According to latest developments, arising from a discussion on Perfume of Life forum, initiated by my friend Denyse who lives in Paris, the unthinkable has happened: Serge Lutens has decided to discontinue Miel de Bois, one of the least liked and most derided fragrances of his in the export line. [edit to add: it has become a Paris exclusive]
It's not so much that it is a great loss in terms of users who will be lamenting its passing, because like mentioned above, it was extremely unpopular due to its overuse of phenylacetic acid*,which is used to give a honey-like odour (in accordance to the "miel" part of the name which means honey in French), but which can produce an olfactory profile of urinous nuances in high concentration. The news are not officially corroborated or explained as yet.
However this has sparked a fear that if indeed the reason of discontinuation is its abysmal reception by the market, then there is something rotten in the kingdom of Denmark and the Lutens brand is not impervious to the vagaries of marketing and sales. This could mean trouble for many of the less popular fragrances of the line, like the celery-smelling Chypre Rouge, the cozy yet dirty animalic Muscs Kublai Khanor the exquisite Douce Amère. And for a brand that has set the bar much too high, this would be foreboding and sad.
Nevertheless, Perfume Shrine in an attempt to exorcise the above demons, has researched a bit and found out that the key ingredient phenylacetic acid is used in the illicit production of phenylacetone, and therefore subject to controls in the United States. Perhaps the high concentration of said ingredient in the fragrance made it difficult to continue producing it without jumping through hoops of bureaucratic paperwork?
Additionally, phenylacetic acid has been found to be an active auxin (a type of phytohormone) molecule, predominantly found in fruits. Auxin comes from the Greek αυξανω which means "to grow", affecting cell division and cellular expansion, which means it has the potential to disrupt another organism's hormonal balance. Used in high doses, auxins stimulate the production of ethylene which can in turn inhibit elongation growth, cause femaleness of flowers in some species or leaf abscission and even kill the plant.
Whether this has tangible effects in humans is not to my knowledge, however seeing as the IFRA and EU terms of ingredients use call for severe restrictions on so many other substances used in perfumery, it might bear some relevance to the desire to discontinue the fragrance.
I don't know which of the reasons thus hypothesized is worse, but in any case, if you are among the few admirers of Miel de Bois or of daring compositions which will be shown to one's grandchildren when everything will be sanitized in the near future, this is your time to stock up.
*Stop the press latest info: I have been informed by a highly savvy source that Christopher Sheldrake, the nose behind it, never liked it and Serge Lutens himself might have stopped liking it too, which could account for his perfectionist streak showing through axing it. Remains to be seen.
*The ingredient is also known as α-toluic acid, benzeneacetic acid, alpha tolylic acid, and 2-phenylacetic acid.
When at school my best friend was using Anais Anais, the soft-focus lily scent in the retro opaline bottle that recalled Victoriana and the BBC series Jayne Eyre and The Barrets of Wimpole Streetwe were watching on television. Something about the aesthetics of its nostalgia coupled with the erroneous hint that it might have something to do with Anais Nin and her Delta of Venus lured me into getting my own bottle. Little did I know that this act would produce the fury of a Maenad! Never mind that Anais Anais was worn by almost anyone below voting age at the time. The cardinal sin had been commited: I had usurped the signature fragrance of someone else and my penance would be exile.
After half a bottle, I somewhat tired of Anais Anais, no matter how pretty and wistfully autumnal it was. The initial coup de foudre was no longer there. Instead, my heart was pounding with fascination for the decadent opulence of Opium which had marked me years before unexpectedly: finally able to procure a bottle of my own with my pocket money, I did just that. The fragrance became so much a part of my psyche, with sporadic flirts with my mother's Mitsouko and Cabochard, that I could never understand how anyone on God's green earth could claim it. Yet, claim it they did and several other people, usually older, used it as well, often in exceedingly large amounts that became noisesome. I remember I was both dismayed and disappointed at that. Since I loved it so much, one would assume that I would enjoy smelling it in the air, catching the wake of it from passing strangers and acquaintances. But it never seemed to smell properly on them. Yet deep down I was a little relieved as well: It was still mine and mine alone, I was hissing through clenched teeth ~my precious! The final straw was at the university, when a particularly nosey classmate questioned me on what I was wearing and I was very eager to let her share: a small eau de toilette bottle was always in my Longchamp along with my notebook with lecture notes on the Aeniad, the syncretism in late Middle-Ages and the artifact types of Upper Mesolithic. Soon enough, what was that divine cloud I was smelling two pews below, wafting up to engulf me in the smell of betrayal? It was at that moment that I had the perfumephile's equivalent of St.John's visions at Patmos: I finally realised why it's not good form to wear the same fragrance as your friend...
Copying someone's identity in its external manifestations and even their intellectual interests, emulating their fashion sense, their hairstyle, their makeup and colour choices and suddenly adopting the same music sense and book material can feel annoying and a little alarming for the one who is being copied: is it to be taken as a compliment or as an invasion of private space and the right to mark one's own territoty? That last part seems to me to be at the bottom of this particular annoyance. Although we have progressed from the jungle, the jungle hasn't left us: we still need to mark our territoty with the invisible olfactory stain of our id. And we do that with our loved ones and the scents we choose for them as well. The scent we choose ourselves to represent our id can be even more poignant when usurped: the betrayal is not only on the physical, territorial plane but on the cerebral as well. It's as if our decision to adopt a certain signature fragrance has been cheapened through blatant copying which required none of the visceral or alternatively the meticulous care with which we came to it ourselves. And in a world where there are myriads of fragrances around, finding that special one can be both hard and frustrating to go through again. Additionally, when that signature fragrance is some obscure niche little thing we unearthed in one small boutique in Crete, hiding behind a local deli with dakos and stamnagathia, and only there, then it feels unique and we subliminally graft that aura on ourselves.
So what to do when asked? Faced with a question as to what is your signature fragrance, you're faced with a trilemma: if you reveal it, you are open for the other person to adopt it and leave you feeling somehow less special; if don't reveal, you risk to seem aloof and arrogant and lose a friend and get gossiped behind your back; if you don't reveal and it's a little known or unpopular choice you run the even greater risk of the fragrance never surviving the axe of discontinuation from the accountants in the manufacturing firm. It's a conundrum!
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that it's better to be gracious and sharing when it is someone who either has a genuine interest in perfume (so you get the chance to win a friend for life) or it is not someone you're bound to meet every single day (therefore even if they copy you, it won't be really significant). Seems to work so far...
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences.
Sometimes the perfume lover is jaded after being entrapped into the midst of deep and meaningful perfumes which sing the praises of king Solomon and his court. Sometimes I just want to put on something that is cuddly and soft and doesn't smell like perfume as much, more like the perfected emanation of a gorgeous body pulsating with vigour and sensuality. This is especially sympatico to the hot summer weather of a southern region, when rich harmonies might risk wilting and becoming suffocating. For those instances, I turn to light, clean musks. I intend to devote more time to musk and musky fragrances in general soon, but today's selection highlights that imperceptible aura that I described above perfectly.
"The concept behind this scent was to recreate the smell of clean, naked skin ... only better" and this is as good a definition of a skin-scent as any. The words belong to the ad copy for the cult favourite of celebrities, Perfect Veil by Creative Scentualization, a company founded by Sarah Horowitz-Thran. {Perhaps the most interesting part is that she custom-makes fragrances for clients, with her perfumer Marlene Stang. Prices range from $350 to $1,000. Call (888) 799-2060} How fragrances become the stuff of cult celebrity fandom is a matter which is rather complicated: there has to be some effective infiltration to the celebrity's PR or some word of mouth from another celebrity (that seems to work a lot more than you'd think!) or gifts to said person which prove welcome and thus sanctioned to be publicized and so on and so forth. For what is worth, Perfect Veil is perfectly all right, with or without the famous entourage of young desirables who favour it. Its citrus piquancy at the beginning keeps it from becoming suffocatingly powdery or too sweet and the effect is not too much like laundry, which is always a risk when working with synthetic musks in the family of Galaxolide and such. The pairing of citrus and vanilla, after all, has the illustrious ancenstry of Shalimar, an impression that is gloriously modernised in the delicately powedery muskiness of Shalimar Light. But where the Shalimar fragrances wink seductively under heavily shadowed eyes and eventually grab you by the collar, these cleaner ones merely slip the spaghetti strap of an ivory microfiber teddy letting you the initiative.
Notes of Perfect Veil according to Luckyscent: lemon, bergamot, musk, vanilla and sandalwood.
For something that is composed by ingredients that do not run too expensive I find that Perfect Veil is on a par with two excellent alternatives, in line with this feature's mission: Nude Musk by Ava Luxe and Opal by Sonoma Scent Studio.
Ava Serena Franco of Ava Luxe is another artisanal perfumer with a stellar reputation of excellent customer service who has devoted lots of her time in creating different twists on musks among a diverse portfolio that includes the wonderful leathery Madame X. Her Nude Musk manages to be just perfect, almost a deadringer for Perfect Veil and yet endearing in its own right. Nude Musk is described as: "A clean and sexy skin musk with notes of sandalwood, bergamot, light musk, and vanilla. Light and slightly powdery. Long lasting". The description is stop-on and the powderiness is especially pleasant, like the most sensual talcum powder you have applied on your skin before gliding into freshly pressed cotton sheets of high thread-count.
Another beautiful skinscent in the musks family is Opal by Sonoma Scent Studio , a company run by perfumer Laurie Erickson in California. Laurie, no stranger to these pages, has been working on lots of interesting musky twists with an edge, some of which will be soon featured on Perfume Shrine, so I am just whetting your appetite today! Opal in Eau de Parfum has amazing lasting power that will surround you with delicate whiffs of the smell of being desired all day long. A little sweetness is induced through the vanilla touch, never too much and the whole does not become soapy-like. I find it a little less powdery than Nude Musk, very pleasant and quite sensual. I can definitely see why it is a best-seller for Sonoma Scent Studio and I can't blame anyone for liking it. Like its gem-like name, it's silky soft, illuminated as if from within, caressing and smelling like the warm skin of a loved one. Upon testing it I received the most delicious compliments on how wonderful I smelled, not how nice my perfume was. And that's the whole difference with those fragrances: they're supposed to enhance your own presence instead of standing alone as a piece of artwork. Opal never wears you, you wear it! It also comes in a concentrated perfume oil made with a natural pure fractionated coconut oil base; no alcohol, silicones, water, emulsifiers, sunscreen additives or colorants added. The fractionated coconut oil is light and non sticky, has no odour of its own, but a long shelf life, dries quickly, and is a light moisturizer on its own.
Notes for Opal: delicate musk, vanilla, ambrette, bergamot and sandalwood.
These are all playful and uncomplicated scents for when you want to let your hair down and enjoy being who you are. Don't burden them with pretentious ambitions and you will be having a wonderful time in a cheek-to-cheek slow dance with them.
Following the work of perfumer Jean Claude Ellena, I came upon The Different Company, a small niche brand which was started by him with the sole objective revealed in its name: to be different! In one of his aphorisms, Jean Claude had professed that classical perfumery although beautiful is too perfumey for today's sensibility, much like reading Stendhal. In his quest not to understand the market though -antithetically to what major brands do, running focus groups tests for their every product- he has always been about making the market instead.
Artistic freedom obviously meant everything and in order to discourage copycats and lowly competition Ellena along with his collaborator Thierry de Baschmkoff, a relative of his and engineer-turned-bottle-designer, opted for the most smart stratagem: make the juice too expensive, too top quality. The Different Company opened its doors in 2000 with four stunning scents: Osmanthus, a fragrance based on the precious little Chinese flower with its divine apricoty smell, Rose Poivrée which Chandler Burr has famously -and complimentary- attributed to Satan's wife in Hell, Divine Bergamot, sunny brilliance and dirty hints under the sun of Calabria and Bois d'Iris, an extraordinarily expensive in the making woody orris fragrance fit for an exiled princess.
When Jean Claude got his in-house position at Hermès in 2004, the baton was passed to his daughter, Céline Ellena. She went on to compose both rich and decadent juices such asJasmin de Nuit as well as diaphanous organza veils ~such as the fragrances in the ‘Explorations sensorielles’ (=sensory explorations) line that is essentially a garden trio: parfum d'Ailleurs & Fleurs(of flowers and beyond), parfum de Charmes & Feuilles(of leaves and charm), and parfum des Sens & Bois(of woods and the senses). And last but not least, the incredible Sel de Vétiver, inspired by Céline tasting water aromatized with vetiver roots at an eastern friend's appartment in Paris. Their latest Sublime Balkiss, inspired by the queen of Sheba and a modern chypre composition no less, has been having the perfume circles talking and anticipating. (notes of violet, blackcurrant, Bulgarian Rose, blueberries, blackberries, clusters of lilac and a special fraction of the essential oil of patchouli, highlighting its cocoa powder aspect)
It seems we have been richly spoiled! And to top it all of, they have opened a new boutique in Paris.
Niche fragrance brand The Different Company has just opened a stunning new boutique in Paris, in the heart of the trendy Marais quarter. For the occasion, they have paired up with make-up brand Maison Calavas, who is sharing the space. Maison Calavas is specialized in top-of-the-line make-up, with a wide range of palettes presented in colorful shagreen, lizard and snake-skin boxes. 10 rue Ferdinand Duval, Paris 4è – (+ 33) (0)1 42 78 19 34
Upon smelling frankincense tears slowly being burnt on charcoals in an old bronzy censer, aromatizing the air with their otherworldy smell, I never fail to be transported in a mirage, similar to the one that Serge Noire by Lutens is evoking: Smoke is rising in the air of an old, byzantine, Orthodox church, the bright light coming fragmented in colourful snippets of reds and yellows through the panelled windows; old beeswax dripping heavily on the trays with sand on which pious old women have pinched their candles, each burdened with a prayer for the soul of a loved one; antique gold chandleriers are hanging heavily from what seems like a thread over wooden pews bearing the double-faced eagle of Byzantium carved in their backs, like an eidolon; visions of brides and grooms who have stood before the altar, erect and proud, crowned according to Orthodox canon with wreaths of silver, like royalty; the hushed lone whisper of someone who has seeked solace from the unrelenting heat of a bright summer's noon into the cool marbled-floored abode.
These are not manifestations of faith or religiousness on my part, rather the spirituality which seeks the opportunity to come out upon inhaling the fragrant remnants of smoke, stucco-ed along with the old egg-paint frescoes of the saint and the martyrs on the walls. And the pyrotechnics of myriads of Easter midnight celebrations, when the sky bursts forth with all the colours of the rainbow and the intense noise of fire-crackers that exorcises the evil spirits in a pagan atavistic nod which is so intrisically ingrained into the customs of this particular little corner of the world. Darkness and Light...
Exilde for ever: Let me morne Where nights black bird hir sad infamy sings, There let me live forlorne.
Downe vaine lights shine you no more, No nights are dark enough for those That in dispaire their last fortunes deplore, Light doth but shame disclose
~Lacrymae Pavanne/Flow my tears, John Dowland
Incense in general has this almost Pavlovian quality of invoking a feeling of serenity, sadness and almost perverse elation in me. Frankincense came into the scene of niche cults with the "Incense series" by Comme des Garcons and Passage d'Enfer by L'artisan parfumeur years ago and although it seemed it languished for a while, it knew a resurgence last summer with Andy Warhol Silver Factory by Bond No.9, an arguably interesting take and with Andy Tauer's wonderful duo of the austere Incense Extrême and the sunny Incense Rosé this past autumn. However Serge Noire has been one fragrance lately which has managed to include every aspect of my ignus fatus, replete with the power to obliterate every other thought during its slow and lasting denouement on my skin. I had posted some earlier thoughts based on confidances by friends who had whetted my appetite but my personal, intimate relationship with Serge Noire has been a revelation.
The name derives its lineage from history: In the 19th and early 20th century, the name (la serge, feminine hence the "e" in the adjective "noire") designated a type of textile, twill of diagonal lines or ridges on both sides, made with a two-up, two-down weave, that was quite popular: a delicate variety was used for finer garments, while a stronger yarn was chosen for military clothes. The etymology derives from Greek σηρικος (σηρος means silk worm, for clothes), which gave rise to the Latin serica and the old French serge.The interesting thing is that serge has been implicated through the British textile trade monopoly via Calais and the Netherlands in wars between European nations, especially religious ones: in 1567 Calvinist refugees from the Low Countries included many skilled serge weavers, while Huguenot refugees in the early eighteenth century included many silk and linen weavers.With that at the back of our minds we might start deciphering the enigma of Serge Noire.
Initially dry and spartan with the flinty, camphoreous aspect of gun powder comparable to Essence of John Galliano for Diptyque, ashes to ashes and snuffed out candles, Serge Noire by Lutens assaults the senses with the intense austerity of real frankincense and elemi. The impression is beautifully ascetic, hermetic, like an anchorite who has dwelled in a cave up in the rough mountains with only the stars as his companion in the darkest pitch of the night: the "noire" part is meditatively devoid of any ornamentation, eclipsing any pretence of frivolous prettification. The surprising transparency is evocative of the Japanese Kodo ritual rather than the denser cloud of Avignon. Those who are unitiated to the wonders of Lutens might coil away with trepidation and apprehension at this point, but much like the alarming mentholated overture of Tubéreuse Criminelle, this subsides eventually, although never quiting the scene completely. And yet behind the caustic and mineral masculinity, a hopeful ascent of a feminine trail of lightly vanillic, ambery benzoin and sweet spice is slowly, imperceptibly rising after half an hour; like a subtly heaving bosom draped with Japanese garments or the curvaceous calligraphy of thick black ink on gaufre paper of ivory or creamy skin. It is then when cistus labdanum provides an erotic hint of sophisticated elegance in Serge Noire while the emergence of sweet spice, a touch of cinnamon, gives a burnished quality of black that is slowly bleeding into grey. The ashen ballet in the flames, the swirls of oriental grey sing an ode to everlasting beauty, beauty under the cover of night's rich plumage.
Elements that have caught the imagination of Lutens and Sheldrake in the past (the camphor in Tubéreuse Criminelle, the ink in Sarrasins, the incense of Encens et Lavande) are merging here in what seems to be a personal declaration of faith. Rumoured to have been in the works for the past 10 years during the tenure of Chris Sheldrake at the Palais Royal, it has the seal of favouritism by Lutens himself, which makes it a personal token of identity. I am hereby claiming it as mine as well: This is one of the best Lutens releases of recent years to be sure!
Serge Noire comes in 50ml/1.7oz Eau de Parfum Haute Concentration for 95 euros in the oblong bottles of the export line (with optional spray mechanism included) and has just launched exclusively for the Palais Royal premiere, to be then distributed by the licensed distributors from September 08.
You can read an interesting article on the Lutens genius in French in Le Point.
Pic of Monemvasia Castle steps in Greece by Kostas Katsiyannis, courtesy of ellopos.org. Eva Green pic courtesy of au.feminin. Clip "Lacrymae Pavanne/Flow my Tears" by John Dowland, sung by Andreas Scholl, originally uploaded by lasultanica on Youtube.
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According to latest developments, arising from a discussion on Perfume of Life forum, initiated by my friend Denyse who lives in Paris, the unthinkable has happened: Serge Lutens has decided to discontinue Miel de Bois, one of the least liked and most derided fragrances of his in the export line. [edit to add: it has become a Paris exclusive]
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