Olympic Orchids Perfumes

Coming Attractions


In the unlikely event anyone has been wondering, I have not forsaken you! As the snow has thawed, I’ve been snowed under elsewhere, and 36 hours in a day are just not…enough. This is not at all the same as saying I’m going to wimp out – so instead of a new perfume post, I’ll give you a sneak preview of what’s in store!

I know I’m on the road to perdition when…I spent the better part of an evening yesterday on First In Fragrance’s website, trying to decide what to try. Decisions, decisions…so many choices, and so little time.

But in the next few weeks, expect to see my takes on a few button pushers and the ones I ordered just because my curiosity is killing me.

Birgit of Olfactoria’s Travels has a lot to answer for – among them, my curiosity over Amouage. Oh, that slope is so slippery and steep, and Epic Woman is on the list…and it’s all her fault! 😉

Robert Piguet’s Bandit has been ‘walking her catgirls on leashes in leather‘…so I have to, I absolutely have to try this again, it’s been so long…

Byredo is a line I’ve never tried, but when someone pays an homage to one of my all-time favorite poets, I have to sit up and take notice! So…Baudelaire and Green are thrown in, too.

I’ve heard plenty of great things about Odin New York. C’mon. With a name like that, it’s like throwing a spear into a Viking horde in berserker mode. So in goes…Odin New York – 02 Owari.

Heeley is another line I’ve heard lots about…and just because the name tickles my fancy, I’ll start with Esprit de Tigre.

The fun won’t stop there. Another package from Olympic Orchids arrived today and is waiting for a pickup at my local post office tomorrow.

It will be glorious, I promise you!

So what are you, dear reader, dying to try? Let me know!

Image: Edmund Dulac, Psyche and Cerebus

Dead of Winter Antidote


– a review of Olympic Orchid’s ‘A Midsummer Day’s Dream’

Today was a day when it was as if spring would never come, as if summer were a bout of desperately wishful thinking. The landscape was everywhere sere and brown and dead, and the fog never lifted from the barren, sleeping trees that seemed to pull their cloak of cloud and mist a little closer, a little tighter and denser, as if to say…wake us when it’s over. We’re sleeping in.

The only sound I could hear was the black metal caw of the rooks headbanging on the lawn, taking flight in a flurry of funereal, ominous black metal notes when a girl in a pink parka ran to the bus stop, the only shock of vivid color among the patches of melted snow and ice, the dun of the trees and bushes, the green of the grass dulled to a faded Polaroid moment memory of green.

Spring will never come. Summer never happens. This barren, this damp, marrow-aching cold, this sere, this brown…is all you will ever know.

Those days of ease and warmth, that still and breathless, restless heat, that scent of green and growing things in a rage to bloom and blossom, that heady trail of elderflowers and philadelphus, the purr of the wood doves under the eaves of the beeches…it was a dream, one fervent, fevered wish to feel entirely alive, entirely there, entirely connected to all that grows and wants and desires…to laugh in winter’s despite.

Unless…summer can be invoked in other ways, by opening that tiny vial of ‘A Midsummer’s Day Dream’. All is quiet as I do, the house is asleep, even the cats are snoozing on their cushions above the radiator, noses to tail tips, twitching in their dreams.

I’m convinced there are genies in these little vials, different genies of times and places and spaces, not at all alike, that sleep and await their moment to rise up and creep out on their fragrant trails and invoke their place and time.

This is the quintessence of a temperate summer, the days that we live for, that heated solstice shocking kiss of life to live, the days that seem an eternity, an aeon away on a fog-cloaked January morning. This is the green that burns your retinas and wakes you all the way up, and up – or down, lying on the emerald grass watching the clouds dance a measured, lazy waltz across a blue, blue sky, and beneath you, crushed wildflowers, bruised grass, trees full of sap and full of leaves inhaling sunshine, exhaling joy – that this day, this moment, this grass that tickles your nose and snaps your synapses, these nameless flowers imprinting themselves on your skin – life is nothing but perfect and you are never less than perfectly content.

Such a perfume, you might think, has never been bottled, such genies never captured, such scents, such moments never happen…outside of books and poems and Shakespeare plays.

Yet I’m telling you that they have. In a tiny little vial called ‘A Midsummer Day’s Dream’.

The perfect dead-of-winter antidote. Breathe it in, all the way in, breathe in that grassy, floral, emerald green all the way out to your fingertips and feel it tickle your nose and your fancies, and you could believe, as I did, that a fog-cloaked, dismal day was surely a figment of your imagination.

Unlike that little vial of bottled sunshine that is very, very real.

I’m speechless. Hard to find the words when all I want to do is lie back against the wildflowers, write cloud stories in the sky, and whistle with a blade of grass between my lips…

“A Midsummer Day’s Dream” can be sampled or bought at Olympic Orchids. Spread the word. Doc Elly is a genius. Or a genie, I’m not sure which…;-)

Image: Frank Cadogan Cowper: Titania Sleeps (1928)

Thanks to Josephine for the inspiration – and to my followers who make me write!

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