Pascal Morabito Or Noir: fragrance review

There's a wondrous line in Sherlock BBC S2E1 (A Scandal in Belgravia) when Irene Adler marvels at the height of the cheekbones of our eponymous hero, saying "Look at those cheekbones, I could cut myself slapping that face... would you like me to try?". This is in essence the, well, essence of Or Noir, the vintage fragrance by French jeweller Pascal Morabito; a fragrance so sharp and juttingly beautiful, one could cut themselves trying to slap it into submission.

Morabito is famous for his "free floating diamond" launched in 1970, a cube that contained a simple, clear cut diamond, that looked as if it was not suspended, but floating in space. Ten years later he launched the perfume equivalent in Or Noir, the fragrance. Diamonds are sharp and all, and scents do float in space, get it?

Or Noir the fragrance oozes with urban elegance. It's a man-made scent, it's impossible to imagine this aroma in the countryside, or coming from a natural source that you can put your finger on. The mix  of notes, with blackcurrant bud in the top notes to give that tangy feeling and the inky impression of bitter oak moss in the base, is not unheard of, but its aloofness speaks of supreme confidence in wielding those slaps expertly. It's the scent of a professional. The heart of the Morabito's Or Noir is comprised of womanly notes, green florals like narcissus and lily of the valley with budding gardenia, notes which pair supremely with chypre perfumes and leather fragrances.

The magic of the perfume comes from delineating its lineage. This owes a heavy debt to iconoclast Germaine Cellier's infamous Bandit perfume for Piguet from the 1940s, as well as Bernard Chant's masterpieces for Lauder and for Madame Grès in the 1960s and 1970s. But it's not a copy, rather the end of a prodigious line. If you ever happen upon a vintage bottle, don't let it pass you by; getting a cut pounding on this prey is very worth trying.

Viktoria Minya Hedonist Cassis: fragrance review

The fallen berries that get smashed and mushed underfoot reflect something of the realization of so much waste around us that even useful, succulent things fall to their unintentional demise through a drive that obeys cosmic rules; gravity, fall, squish. Hedonist Cassis by young but talented perfumer Viktoria Minya is certainly not wasteful, bring the tang of blackcurrant and grapefruit into the core chord of Hedonist, her original creation, making for an intense experience that recalls gathering berries in the countryside waiting for mr.Fox.

hello mr.fox on flickr, via Pinterest

Viktoria Minya has indulged her original composition with a cluster of variations, each highlighting a separate ingredient, Iris, Rose, and Cassis. The latest, Hedonist Cassis, possibly comes in the most attractive bottle, purple-ish with a touch of the late Prince, if you will.

Berry fragrances probably owe their heritage to the cult best-seller by L'Artisan Parfumeur, the original "berry" which spawned a hundred offspring over the decades since its inception.
The composition here however reminds me much more of the appeal of Yves Saint Laurent In Love Again (a combo of grapefruit and blackcurrant) by perfumer Jean Claude Ellena and doesn't fail to make me smile. The rose note is reminiscent of the chord in L'Ombre dans l'Eau by Diptyque; if like me you tend to shy away from overly prim, Jane Austen roses, and appreciate instead the tang that blackcurrants give to the above mentioned Diptyque fragrance, then Hedonist Cassis is sure to hit you with the epiphany of "oh, there's rose in it". Yes, but oh so delicious.

I am reminded of inconsequential things that have to do with late summer: the droning sound of the bees, the lazy contours of the calamus in the distance, the gentle softening of the sky as dusk sets in lilac hues; refreshing juice full of sour and sweet citruses served on the balcony and the canopy shading the rays while we're reading L'Education Sentimentale, the heroes leaping off the page in their game of social graces, platonic loves and carnal disgraces; freckles slowly forming on a long hellenic nose and lashes prettily faning on a smooth cheek, the comfortable silence of well trodden territory.

Extraordinary lasting power in Heodnist Cassis is an added bonus. For those of you who love a tart synthesis with great balance between sweet and sour and a stonking beat of lasting musky-wood this is your fruity floral pick for summer wear.

Fragrance Notes for Viktoria Minya Hedonist Cassis:
Top notes are black currant, grapefruit and rhubarb;
middle notes are bulgarian rose, grass and cassis;
base notes are cedar and musk.

Acqua di Parma Acqua Nobile Rosa: fragrance review & giveaway

It's pink! 

This exclamation can be taken two distinct ways. It either beckons lovers of all stuff girly

or it scares hardcore perfumephiles with their anticipated suspicion hardened through years of insipid fruity florals that would be better used as shampoo. Thankfully Acqua Nobile Rosa isn't either too fluff, nor a fruity floral. It's a pure, crystalline, airy wisp of a scent, as ethereal as wind chimes heard through an early morning breeze.

With Acqua di Parma issuing a newer interpretation of their previous Rosa Nobile in their Acqua Nobile line of scents one might expect a rehashing of the same formula, only turned lighter. But in fact Acqua Nobile Rosa is a new composition, certainly more ethereal, yet managing to differentiate itself enough to warrant testing both.

Rosa Nobile is a cool and straight-up rose petals fragrance, a ballet slipper of a smell rather than an exuberant Nahema (Guerlain) red Jimmy Choo pump or a moiré slingback in the fruity green style of Sa Majeste la Rose (Serge Lutens). It's not retro, but it's not bastardized either, the way some of my favorite rose fragrances are, i.e. sprinkled with loukhoum rosewater (Mohur extrait), dense with spice and patchouli (Aromatics Elixir, Voleur de Roses) or plain resinous goddess-like (Caron's Parfum Sacre). It's never easy making a true rose scent, so Rosa Nobile is not unworthy of mentioning as a relative success, especially given how jammy the pure absolute of rose can smell.

Acqua Nobile Rosa on the other hand is more like the air floating above a rose bush, with a perceptible citrus and blackcurrant tinge, tart and a little bit tangy. Blackcurrant buds have an illustrious and infamous history in perfumery, what with them being used to great aplomb in First by Van Cleef & Arpels (where they open the scene to the animalic smelling background beneath the posh French style perfume) and their ammoniac feel reminiscent of a kitty cat. 

But do not fear. It's pink. How wrong could it go? 

The airy, electrical buzzing (i.e. freesia) but prolonged -thanks to large musk molecules- drydown is very soft, lightly powdery (a hint of makeup aroma), lightly sweet and the rose is retained throughout; it's as if one is catching the whiff of a rose garden next door rather than hiding one's nose amidst the bushes. I'm OK with that.

Capturing the serene beauty of a stroll in an Italian rose garden, Acqua Nobile Rosa Eau de Toilette is a radiant fragrance for women. This sparkling Eau de Toilette focuses on the lighter, brighter aspects of the rose garden with notes of mandarin, blackcurrant, rose and ambergris. A veritable symphony of enchanting accords capturing both the vibrant and ethereal facets of the Italian Centifolia Rose, famed for its incomparable beauty. 

Fragrance notes for Acqua Nobile Rosa by Acqua di Parma:

Top: Bergamot, Mandarin, Blackcurrant

Heart: Damask rose, Centifolia rose, Cyclamen, Freesia

Base: Ambergris, Musk

Related reading on Perfume Shrine:

Top Rose Scented Fragrances & Products

Everything's coming up roses: how rose is on trend again

My Troubles with Rose & Overcoming Them One Step at a Time

I have a full bottle of this from which a 5ml decant has been taken for a lucky reader. 
Please enter a comment below this post to enter. Draw is open internationally and closes on Sunday 5th midnight. 

In the interests of full disclosure I got this through a PR promo. 

M.Micallef Rouge #2: fragrance review & Deluxe Rouge Collection free perfume draw

Some perfumes benefit from an embarrassment of riches, sort of a scent analogy with Bathsheba Everdene given the choice of not one, not two, but three suitors. Similarly these gifted perfumes straddle varying stylistic directions, arriving at the most meaningful in the end, but having quite the mileage before settling there. Rouge #2 eau de parfum, part of the newly launched Art Collection Rouge by M.Micallef, is one such olfactory heroine.

Julie Christie via bookforum.com

The fusion of catty, tangy blackcurrant with spice and fruity-amber notes produces a very individual experience: the segments are certainly familiar from other fragrances which highlight one or the other, but the combination by experienced perfumer Jean Claude Astier is unexpected. Rouge #2 feels much redder than M.Micallef Rouge #1 (which flushed pinkish, salmon-toned in my mind, with its peachy rose). Although advertised as an animalic fragrance, I do not perceive it as too naughty for comfort (in the sense of too musky or civet/cumin leaning like Muscs Kublai Khan for instance), though it could be argued that my personal threshold for naughty is set on rather high, since I find the infamous MKK a purring kitten. Rouge #2 by M.Micallef is more of an intense, pungent fruity yet polished fruity oriental, in the mould of -say- Jungle L'Elephant by Kenzo, with its unusual mélange of contradicting elements.

Rouge No. 2 eau de parfum by Martine Micallef's Art Collection Rouge, which includes Rouge no.1 perfume in beautifully decorated crimpson-hued bottles with Swarovski details, is recommended for perfume lovers who like being surprised by orientals that take a zig when you expect them to take a zag and anyone who considers standard gourmands too sweet or predictable. It could be shared by both sexes, although it leans more on the feminine side, and its lasting power is very good.

Notes for M.Micallef Rouge #2:
citrus, blackcurrant, nutmeg, jasmine, violet, orchid, amber, vanilla, labdanum, castoreum

Finally for our readers and thanks to the US distributor of Micallef, we have a lucky draw: 
10 winners will each receive two fragrances, the pair of No.1 and No.2 as large 5 ml deluxe miniatures set in a drawstring pouch: M. Micallef Art Collection Rouge No.1 M. Micallef Art Collection Rouge No.2.  The draw is available to US addresses only and is open till Wednseday midnight. Winner to be announced on Thursday Please leave a comment to be eligible.

Giorgio Armani Si: fragrance review

It wouldn't be inaccurate to claim that Sì, the latest feminine fragrance by Giorgio Armani, is L'Oreal's (the parent company of Armani parfums) answer to the commercial success of Lancôme's La Vie Est Belle from the previous year. Both are competent but rather forgettable perfumes that are sure to capture and retain the demographic they're aimed at: 35-50 year old women seeking something a little more sophisticated than the average fruity floral at department stores, while still not shocking anyone with their limp-wristed, yet persistent, wake of scent.

They're the Empire State Building rather than the strikingly asymmetrical Reykjavík’s Harpa Concert Hall & Conference Center. The tousled hair rom-com heroine rather than Irene Dunne. And a predictably lyrical novel that reads like a self-help book by Paulo Coelho rather than Orhan Pamuk. No, strike the last aphorism out: the fragrances in question are not Coelho-bad, surely!

Several small details point to the correlation between the two scents, Sì and La vie est belle. I mean.
The blackcurrant top note revisits a theme that was forgotten for long (First by Van Cleef & Arpels brought it into the scene and it's famously giving the piquancy in niche cult L'Ombre Dans l'Eau by Diptyque). They share a small fruity lactonic chapter (reminiscent of peach and pear). They both are buttressed by the familiar contemporary patchouli with woody-smelling Iso E Super and musks, plus a cotton candy vanilla note that -especially in the Lancome fragrance- instantly references Angel to anyone's mind. In Sì, the feel of a nouveau chypre (see our article for more on those) is enhanced by a cosmetics-smelling chord that is feminine and subtly intimate: the rosy note is simply put buoyed by soft, powdery violets like in many lipsticks and face powders.
Giorgio Armani's Sì is less sweet overall, with a drier, less cushion-like ambience. The cleaned-up feel and powdery abstraction recall segments of Knowing, a forgotten 1980s perfume by Estée Lauder. As per the perfumer, Christine Nagel of Mane, the base of Armani Sì includes Orcanox, which is another name for Ambroxan or Ambrofix (an aromachemical with an abstract woody-ambery scent aiming to recall natural ambergris), that gives great diffusion and tenacity to modern fragrances; indeed this Armani is one of them.

The official fragrance notes for Guorgio Armani Sì include blackcurrant, freesia, rose, vanilla, patchouli, blond woods, orcanox.

The choice of actress extraordinaire Cate Blanchett as the fronting woman for Armani's latest fragrance ("Cate Blanchett says Sì" -i.e. "yes" in Italian- is the motto of the campaign) has created the expectation of something truly exceptional and smart, like she is herself -the modern equivalent of Katherine Hepburn. Maybe the stakes were just too high. Sì just couldn't possibly live up to it or the "chypre reinvented" perfumista-nod on top of this. That doesn't mean it's not a pleasant fragrance; you could do much worse in the department store circuit, I'd wager.
Lovely bottle (in 1, 1.7 and 3.4oz of eau de parfum at major department stores), reminiscent of the Armani Privé perfume bottles aesthetic, a nice bonus.

Below, watch the official film for Giorgio Armani Sì (rather uninspired if you ask me, though beautifully shot by director Anne Fontaine) and a small interview with Christine Nagel where she explains the fundamental blocks of the perfume composition.

Guerlain Chamade (1969) Fragrance Review Series Part 3: The Fragrance

"Perfume is made mainly so that one remembers the woman who wears it. I like to call it the elevator effect. This is the man who goes to meet his lover—whether it be his fiancée, his wife, or his mistress—who has entered a building before him. She is wearing perfume, and he smells it. Suddenly his heart beats faster and the blood rushes to his head."

—Jean-Paul Guerlain via “Perfume Legends: French Feminine Fragrances” by Michael Edwards (1996)

~by guest writer AlbertCAN

[For Part 1 Introduction to the Myth and Part 2 The Muses refer to the links]

Of all the approaches to fragrance criticism I’m most dreary of the revisionist approach, pulling a scent out of the context of its time and aiming at regurgitating an ill-advised paradigm. Somehow the critic’s bias shines through more than anything else. Of course, fragrance masterpieces deserve to be respected—and insincere efforts need to be chided—but a fragrance ultimately needs to be judged based on its genre and its cultural context. It’s not a fragrance critic’s job to ignore the innovations set forth by a classic fragrance, nor forgetting to mention the classicism within a new launch. They are simply two sides of the same coin in perfumery.

After more than four decades Guerlain Chamade is of course deservedly termed a grand classic, but to assume that a classic-smelling French fragrance lacks an ounce of rebellion is not a correct notion, either.

Perhaps the biggest misconception about Chamade is its doyenne status. There lies the paradox: sure, the definition of youth has changed dramatically, but back in 1969 Chamade’s opening would be considered quite interesting. Hedione. Blackcurrant. All then new materials and not widely used. Of course Edmond Roudnitska employed hedione brilliantly in Eau Sauvage (1966), but the chemical hadn’t been widely dared in women’s fragrances. Nowadays the blackcurrant note has been used to a fault, but Chamade was arguably the first to have done so. Again, one shouldn’t fault the early adaptor, even if the innovation becomes commonly accepted.

But I’m really ahead of myself. The trembling of the heart really starts with two key players: the interplay of galbanum and hyacinth. Both are quite polarizing, having a refreshing but strong-willed diffusion—hyacinth, having an unapologetically white floral scent with a slightly bitter edge; galbanum, emitting an all-out, almost knife-sharp verdancy. The chills, when set on the typical Guerlain warmth, surprisingly pulsate and mimic the intrigue upon feeling "the mad ache". (Doesn’t one often feel a moment of clarity even when falling madly in love with the wrong person? The interplay of fire and ice can be so cruel sometimes.) Had the opening act been allowed to dominate the fragrance would have been reduced to a bony, postmodern solarium, but all this feels like the opening clash of the battlefield surrender signal.

The undulation between the cold and the warmth really creates a dual effect when narcissus and vanilla add to the tension. Within the context of ylang ylang and blackcurrant the narcissus feels opulent and insolent at the same time, yet there’s a certain ambiguity about the shapelessness of it all, as if the character of Sagan’s heroine Lucile comes to life. Chamade the fragrance would have been the necessary luxury she craves, yet like the fragrance she doesn’t fully give in when facing her feelings, essentially not out of defiance, but actually coming from an undulating ambivalence. Do not be mistaken by the gauzy, silken aura with a slight golden sheen: Deneuve has that the necessary indirectness down pat—the confusion is essentially self-serving and really the destination, not the process.

Come to think of it Chamade’s legendary development curve adds a beguiling interplay to the theme of Sagan’s novel as well: this has never been a forthcoming, no-barred-hold type of wild attraction story at heart, but more of an exquisite torture. The pang of the hyacinth and galbanum really hold fort for a good while before the drydown of the narcissus-amber sets in. In fact it’s exactly this character that makes exposes the problem of testing fragrances on paper blotters: testing a multi-dimensional olfactory sculpture on a two-dimensional medium is an act in futility in itself.

On a personal note I was determined not to make that sampling mistake when presenting Chamade to my godmother Jeannie, instead testing the scent directly on her skin. Surely enough the golden gauze envelopes her upon first spray; after decades of using L’Air du Temps, Chamade became her signature, no doubt in part because my beloved godfather was hooked from the get go!


Photo: Guerlain Chamade fragrance advertisement from the 80s, via Google