I received an email from Doc Elly early this morning about something she found in her inbox, and I rather suspect you might be interested, so without further ado, head over to her blog, Perfume Project NW, for further details!
And big thanks to Bloody Frida, who gave me the perfect word for my own reaction:
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Yes, I’m excited. So I’ll slink away into the shadows again and get back to that Other Thing I Had To Do…
😉
Tarot Card: Guiseppe Lama, Voodoo Chilli
-a review of Olympic Orchid’s “Siam Proun”
There is something in the term “Oriental” that tickles the imagination, a sense of ancient history and timelessness. In perfume, an oriental denotes something spicy and opulent, a dream of far-away lands and old, sensuous secrets hiding within the depths of a perfume bottle, something ever-so-slightly decadent, even a touch forbidden, which only makes it that much more alluring.
My own relationship with the oriental category has not always been an easy one. With the exception of Lancôme’s “Magie Noire”, I’ve tended to avoid them. I just wasn’t sure I was that kind of woman, or else just woman enough to add that potent weapon to my arsenal. So over the course of my life I gravitated toward other categories, the greens and chypres and verdant florals I still love to this day.
Caught in the all-pervasive miasma of a dismal winter and the blahs that follow, I decided a few days ago to do something about it, and set about rearranging my bookcases. In the course of doing just that, I came across a dream journal I kept ten years ago.
In the dream, I stood at a gatehouse at Angkor Wat, that recapturing of creation laid out in Khmer stone, both ruin and reality. Until the next moment, it wasn’t, and it lay before me, still standing in that gatehouse, not as it is now, a tourist attraction and World Heritage site, but as it was during, say, the reign of Jayavarman VII, surrounded by priests and officials and courtiers, and the Mount Meru in stone I saw before me was opening up to me, some test I had passed, some deed I had done had gained me access to this place both sacred and profound. Needless to say, as I walked on flower-garlanded feet down that processional path lit by torches, I woke up…
But the dream remained and refused to budge, so I wrote it down and forgot about it, only to be reminded the instant I opened my tiny vial of Olympic Orchids’ “Siam Proun”…
Siam Proun is an Oriental in the true sense of the word – a mystery wrapped in the fragrant secrets of spice and incense. It’s at once both contemplative and evocative, serene and slightly disturbing. Just like the mood in my long-ago dream, it smells both sacred and profound, and just like my dream, it evokes a unique history in its notes – a time that lay waiting to be rediscovered. It is not sweet, but heady, spicy and floral, less a composition of parts than all of a piece and entire – one mood, one time, one place and one place in time. Is there patchouli and sandalwood in there, incense, Doc Elly’s signature spice, a touch of jungle flowers hiding in the green? Yes, and a time capsule too, of a dream of the East, an idea of the Orient, a frame-freeze of history and splendor I all but forgot until it wafted out of a vial on fragrant, flower-garland feet along the path to Mount Meru where the world began, a frieze of beautiful temple dancers, dancing for the glory of Vishnu just above the milky ocean.
On my everyday excursions to places like perfume stores and the stores that smell perfumes, I don’t often come across time travel in bottles, never mind the kind of time travel I might even be persuaded to wear.
But this little-genie in-a-bottle is precisely that, a long procession of dancers, weaving through time and place and history in their gleaming silks, on those flower-garland feet, and if that’s not a cure for the dismal winter blahs, then what is?
It wears unisex, although I’d hate to encounter any man who wore this. Resistance would be futile. In no time at all, I’d be dancing quite a few measures of my own!
I want a bottle. Yesterday. Just so I can be reminded of history and beauty and far-off, exotic places past, and faraway, exotic pleasures present – and future.
Image: Temple carving from Bayon, Cambodia, 13th century.
– a review of Doc Elly’s experiments with Golden Cattleyas
A while ago, Doc Elly talked about one of her orchid varieties, the Golden Cattleya, and how the scent of them changed as they bloomed – from heady and indolic to fruity-floral in the best and original sense of the word. So when she offered samples of her experiments with her Golden Cattleya orchids, which apparently have a distinctive scent reminiscent of orange, I jumped at the chance. I grew up in Florida surrounded by orange trees everywhere, so naturally, I’m a sucker for all scents orange.
It’s such a privilege to participate in a perfume experiment. Armed with nothing better than my nose and few preconceptions, I’ll never know where I’ll end up or what wonders I might find, and in no small part to Doc Elly’s creations and her excellent blog, I know quite a bit more about both perfume and scented orchids than I ever did. I have been taken to wild and wondrous places and times and known emotions I’ve all but forgotten. Now, I had a chance to dip my proboscis into something on the ground floor as it were, and with one of my all-time favorite notes – in perfume as well as life, and how cool is that?
There were three samples, labeled GC1, GC2 and GC3, each with a different focus of the Golden Cattleya’s evolution and with a different accent. I sampled each of them on Canson Arches watercolor paper and my skin at different times in the past two weeks, before I was ill and once I felt better.
One thing is apparent almost immediately – just as there is a Guerlainade, a Tauerade or even a Lutens/Sheldrake-ade, Doc Elly, too, has her own unique signature in each of her experiments, a distinct imprint of herself in the perfumes she makes. Even in the prosaic sample bottles labeled GC1, 2 and 3, I can tell almost immediately – these are her creations.
In each of the three, you’d be hard-pressed to tell these are different interpretations of the same orchid right out of the vial. Since I learned that orchids evolve as they bloom, I wonder if evolution has a serious sense of mischief. Orange blossom on the tree may be orange blossom from top to bottom and start to finish, a rose on the bush is a rose is a rose is a poem by Gertrude Stein, but orchids are full-blown symphonies with top notes as they begin to bloom, heart notes as they open further, and a final blast of scent before the end.
GC1 – we can call it The Overture. This is the heady, indolic phase of the bloom, represented by a definite civet note. I detect orange blossom as well as neroli and a touch of orange zest, something that reminds me of tea rose, jasmine, a little spice I suspect is nutmeg or mace, and finally that animalic whiff of civet softened by a bit of vanilla. There are certain aspects as it develops on my skin that bring my near-forgotten bottle of Narcisse Noir to mind, but in only a few minutes, it loses some of its oomph and becomes less sexpot and more classic in its construction. This stuff has some serious sillage, I found out when I sprayed a small amount and the kids in my son’s kindergarten class gave me strange looks, nostrils flaring. This is bold and slightly audacious.
GC2 – The Allegro. This is one happy orange, the orange-you-glad-to-meet me that dances out of the vial on a vivid colored trail of orange blossom, zest and lots of lovely vanilla, but thanks to another touch of spice and sass, never ventures anywhere near Creamsicle territory. The spice is sweeter and softer than in GC1, which makes me think of mace as well as cinnamon, but just the faintest whisper. I sense the evolution of the orchid in this Stage Two, and GC 2 strikes me as more accessible and less in your face – I can see this develop into a bestseller with just a little more vanilla. All joy, all sweetness and the glow of orange light blooming off the skin. Orange I glad I tried it? You bet! GC 2 would be perfect for those gloomy, gray, dismal winter days when you simply want to be the Compleat Pollyanna optimist and dance out the door in winter’s despite, carrying your own beam of sunshine with you.
GC3 – The Andante. This is the third stage of the Golden Cattleya, and thanks to a potent dose of sandalwood and incense, this one contains its own memento mori. This is the final blast of glory, the swan song of an orchid, and even though the notes are darker and deeper, there are echoes and chords of stages 1 and 2. GC 3 has a gravitas to it, notes in a minor but never diminished key that are no less beautiful for their dusting of Cattleya blues. The orange blossom and zest of the beginning is underpinned and teased out by that sandalwood and incense, and is there myrrh in there too, hiding behind that feather-brush of nutmeg? I ran this by my (platonic) Scorpio friend a few days ago, and he almost ate my arm. As it dries down, it turns toward a luscious orange chocolate, bittersweet and delicious. While I very much liked all three of them right out of the vial, this Andante stole my heart. There is beauty here, and a twinge of regret, but more than anything, an underlying song of glories past and present – and an intimation that “we’re not gone until you forget!” Memento mori – “but you won’t, will you?” Of the three, this one strikes me as the most polished.
GC 1 and 3 could be worn by either gender, whereas GC 2 has a definite feminine vibe, at least to my nose. If I had any preconceptions, I would have expected to swoon over GC 2 – since I love orange and vanilla notes, separately and together. But to my own surprise, GC 3 stole the show and my heart, and Doc Elly, if you ever make any full bottles of this, let me know.
I’m doing what I can to spread the word!
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In a final aside, thank you – ALL of you, for all your well-wishing when I was so wretched with cold/walking pneumonia. Can I just say that your wishes did at least as much as the antibiotics? It’s good to be back! ☺
Image: Doc Elly’s Golden Cattleyas. No other image I found did them or these scents so much justice! 😉
– 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 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 Alembicated Genie 