wind down the waltz and slow down the linden blossom to a glow that fades away like the stars above in a high summer sky that never gets completely dark at this time of year.

I’m reminded of those lines from William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’, although here, the angels are the blooms of a linden tree…

“Unseen they pour blessing.
And joy without ceasing,
On each bud and blossom,
And each sleeping bosom.”

It was a privilege to be privy to the process of creating a linden blossom perfume through Nathan Branch’s blog, and an even greater privilege to be able to compare the two different interpretations of the same CO2 extract. Both ‘Zeta’ and ‘Honey Blossom’ share that same soft yellow glow, but the similarities stop there. I can admire ‘Zeta’ for the beauty that it is, but I can never wear it. Unrequited love is so over-rated! ‘Honey Blossom’ sings in a different key with a different pitch, pouring its joy and blessing on all things good, waltzing around in a summer twilight beneath the blooming linden trees.

‘Honey Blossom’ was one of three of Mandy Aftel’s creations (The others were ‘Lumiere’ and ‘Candide’, which I reviewed here) to be nominated as a finalist in both the European and American FiFi awards as Fragrance of the Year, Indie Brand.

Meadows Sweet

There was a moment back in January I can clearly recall on a July afternoon, a moment I stood outside my work on a lunch break on a dismal, cold, foggy day and thought to myself…this cold, this damp, this gray…is all you will ever know, and winter will never end. When summer seemed an all but impossible concept, some delirious fevered dream of light in a month that has so little at my latitude in January, and heat that seems so outrageous on such a chill, gray day.

I can remember I went home and wrote a perfume review that night, the kind that would remind me of what I knew but could scarcely believe in January…sooner or later, summer will return and the flowers bloom again, sooner than I always think it will be summer, and I will feel that delicious kiss of sunlight on my skin that makes me think of things I can so easily forget..like hope, like possibilities, like feeling every inch alive.

The review was for Olympic Orchids’ ‘A Midsummer Day’s Dream’, but where Doc Elly’s perfume takes you out on the grass and beneath the fig trees, from the bark of the wood to the leaves and the fruit in all its stages, Mandy Aftel’s ‘Wildflowers’ takes an entirely different tack.

‘Wildflowers’ is a solid perfume, a delicious way to wear perfume entirely for yourself and no one else. It has little sillage and an understated presence, but when something is this beautiful, I don’t much care. The feel of the solid on my skin is probably the best I’ve ever encountered in a solid perfume, smooth as silk charmeuse, and if this were a body butter, I’d buy it by the tub, it’s…that good.

Instead of grass and a whole fig grove, this is a meadow full of flowers, all the flowers of a hot, perfect summer day of sunshine and blue skies, the larks singing high in the air and the buzz of bumblebees in the flowers, some of which you know, and many which you don’t.

So lie back in the meadows and watch the world from the ground as you breathe it all in….the verdant kick of lime awakening your senses to your surroundings, a whole bouquet of heedless, fragrant flowers blooming in random profusion and careless, elegant abandon by nature, all if it spelling the kind of peerless beauty artifice can never know, and as that meadow seeps into your consciousness, draining away all worries and cares, the demands of your day and the weeks ahead, a sweet scent of hay, some of it fresh-cut, some of it dried gathers force, and you become, as so often happens with Aftelier perfumes I’ve noticed, one with the moment, the flowers far too many and too beautiful to pluck and take with you, the larks in the sky above you and that sugary hay that is nothing more or less than the quintessence of every summer-blooming, sunshine-soaked grass that ever grows.

Maybe I should just amend that to…every summer day that lives forever in our memory, the kind we need to be reminded of on dismal, foggy January days. A memory, a recollection of S-u-m-m-e-r, period.

If summer somehow eludes you, if you need a reminder that some day, heat and light and sunshine will return, the wildflowers will bloom and hopes and possibilities will be every inch alive, that even you will be every inch alive and aware in a perfect meadow moment, then you need to try ‘Wildflowers.’

Meadows should always be so sweet, and flowers should always bloom in such plentitudes, just like those possibilities that seem such a distant, nebulous dream on a dismal January day.

Notes for ‘Honey Blossom’:
Top: Mimosa, linden blossom CO2
Heart: Orange blossom absolute, phenyl ethyl alcohol
Base: Ambergris, benzoin

Notes for ‘Wildflowers’:
Hay, wildflowers, Mexican lime

‘Honey Blossom’ and ‘Wildflowers‘ are 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.