Al Maali by Itarji: fragrance review

It's always interesting to witness the intercultural exchanges between newer and older worlds and especially so in fields that pertain to olfaction: the amount to which French perfumery and tastes have been influenced by the Anglo-Saxon "clean" trend is staggering; as is the intergration of classical "stinky" notes into modern compositions (Stockhausen meets Rameau, so to speak), or the worldwide influence of the Asian school of diaphanous treatment. But never is the effect more eye-opening to the globalisation of the international market than upon experiencing an Arabian fragrance of all things that smells like a modern French classic: in short, Al Maali by Itarji is an Arabian speaking fluent French of Angel-ic cadenzas of agility.

We have been conditioned to believe the reverse is more common (isn't Nahéma the reference Franco-Arab masterpiece?) and rather en vogue, what with the Serge Lutens seraglio and the plethora of ouds or oud-inspired fragrances on the market (witness the Montale line), as well as the increasing popularity of getting to know the Arabian rituals of fragrancing [click for article]. Yet as previously discussed there is also the side of Arabian attars vaguely smelling like ideas that belong in a westernised society, scattered among more traditional offerings. But then again, it's not uncommon to encounter small local companies using ingredients by the big aromachemical producing companies, such as Givaudan, Firmenich and IFF, even in the medinas of the Arabian peninsula! So nothing comes as a shock to my eyes any more...

I was sent a little of this intriguing Arabian fragrance by my eloquent friend Maria from Bittergrace Notes in a back and forth of perfume haikus to communicate impressions on the most evanescent of small pleasures. She had described it as "a rich, green patchouli-fest" and she proved to be dead-on. The opening of Al Maali has an interesting spicy-limpid accord that reminds me of wet nutmeg and cardamom pods, ready to be used in Easter bread dough or a smidge of the spicy-powdery top of Yves Saint Laurent's discontinued Nu in Eau de Parfum. Maybe even a small, small hint of saffron? Yet wait a couple of seconds and with a rushed dash patchouli enters the scene unapologetically, its radiance and warmth being generous and "open", quite natural in fact and capturing the audience for the duration of the performance. I am quite fond of patchouli and in fact have a precious bottle of 20 years old essence which I cherish. When patchouli oil ages it gains in complexity and acquires a round effect which adds to its charm.

The effect in Al Maali is semi-gourmand, quite coumarinic with a whisper of sweetness minus the caramel tonalities of the usual treatment in that mold and with a dangerous undercurrent of sensuality. I don't quite understand how the desciption on the site states "Light floral, green scent; fresh and understated". It is anything but light or floral (or traditionally fresh) and it asserts its presence in a most delightful way. Yet I can see how this is excellently suited to both sexes and suitable for year long wearing if you use it sparingly. I would hazzard that it would please the numerous fans of the progeny of both bittersweet gourmands in the mold of Lolita Lempicka and Angel as well as the boho-chic youth of today with their nostalgic eye on the 60s. The lasting power is exceptional and the diffusion/sillage very pleasing, radiating warmly without making you choke to your death upon spritz (at least judging by my sample sprayer which diffuses it in a light and steady mist).

You can buy Al Maali on the Crescent Beauty site (what a cute name!) and the price is quite advantageous compared to the western equivalents.

Pic via pxdaus.com

Tocadilly by Rochas: fragrance review

There is a French expression "mettre en valeur" which roughly translates as to highlight, to draw attention to one's best features. This is what Tocadilly by Rochas does; an ethereal scent that highlights the flowers of spring I love ~lilac, wisteria and mimosa~ beautifully, yet transcends the genre of floral. The feeling I get, when I sort this out of my perfume wardrobe at the first hints of spring, is just like the interplay of cool and warm one experiences upon imprinting their breath "fog" on a wet window pane.

Tocadilly by Marcel Rochas is a floral which launched in 1997 amidst a sea of aquatics and marines. It was said that it represents the younger sister of Tocade, an intensely rosy vanillic fragrance by Maurice Roucel from 1994, yet I do not perceive the kinship of spirit that should tie them in such a close relationship. They both have the same design of flacon, nevertheless, created by bottle designer Serge Mansau; but to Tocade's red packaging hues Tocadilly conterpoints blue-green-purple tones and the aura of the scent is complimentary.
Perfumer Christopher Sheldrake (currently at Chanel) is best known for his oeuvre under the wing of Serge Lutens composing a sumptuous line of persuasive orientals and opulent florals. In Tocadilly those preconceptions are shed and Sheldrake reveals a light, lacy touch that is capable of creating diaphanous effects which do not lack staying power or diffusion. The composition is segmentated into interesting facets of aqueous, fruity, floral and lightly ambery-powdery, fusing into a playful, cheerful and tender composition that is above all soft.

Three years before the modern aqueous lilacs of En Passant (2000), realised by Olivia Giacobetti for éditions des parfums Frédéric Malle, Tocadilly had captured this unholy allience between "clean" and "dirty" (Lilacs naturally have an anisic spiciness/powderiness recreated through anisaldehyde and heliotropin in fragrances, as extraction is so uneconomical/unyielding*; yet they often also possess an animalic undercurrent like pollen dusted on impolite feminine parts, especially the mauve-tinged blooms). The watery impression of Tocadilly is less "marine" than En Passant and the yeasty note is absent completely, rendering a must-try for both lovers and haters of En Passant.
The unusual pear note comes from the flavour industry and was contemporarily explored in Annick Goutal's Petite Chérie. Yet in Tocadilly it's not as easily decomposed and the absence of intense sugary lappings helps along, focusing instead on the almost pollen-like aroma of wisteria and lilacs. The mimosa is detectable ~and delectable, providing the emotional foil for the overall spring-like tonality which runs through the fragrance. Yet one would be hard pressed to designate Tocadilly to any particular season. It's utterly friendly and wearable in almost all settings and all climates, easing itself with an insouciant shrug of the shoulders and a child-like innocence that's not without a little mischief.

Notes for Rochas Tocadilly:
Top: cucumber, lilac, hyacinth, pear, jasmine, tiare, wisteria, mallow, mimosa and mandarin.
Heart: glycine/wisteria, coconut and heliotrope.
Base: sandalwood, musk and amber.

Sadly discontinued, Tocadilly is still available online.

*There is a fragrance that is purpotedly using a natural extraction of the flower itself, Highland Lilac of Rochester, to which we will return soon.

Photo Dreams and Cookies II via meren.org. Lilacs shot by PerfumeShrine, all rights reserved.

Christian Dior Escale a Pondichery: fragrance review

If the idea of travelling to far away, sweaty places full of the pungency of warm bodies, overripe fruit at the marketplace, mud and animals' dung appeals to you more than the actual travelling, there is the escapism of travelogue fragrance snippets meant to ignite your olfactory nerve in stictly non-offensive ways. Escale à Pondichéry is the latest release from parfums Christian Dior following Escale à Portofino from 2008. The new cologne is a tribute to the erstwhile ex-French Colony in India and is the second instalment in the series "les escales de Dior" (Dior's ports-of-call), initiated and composed by François Demachy, Senior vice president of olfactive development of perfumes for the LVMH group(he created Fahrenheit 32 for Dior as well). And is appropriately accompanied by a make-up follow-up in a Rose Pondichery nude-rose gloss to go with it (don't ever let anyone tell you you're not matchy-matchy, huh?)


According to the Hindu Business Line, Dior scheduled the official fragrance launch at The Dune Eco Beach Hotel in Puduchery in a move of almost parochial emphasis. The celebration took 3 days and 40 journalists from around the world staying at the popular 36-acre eco-friendly resort.

The Eau-de-Cologne-with-a-twist interpretation of the Escales de Dior series blossomed into pleasantly appealing local folklore in last year's Escale à Portofino with its Italian accents of bergamot, citron, petitgrain, glorious orange blossoms and bitter almonds, all part of the local flora. The pneuma of those colognes is expressed by the link between the raw materials and the chosen destinations, lands of culture and fragant history. François Demachy next chose India, inspired by the fragrances from Pondicherry and Kerala, to unravel the exotic fragrances of India and the raw materials we have come associate with the peninsula: Jasmine, sandalwood and tea. According to the press release "The perfumer has selected a black tea enwrapped in a fresh and light signature that harmonizes with a spirit of happy insouciance".

The idea of a light cologne in an Indian setting has been previously explored in the perplexing yet astute Un Jardin après la Mousson by Jean Claude Ellena for Hermès. Boucheron created Jaipur, a different beast, a fruity oriental inspired by the legendary city of jewels; Patou featured the banana note of ylang- ylang and jasmine in the floriental Sira des Indes; while Kenzo Amour Indian Holi even has "holi hai" written on the red bottle in Hindi! Even Cabochard was inspired by memories of a soujourn of Madame Grès at the exotic peninsula. And of course there's always Shalimar... India has never been short of pefumes dedicated to its olfactory traditions!

It seems however that travel destinations are very popular right now with big companies (judging by the travelogue of the Guerlain scents which we were the first to reveal back in August last year or the travel exclusives of Lauder and Lancôme) as are Eaux de Cologne in general (from the new Hermès Cologne collection including Eau de Pamplemousse Rose and Eau de Gentiane Blanche to the Chanel Exclusif Eau de Cologne which pre-emptied the trend).

India however has not been unknown to the Christian Dior fashion house: Chandernagore/Chandannagar, another Indian town of French colonisation, was referenced as early as in Dior's Fall-Winter 1947 collection! In 1962, Dior held two shows in Delhi and Mumbai and the last creation presented was ‘Voyage en Inde’ (Voyage to India). And of course the Dune hotel nicely references the now classic Dune fragance by Dior, a non-ozone "marine" for the 90s. However Goa, the ulta-popular destination for the new generation of India-travellers was eschewed in favour of Pondichéry, “a distant and exotic destination, an ideal of escapism and travel”, according to Demachy.

In Dior's Escale à Pondichry the diaphanous, almost colourless juice ~in the matelassé glass bottle that is meant to transcend the collection~ delivers a shot of refreshing and nicely bittersweet aroma meant to act as a journey carnet in very simple strokes. Four major Indian ingredients went into the making of this perfume and they're mingled into the composition with delicate mannerisms that should please without aspirations of symphonic cadenzas. Demachy lists them as Cardamom Essence in the top; Jasmine Sambac Absolute in the heart; Sandalwood Essence in the bottom; and Black Tea Extract as a "fil rouge" (common thread). Although one almost expects by default some spice in a composition inspired by India, the graceful weaving through of cardamom, used to aromatize both coffee and tea, is the protagonist in the delicate and contemporary take on a refreshing cologne of citrus opening with a pleasingly dry base and very transparent floral accents. The composition doesn't especially smell of the tannic facets of stong brews of black tea (and aren't there enough tea fragrances on the market already?), but more of an abstract idea of ambery woodiness and lightly smoky powder (probably due to synthetic musks). Will it prove as popular as Escale à Portofino did? It remains to be seen. The demographic is the same, but I predict that this one might attract more men without being too masculine in scent.

From a visual point of view the advertisements with the big-straw hat blonde Edita , all decked in white bat-sleeves and pop sunglasses bring to mind more of Estée Lauder or Elizabeth Arden cruise-style collections for WASP ladies than the exotic locales of India or the boho-chic tourists that pilgrimage. And it leaves one in aporia as to why Kalyani Chawla (the indian face of Dior) wasn't appropriate for this project of all projects! But the marketing angle is thus apparent and who can blame them? The modern consumer of globalised galivanting is far removed from the Ravi Shankar apprentices who followed en route to the spiritual. Perhaps taking that last observartion in mind might ellucidate the facets that surface in the latest fragrance.


Escale à Pondichéry launched in India on Saturday March 21st, launches in European boutiques on May 28th and is expected to arrive on the US shores in July 2009. It will be available in 75ml bottles of Eau de Toilette for 64,95€ .

Oh and if Dior is taking ideas, might I suggest the next escale is inspired by Assos in Cephalonia, Greece? (click for pic here)

Pics via Dune hotel blog and fr.bkrw.com.

Mapping Scents of Spirituality

While I am sitting on my desk with the open window rushing in the fragrant air full with the blossoms of bigaradier and the trembling dew of spring on them, my elderflower cordial by my side, I am thinking of how this Good Friday reminds me of Good Fridays past, those of my formative years and the thoughts that accompanied them.

I recall as a teenager sitting on the old, wooden pew and smelling the luminous, Byzantine, old church. Not only the predictable incence smoking in the cencers; neither the peeling varnish off the old egg tempera icons, nor the slight mustiness of the corners of the rugs on the floor where feet slightly wet from the spring showers had walked on; not even the flowers garlanding the "epitafios", the symbolic deathbed of Jesus: lilacs and narcissi (it was a country church; in the city it's lilies and roses). It was the assembly itself emitting its own smell of humanity and through it all a familiar smokish vanilla with slight accents of the inside of an old leather handbag. The scent assaulted my nostrils with the vexing pang of unidentified familiarity. I couldn't place it...And then out of blue the realisation hit me like a ton of bricks: Shalimar! Some unidentified woman wearing that most carnal oriental, bronzy like the candelabras that burned over our heads bearing the history of centuries. It puzzled me...

Good Friday is traditionally a day of abstinence, often subsisting on nothing but bread and water. And yet, here there was a carnal scent reminding me of non spiritual matters on that day. This chasm between the spiritual and the carnal is at the heart of matter. If Orthodoxy is antithetical to the Protestant faith in embracing the most humane of our faults while at the same time not granting the forgiveness that is so tangibly accessible in the confessional of Catholisism, how is it even possible that the carnal is so much accepted? How can the pleasure of the senses subsist into the celebration of the celebral and the divine?
But the Pagan survival in almost everything involving the rituals I remember is omnipresent: The beeswax candles that drip on the sand trays where old people stick them decisively yet with trembling hands, the wine that gets spilled on the floor as a tribute to the power of mother earth, the fires lain on the street of the castello fortified villages on the top of the Greek islands and the purotechnics shot on Easter's Eve midnight with their sulphurous smell...And most importantly, the death of the young god whose resurrection in the middle of nature's releafing is the return of Dionysus.
When my steps in assorted historical pursuits later took me to "ascetaria" (places of hermites) the myrrh exuded off the craggy walls of the caves stopped me in my tracks with its beauty and its caressing of the senses. How a person who lived on faith and little else could emit such a strong smell of holiness, and on top of that how could this smell be so pleasurable? Isn't sanctity synonymous to refusal? The question bugged me for long and it lay hidden at a corner of my mind, peaking its thorny head from time to time when an occassionary excess of the flesh filled me with an unexplicable sense of sorrow and unfullfilment. How could the Dionysian and the Appolonian, the Cthonic and the Olympian, coexist in a single soul?

Years enriched me with experiences and my dreary feet took me to various places with spiritual connotations. To the Bangkok Buddist temples with their serene smoke and the colourful blanket of different races entering and leaving, their skins and breaths speaking of exotic fruits of far away origin and pungent fish-soup. To the Great Mosque at Cordoba, Spain where Muslims kneeled beneath the pointy minarets, their clothes and bodies bearing the scented traces of lives lived beneath shady patios where the jasmine vines grow rampant. To the mahleb and cardamom smelling bakeries of Istanbul preparing the yummy desserts of the holy days, bought by Christians and Muslims alike, and the street vendors on Boğaziçi Köprüsü selling salep and salty mackerels to ease the hunger of the tourists. To the foreboding Minster in Ulm, Germany, its vertical majesty evoking thoughts of awe, where people pin little prayers on the cork board beginning "Liebe Gott" and the aroma of Eau de Cologne on the hands of the waiters in the cafeteria across the square. To the colourful vitraux of the York Minster, England, where the humidity of the soil and the sharp northern lights of the sky cannot hide the splendour of the roses blooming in the church yard and the women who stooped to smell them going out of the vesper service. To the modern synagogues of the East Coast of the US where kindly people share their cookies recipes in hushed whispers, whetting my appetite for culinary escapades upon returning home. And coming full circle, to immigrant familiar Greek churches in Melbourne, Australia, where the familiar, thick and smoky stench of Easter "lamb on a spit" roasting is never farther than a stone's throw away and where the whole street down the neighrhood is invited to the feas, no matter their adherent religion.

Because spirituality, I finally realised, is independent of religion and cannot be experienced if one has not first embraced all that this wonderful, this amazingly rich and truly wonderful life has to ferret: the good and the bad and the thorny. And the fragrant.



The kontakion "Ω γλυκύ μου έαρ" (My sweet spingtime) was written by Saint Romanus the Melodus in the 6th century AD and is the standard song of the Good Friday street procession throughout Greece.

Pics via greekingreece.gr, amorgos.blogs.gr, lovingit.co.uk

Hanami by Ayala Moriel at Blunda Los Angeles

It all started with a poem and a blog project: In March 2008, perfumer Ayala Sender was invited along with 14 other leading perfumers in the niche perfume industry to interpret a haiku-like poem by Ezra Pound, "In A Station of the Metro" for a project titled "Perfume In A Poem" on Memory & Desire blog. One year later, Ayala Moriel releases the perfume, named Hanami, at Blunda Aromatics in Los Angeles, in the 2nd of their 8-part Natural Botanical Perfume Exhibitions.
You can read more about Hanami on this link.
What:Natural Botanical Perfumery Exhibition #2: Hanami by Ayala MorielWhen:Saturday, April 18th, 1-5pmAyala Sender will speak at 2pmWhere:Blunda Los Angeles304 South Edinburgh Ave.Los Angeles, CA, 90048RSVP: (323) 658-7507 or email: rsvp@blundaaromatics.comFollowing the exhibition, Hanami perfume will be available exclusively through Blunda and Ayala Moriel's studio @ #314-1230 Haro Street in Vancouver, and the online boutique www.ayalamoriel.com