Romancing the Ripe

Widespread is the knowledge of Napoleon's famous erotic line to Josephine, "I will return in three days, don't wash!" (“Je reviens en trois jours; ne te laves pas!"), which inspired even the famous name of a Worth perfume, Je reviens. But little do people realise that he was not the first one to appreciate the ripeness of a female body's natural aroma. It was another French figure who had the historical privilege of uttering a comparable phrase in the throes of erotic passion to his beloved centuries ago: Henry IV of France, who wrote to his mistress Gabrielle d'Estree: "Don't wash my love, I'll be home in eight days".
Interesting to note no doubt that transport as well as beliefs concerning for how long one could sustain themselves without a bath had changed accordingly through the course of more than 2 centuries.
Henry IV of France was reputed to have such a ripe smell himself that his intended, Marie de Medici, keeled over upon meeting him.
But a predecessor, Henry III was also reportedly excited by the animalic essence of the female body: he fell in love with Mary of Cleeves after smelling the odour of her just removed clothing. Of course the circumstances upon which she had removed the clothing and what he saw might also have contributed to his infatuation no doubt.

According to Alain Corbin, social historian and author of The Foul and the Fragrant, Baudelaire was in part responsible for transforming the scented profile of the woman.

"The perfume of bare flesh, intensified by the warmth and moistness of the bed,replaced the veiled scents of the modest body as a sexual stimulus.[...] The woman stopped being a lily; she became a perfume sachet, a bouquet of odors that emanated from the "odorous wood" of her unbound hair, skin, breath, and blood.[...] The atmosphere of the alcove generated desire and unleashed storms of passion".

As we had noted in a previous article on Perfume Shrine named "Glorious Stink", the matter of fragrancing the body or not, the ritual of bathing and the perceptions concerning cleanliness have been at the eye of the turmoil of civilization since antiquity. Fragrance can only be an additional veil upon the essence of the body itself. In the words of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, "you feel how external fragrance stands upon your stronger resistance?"

Henry Miller was even more explicit when he progressed the onomatopoeia of Baudelaire's "muskiness of fur" using its proper name taken from the vernacular:

"With the refinements that come from maturity the smells faded out, to be replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable smell" and he goes on to suggest the female genitals as the source of the ambrosial aroma. "More particularly, the odor that lingers on the fingers after playing with a woman, for if it has not been noticed before, this smell is more enjoyable, perhaps because it already carries the perfume of the past tense".

It is obvious that the natural smell of a sexually mature body held great fascination for men for centuries and it is even more confusing juxtaposing this belief with today's standards of hygiene to the point of the sterile. All in all, the print of a civilization often revolves around the use of soap and water and this is none more apparently ironic than in the examination of sophisticated societies.

Illustration by Steve Murray, courtesy of the National Post.

La Vie della Lana Cashmere Twill: new line by Acqua di Biella

In the cyceon of new releases some catch our eye more than others. Especially when beloved materials find their way into the inspiration behind a new niche fragrance. Cashmere Twill, a warm and enveloping perfume, the Acqua di Biella brand inaugurates a new line of fragrances "Le Vie della Lana". "A new unparalleled range of products of the highest quality, based on the old recipes of the Reale Manifattura but also on the most advanced scientific and dermatological research that draws together the precious components of the finest wool and of the best quality, strictly vegetable primary materials. Powerfully evocative creations that are the fruit of careful olfactory research, stimulating the senses with intense and intriguing scents they invoke the fascinating fresco of Biellese life, the folk stories, the sensations and the scenes of the world of wool, all inseparably linked to the history of her family, to her roots in the Biellese region, but also to the lands which produce the greatest wools of the world, Australia, Asia and South America".

There are plans to bring out a new perfume in the line ever one or two years, for men and women to complete a line of distinction.

Cashmere Twill notes: Essence of Wool - Raspberry Leaves- Bergamot of Calabria - Sicilian Lemon- Iris Water - Magnolia of Eastern Asia -Cardamom of Ceylon - Yunnan Anise- Cedar of Lebanon - Vetiver - White Moss- Ambrette Seeds

Bellissima!

Pics courtesy of Acqua di Biella

O la la, how fresh! ~O de Lancome: fragrance review

Inhaling a lemon grove's foliage trail in the morning air under hot azure skies, set to savour the day with optimism, full of joie de vivre must be one of life's simplest and most satisfying pleasures. Fragrances that give a lift to my step and make me face the mornings with élan are precious.
The task of achieving just that is not easy: it has to be uplifting, but also suave, not rasping on the senses which are slowly winding up to function from the night's inertia. Optimistic but with a hint of the stoic that marks the nature of my thoughts. Ô de Lancôme with its playfully double entendre of aqueous name and cool, dark green chyprish tendencies puts the right balance between the zesty burst of yellow hesperides and the alchemy of green herbs, interwoven like baroque music with its rounded forms philosophically puts some semblance of order into chaos.

The first advertisements for Ô de Lancôme emphasised the back to nature vibe that the French do so well with artistic merit: young women on bikes emerging from the rampant countryside, drenched in sunlight but with the coolness of spring air and dew in the fragrant grass, putting goosebumps on the skin at the hint of a breeze. It is so rare to encounter such a blatantly unpretentious image in fragrance advertising any more. Seeing those advertisements while leafing spring volumes of French Elle magazine, yearly devoted to beauty rituals of what seemed an arcane yet factually a simple mode, made me realize at a tender age how the natural world hides secrets of longing in the grass.

Composed in 1969 by perfumer René Gonnon, Ô de Lancôme came out at the time of Paris students' revolt and became an emblematic fresh Eau, taking the uber-successful Eau Sauvage one step further with the inclusion of synthetic aroma-chemical Thujopsanone. The consolidation of greenness under the crushed lemon leaves in the palm, with a subtle woody background resembles a viola da gamba supporting a clear, young female voice singing rounds of couplets in an allemande that converge on the same sweet surrender of a third majore of Provence in the end of a song in minore. Almost thirty years later and it retains the fresh radiance of a young girl, nary a shadow under the eye, curiously a tad sorrowful for the joys of life she has yet to experience.



Like the song goes:

Une jeune fillette
De noble coeur
Plaisante et joliette
De grande valeur
Outre son grès,
On l'a rendue nonette
Celui point de lui haicte
D'où vit en grande douleur
~{see the translation and musical notation on this page}

Ô de Lancôme was according to Osmoz the start of

"a new olfactory adventure [..] and perfumery would continue to explore its charms and powers until the early 80’s: Eau de Rochas, de Courrèges, de Guerlain, de Patou, de Givenchy, Eau d’Hadrien (Annick Goutal), Eau de Cologne d’Hermès, and even Cristalle (Chanel) and Diorella (Dior) would successfully pick up the gauntlet of those fresh, signature thrills that left their mark on an entire generation".

Notes: bergamot, citron, mandarin, petit-grain, jasmine, rose, honeysuckle, (witch hazel in 1995 version), basil, rosemary, coriander, oakmoss, cedar, sandalwood, vetiver.

Eau de Toilette comes in 75ml/2.5-oz and costs €48.50 and lasts incredibly well for this kind of fragrance.
Available at major department stores and Sephora.

The fragrance was re-issued in 1995 with a slight change in colouring in the packaging, which is helpful in identifying batches: the band around the bottle changed from ambery brown to bright green, same with the colour scheme of the box. The motif on the glass, like 60s wallpaper as Susan Irvine succinctly put it, remained the same.

There are two "flankers" to the original fragrance, both futile in my opinion for different reasons: O oui!, a fruity floral in a similar bottle with the palest white-ish blue colouring, aimed at generation Y, so saccharine-full generic and dull that it barely made a bleep on the radar; and a men's version in a green capped spartan column of a bottle called O pour Homme , marketed with the symbol of Mars (and male too) as the variation on O. Pleasurable thought it is, it seems like a redundant attempt to market what is already an eminently unisex fragrance in a new packaging to the opposite sex.
No need to splurge in getting both: the original is perfect on men as well and I highly recommend it.

Pics from parfumdepub.
Clip of popular song Une Jeune Fillette arranged by J.Savall from the exquisite film Tous les matins du monde, originally uploaded by Peteronfire on Youtube

Sealed with a Kiss

Perfume Shrine had found a comprehensive video for showing the delicate technique of baudruchage (the coiling of the silk thread around the neck),barbichage and brossage (the following steps into securing the neck and seperating the ends of the thread) at Chanel. It was posted here, if you missed it.


However, there is another page on Notcot.com devoted to this exact process with funny captions step by step and very comprehensive photos. You can see the Chanel parfum sealing clicking here.

But there is also a very interesting page on the same site comparing the Chanel bottle with Place Vendôme in the 1er arrondissement itself via Google maps, confirming the myth that Coco might have chosen it to echo the shape of the famous square in her bottle, as a reference to the Ritz where she stayed.
It's always fun to prove -or disprove- perfume lore, isn't it?

Pics courtesy of notcot.com

Extraits de Parfum and Another Exclusive for Miller Harris

Miller Harris has mostly been an unsung brand by the perfume online community, mainly because -I am hypothesizing- the style of the fragrances is limpid and diaphanous which possibly are not desirable attributes for the budding perfume lover as well as the more seasoned perfume collector: too often there is the plunge for the dark and mysteriously orientalised with a sinister twist or antithetically for the ascetically sparse and architecturally focused on a single abstract interplay of steel and glass.
Miller Harris scents, the brainchild of Lyn Harris, an independent perfumer working on several high-class commissions for the famous and for perfume lines that do not always reveal their secrets, are neither.

Instead they began as an affair of simple compositions with no pretence, but with good quality ingredients, often expensive natural floral essences, and they progressed into producing fragrances that went beyond: Feuilles de Tabac with its smokey, comforting whiskey-tobacco dream of a pipe, the crystalline honeysuckle chased with champagne that is Fleur du Matin, the fantastically "ripe" and sexy, naughtily commissioned by Jane Birkin L'air de Rien, the wonderful orange burst inside a leather jacket that is Cuir Oranger as well as the salty earthiness of salt mines in Fleur de Sel.

This spring, Miller Harris is releasing a variation on the 4 fragrances in their ‘Classics’ collection. Cœur de Fleur, Terre de Bois, Citron Citron and Fleur Oriental have been unveiled in a new extract concentration, ‘Les Parfums’. Presented in delicate engraved bottles, they’ll bring a touch of chic to your boudoir, vanity or bathroom.

Perfume 1 oz/30ml, €215. Available at selected points of sale.

~Via Osmoz.com
Might I remind you that three out of these also come in candle form which is a good way to try out to get the feel for the line.

However not to bypass another new release: Le Petit Grain, an exclusive to their eponymous boutiques, which puts the heavenly feeling of standing beneath an orange grove in spring. To quote:

"Incorporating every element of the orange tree from the oil from the peel of the fruit, to the flowers, to the leaves and the twigs, Le Petit Grain celebrates the great tradition of the cologne family and can be worn and enjoyed by the whole family.
With Le Petit Grain, Lyn has created a careful fusion between each material. The sweet orange sets the tone and is enhanced by angelica racine, eau de brouts absolute (extraction from the leaves), bergamot from Italy and Sicilian lemon".

Eau de Parfum comes in 100ml/2.4oz and costs 110 British pounds

~Via the Miller Harris website

Pic courtesy of Miller Harris.com