Annick Goutal Sables: fragrance review

Sables flies under the radar amidst the masculine selection chez Annick Goutal, despite the fact that Harrison Ford is supposedly an ardent fan. I guess he's considered "old man" by now and not as hip for a celebrity endorsement. But Sables shouldn't suffer from malrecognition; this is an especially brilliant composition and a unique one at the time of its launch, in 1985. The burnt sugar aspect of helichrysum ~known also as immortelle or everlasting flower~ with its shades of curry, maple syrup and fenugreek aromata make this fragrance one of the most distinctive not only in the Goutal canon, but in general. The onle fragrance more daringly infused with this spicy-caramelic note is Eau Noire in the private line of Dior colognes, composed by Francis Kurkdjian (A scent for which designer Karl Lagerfeld is crazy about!). Asmar by So Oud (launched in 2010) is closer to Sables, although not exactly the same.

Immortelle is an aquired taste for sure. Not everyone feels comfortable smelling like Indian food and helichrysum italicum is called "the curry plant" by some. Still, the initially spicy fenugreek nuances (somewhat mentholated and bitter inky, like in good old Fernet-Branca digestif) in Goutal's Sables are mollified towards the caramelised smoky spectrum; a whiff of pyrazines and malt, for those who appreciate Jeux de Peau by Serge Lutens for instance. The curry note is joined by its conspirator in crime: cumin, with its perceived sweaty aspect, and by a little pepper. Yet one cannot exactly categorise Sables as "dirty", "skanky" or spicy, but rather as smoky sweet and cozy in either winter or summer. In my own personal experience, Sables is a child of the sun and the warmth, and performs best in minute amounts put on the belly or behind the knees in the heat.
Contrary to the standard perception of Goutal scents being ethereal and fleeting, this one is particularly projecting, leaving a memorable trail and lasts very long, so beware of overdosing. It's definitely not intended to be used solely a masculine, although the saltier quota of male skin brings out the herbal and more ambery facets to the fore (much like in Ambre Sultan), while it's sweeter on women. The longer the fragrance stays on warm skin, the more it manifests those burnt sugar notes allied with milky, woody facets of sandalwood without ever becoming cloying. On the whole, Sables's kinship is more with a Lutensian oriental oeuvre, or a more powerful version of Cuir Béluga by Guerlain, than with the Indian dish intensity of Dior's Eau Noire where immortelle contrasts with the medicinal-caramelic ends of spectrum of natural lavender essence projecting a more rustic, rugged edge. 

Sables saw the light of day after a journey in Corsica, imbued with the warm and spicy scent of wild immortelle. This fragrance is dedicated to men and women whose originality and subtlety make them just as they are–-that is, authentic. Annick Goutal created it especially for her husband, Alain, who played the violoncello, as a memento from a trip to the so-called Island of Beauty, where the scent of immortelle-sprinkled sand dunes had captured her mind.

To me Sables will always stand as the olfactory equivalent of a particular beach in Lesbos Island in Greece. It is a volcanic place, all hot springs and absolutely no fish in the water, a deserted sugar-like fine sandy beach near a fossiled forest. The warmth of the sun schorches the tree trunks laying in the background. A moment of eternity has just been mine and I can see the history of the earth in a long gaze...

Related reading on Perfume Shrine: Annick Goutal news & reviews, Immortelle: perfumery material, Pyrazines; maple & caramel notes, interview with perfumer Isabelle Doyen

helichrysum flowers pic via stopthatcat

FiFi Awards & Element Showcase: First Indie Fragrance Award

As Elements Showcase prepares to host its second design and fragrance showcase on August 15th and 16th of this year, the founders are pleased to announce their partnership with The Fragrance Foundation to introduce a new FiFi® Award for Best "Indie" Fragrance Brand at this August's show. Brands will be able to sign up to receive nominating forms at the show and via the websites of Elements and the Foundation. The winner(s) will be announced at the Elements Showcase in January 2012 and again at the FiFi® Awards ceremony in the Spring of 2012.
Elements Showcase is the brainchild of Frederick Bouchardy, Jeff Lawson and Ulrich Lang. The first showcase, in January 2011, presented curated offerings in the field of fragrance design. From its conceptualized space by Reddymade Design to its cutting-edge and experiential installations, industry veterans, retailers and media have praised Elements Showcase as an innovator in its field. "We are honored to partner with The Fragrance Foundation in the creation of a FiFi® for Best 'Indie.'"

An exceptional crowd of buyers from all over the globe, including Barneys New York, Saks Fifth Avenue and Henri Bendel attended the January 2011 Elements Showcase. These buyers were exposed to dozens of emerging and established visionaries in the art of fragrance design including Bond No. 9, Lafco New York, Dayna Decker and many more. It will be from a list of fragrance visionaries similar to these that The Fragrance Foundation and Elements Showcase will accept candidates for the new FiFi® Award based on criteria which will be shared in the weeks ahead. "The Fragrance Foundation recognizes the talent and artistry of the 'Indie' Brands and wants to acknowledge this category in the environment which celebrates their individuality and craftsmanship," says Rochelle Bloom, president of The Fragrance Foundation.The FiFi® Awards, sponsored annually by The Fragrance Foundation, honors the fragrance industry's creative achievements. The Fragrance Foundation was established in 1949 by six industry leaders affiliated with Elizabeth Arden, Coty, Guerlain, Helena Rubenstein, Chanel and Parfums Weil, to develop educational programs about the importance and pleasures of fragrance for the American public. Today, America is the largest fragrance market in the world and The Fragrance Foundation has become an international source for historic, cultural, scientific and industry related reference materials.

info via press release

Francis Kurkdjian: Star Perfumer to the Stars, Creator of Best-Selling Fragrances

Few perfumers in the course of the past 150 years have enjoyed such a sky-rocketing course to stardom as has the handsome Francis Kurkdjian, formerly a dancer, piano player and aspiring tailor and eventually a perfumer and co-founder of his own niche fragrance house, Maison Francis Kurkdjian. Kurkdjian (his name of Armenian descent pronounced “koor-zhan”) was the nose behind such fragrance best-sellers as Jean Paul Gaultier’s characteristic male-torso-flacon Le Mâle, Armani Mania, Miracle Homme, Elizabeth Arden Green Tea, Narciso Rodriguez For Him and For Her, Acqua di Parma’s Iris Nobile as well as the initial Christian Dior private "cologne" fragrances Eau Noire (2004) with its daring use of helichrysum/immortelle that recalls maple syrup and curry.

“Francis was behind around 30 blockbusters, from global blockbusters to blockbusters in niche industries,” says Marc Chaya, president and co-founder of Maison Francis Kurkdjian Paris (MFK). “He worked with Romano Ricci on niche line Juliette Has a Gun [ed.note: Miss Charming and Lady Vengeance, both based on delicate musky rose accords which he loves], and also did Rose Barbare for Guerlain's boutique exclusive line.” More impressibly Francis recreated Marie Antoinette’s scent based on a book about the French queen’s perfumer by Elisabeth de Feydeau, and he scented the palace of Versailles’ fountains for two special events with his beloved, trademark metallic rose accord.

Indeed Kurkdjian seems to have favourite themes which he manipulates into his compositions: two of them make a frequent apparition in feminine fragrances; the musky rose that feels fluffy and yet a tad dusky thanks to woody patchouli nuances at the background (Lady Vengeance, Rose Barbare), as well as the man-made, sweet, clean and fresh, piercingly bright orange blossom accord which he perfected  for Narciso For Her and respun in Lanvin's Rumeur in 2006. He also loves his musks and ambrox, especially in his masculine fragrances, fusing the warmth and clean feeling of the former into the soothing hum of the latter. For those reasons there's things to love and things to shy away from in his work, but the talent and consistency of his work is undisputed.
Francis's perfumer idol is none other than prolific perfumer Alberto Morillas, one of the greats in the business; with sales like the ones he's generating, however, Kurkdjian isn't far from being admired by fans. His work is respected by other perfumers, but mostly adored by discerning customers, often of the celebrity of perfumes-connoisseur Catherine Deneuve (who loves the rich Lumière Noire pour femme, which was born out of her comission for a private scent, but she later agreed to add it to the line when Francis opened his own house) Kylie Minogue (who wears Apom pour Homme) is another dedicated customer. Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge (formerly known as Kate Middleton) has been an inspiration for Kurkdjian: the occassion of the royal wedding made him picture her in something intimate and warm, like the new Elie Saab fragrance he created. (We now know Kate went with something completely different, but that's besides the point).
His bespoke service involves a travelling "crate" with bottles of essences which he brings along on a scented profiling of the individual: the process can be laborious and take from 3 months (sending back and forth samples for evaluation and recalibrating) to one year for those with very definitive views on the subject! The project had began casually enough; talking on the plane with well-heeled co-traveller Terry de Gunzburg resulted in a comissioning of a tailor-made fragrance, one which smelled of "orange groves in Italy and earth" (according to an article by Susan Irvine on British Vogue in the mid-1990s)

Francis Kurkdjian was born in Seine et Marne on May 14th, 1969, to a family outside the fragrance industry: his grandfather a men's tailor, his grandmother an inspecting eye in the family business. His first scented memories involved the aroma of sewing oil, clean cloth, tailor chalk and the spice rack sneeking in from the pantry, while an overseeing Art Deco panther was looking on the proceedings. His whole professional ethos was influenced by the ideal of giving pleasure, much like those in the tailoring business are brought up to do.
Francis studied at ISIPCA, the eminent French perfumery school, before composing Le Mâle at 23. He won Prix François Coty in 2001 and the rest is history. The irony is Chaya had no idea who Kurkdjian was when they met at a Jean Paul Gaultier fashion show. “Francis said to me, ‘I am a perfumer,’ and I said, oh, really, does such a thing exist? I thought that was Gaultier doing it himself.” Chaya eventually quit Ernst & Young to co-found and head Maison Francis Kurkdjian in 2009. “Founding MFK was about bringing fresh vision to the fragrance industry,” Chaya says. “It was about founding a modern luxury fragrance house and celebrating the talent of one of the most talented perfumers of our time.” Kurkdjian is more restrained in his evaluation of the company: "La Maison Francis Kurkdjian is an expression of my idea of beauty in perfumery and luxury in general. This House is a tribute to Paris - her spirit of freedom - and blends tradition and technology. My House is dedicated to small joys distilled into 24 hours of perfumed life. Each experience is an olfactory story that lives within my product".

Currently the Maison Francis Kurkdjian line comprises the following fragrances:

Aqua Universalis
A fresh unisex cologne based on the mock sweet orange note which permeats "clean" white floral compositions and laundry detergents (and indeed the house's own laundry product aromatized with the same scent), flanked by hesperidia on top and musk/ambrox on the bottom.
Aqua Universalis Forte
A more concentrated (40%) version of the "clean & fresh" Aqua Universalis theme with boosted Calabrian bergamot, added citron, added florals (rose and jasmine)and a more powerful musk.
Pour le Matin
The vision of a Mediterranean garden, replete with rustic herbs (thyme and lavender). Available as Cologne and Absolue (Eau de Parfum)
Pour le Soir
The vision of Francis's mother in a fur coat for a night out: powder and lipstick on, rich fragrance leaving a seductive trail behind.Uniting the holy (benzoin incense) with the profane (animalic and cumin-rich accords), it's a perfume to be noticed in. Available as Cologne and Absolue (Eau de Parfum), the latter featuring intense cumin and added ylang ylang.
ApoM pour homme & pour femme
Basically an acronym for "a piece of me", the duo was inspired by travels to Lebanon and the Lebanese people with their dark good looks. The scent speaks of orange blossom's beauty and cedarwood's austerity, while being infused with ylang ylang for the feminine version and with (sweet, narcotically floral) and amber for the masculine one (sportier and manly).
Lumiere Noire pour homme & pour femme
Spiced rose, cumin, hot pepper and patchouli, plus narcissus for her and mugwort herb for him mingle in the fragrance equivalent of a long evening gown and a tuxedo: the rich, decadent composition is truly luxurious.

At the end of t2011 MFK will release small, five-milliliter perfume roll-ons perfect for the purse and on the go. The packaging including the stoppers on the flacons are inspired by the zinc & gold rooftops of Paris.The line already incorporates incense paper strips (infused with benzoin resin), leather bracelets permeated with essences, deos, laundry detergent in Aqua Universalis scent, scented candles and room sprays and Les Bulles d'Agathe, soap bubbles in either mint, pear, cut grass or violets scents for the kid in us!

Visit Kurkdjian's official website at Francis Kurkdjian.com



Ref:
Interview on Ecodesign Canada
Interview on Vogue UK
Article on ParisBao
some quotes via the Philippine Global Community
portrait shot via vogue.uk, trunk via parisbao.com

Myth Busting: Coffee Beans as a Method for Fighting Nose Fatigue?

We all know the drill, as perpetuated on the perfume counter: After a series of enthusiastic spritzing of every conceivable fragrance on the shelf our nose registers .....nothing. (This can also be an effect of too much of a specific class of aromachemicals in fine fragrance, for which you can refer to the linked article). So what have the shops come up with to counteract that nasal tiredness? They devised a technique of fighting boredom of the nasal passages with an aroma so strong and different that the jolting sensation would recalibrate our ability to smell: coffee beans. Freshly roasted, dark and aromatically pungent. Does the trick work? Usually not so well, in our experience. But now scientific research backs this claim up.

Do without the perfume-counter coffee beans, say Beloit College researchers

Beloit, Wis. – In an effort to offer shoppers a nasal palate cleanser (and presumably, to sell more fragrances), department store perfume counters have long been topped with small jars of coffee beans. As it turns out, they shouldn’t be. New research published by a Beloit College* professor and two of her students suggests that the beans are no more useful than sniffing the air when it comes to clearing the nose.

In a recently published report titled “An Exploratory Investigation of Coffee and Lemon Scents and Odor Identification,” psychology professor Alexis Grosofsky and two Beloit students, Margaret L. Haupert (class of 2011) and Schyler W. Versteeg (’12), put this common practice to the test using four widely available fragrances (Babe, Confess, Prettiest and Tempt Me). After several months of work they found that, “Coffee beans and lemon seem to have no special refreshing properties.”  

“Fragrance sellers,” they suggest, “may wish to reconsider the practice of providing coffee beans to their customers.”

The research is outlined in the latest edition of Perceptual and Motor Skills, a peer-reviewed bimonthly research journal. Read the full article online.

*Beloit College, founded in 1846, is Wisconsin’s oldest college. Hailed as one of a handful of “Colleges That Change Lives” by former New York Times education editor Loren Pope, Beloit draws students from 48 U.S. states and 40 countries to its residential campus along the Rock River in downtown Beloit, Wis. Learn more at www.beloit.edu. 

Shiseido Inoui: fragrance review, history & draw

Beware of the celebrity endorsement; it might get you in trouble hunting for rare, long lost treasures to the detriment of your wallet: The first time I became seriously intriguied by Inouï was upon reading an interview of Greek singer Anna Vissi, more than a dozen years ago, declaring her longing for a bottle of this discontinued Shiseido scent: "If anyone still got a bottle, I'm paying double for it". Makes a girl move earth and sky to find some, doesn't it! Inoui, or rather Inouï with the requisite umlaut, launched by Shiseido in 1976 and quickly vanished from the market in the late 1980s, its quirky name meaning unprecedented in the sense of stunningly gorgeous.

Stunningly gorgeous it might not be exactly, as I reserve this characterisation for truly seminal fragrances or those which exhibit a daring concordance of vision and orchestration, but the drops resting on my collarbone speak of its beauty in no uncertain terms: Inouï prettifies everything it touches, even though it belongs to the old-school austere, cool greens of the ilk of Chanel No.19, Alliage, Diorella, Calèche and Shiseido's own Koto which are crepuscularly silver, rarely breaking a smile, surely alien ~ in the letter of the law~ to my own warm-blooded, passionate Mediterranean nature.

There is nothing really warm or conventionally seductive about Inouï , the bitter galbanum resin and chilled alοof florals giving a Brechtian detachment, a sort of stoic Britannic phlegm even on the face of the gravest tragedy; or maybe -more plausibly- it's just the Japanese aesthetic of keeping one's cool and always appearing composed. At the time Shiseido was not yet in collaboration with Serge Lutens, the maestro who would bring Gallic passion to the Eastern refinement with Nombre Noir and all the rest of their collaborative opus, and suppposedly the company was meaning to break up with their oriental tradition at the same time, hence the name of the fragrance one would assume:

'An international product developed by the joint efforts of Shiseido staff in Japan, the U.S. and Italy, Inoui was introduced in 1976. Under the sales theme of the “New Working Woman,” the image was of a new woman with a cosmopolitan mind. She lived a beautiful lifestyle of jazz dance, yoga, jogging and other new activities of the time, while easily handling her work as well. “It's not her beauty. It's her lifestyle.” clearly expresses the concept behind the product.'

Thus ran the official blurb on the fragrance on the US site.Somehow it doesn't sound very fetching to me. I can think of better things. But times have changed; back then "modern" woman apparently dreamed about the "beautiful lifestyle of jazz dance, yoga, jogging and other new activities, while easily handling her work as well".

Yet history disproves this assertion of breaking with tradition: Saso and Myth of Saso, other Shiseido rarities, are unusual and unpliable with no "lifestyle" concept behind them, yet roughly contemporaries. But for every Saso there's a Koto; easy, breezy, refreshingly cool for active lives, so Shiseido is obviously consciously catering to a multitude of women and respective markets. Later on, the Japanese company launched a make-up line by the same name (and the follow-up, Inoui ID) which was put into stunning visuals by Lutens himself, the choreographing of the models an exercise in cobra mesmerising human eyes.

Inouï is a fragrance which, underneath the crashed stems and sap, lives and breathes in human form and yes, warms up somewhat with an exquisite jasmine heart, halfway between birth and rot, flanked by the pungent accent of herbal thyme, like a seasoned woman who knows what she wants and what she's capable of. This is why it feels at a crossroads between floral chypre and green floral; but Inoui is friendlier than angular No.19 by Chanel, soapier and sweeter than Alliage by Lauder and less BCBG than Hermès Calèche. It's so pretty, deep and undemanding that it poses a mystery on why it got axed so soon! Then again, might we recall the dire straits of Paco Rabanne's Calandre; who knew such an easy, loveable fragrance would become hard to get!
The opening accord in Shiseido Inouï is sap-like, crushed greens with a hint of soapy aldehydes and at the same time reminiscent of the lemon-peach top chord of classic Diorella: fresh, but registered an octave below, mossier. Soon the warmth of ripe jasmine anchors the peachy lactonic notes and gives oomph, fleshing the sketch of the greens and deepening the feminine impression. The impression of green floral sustains itself cuddled by a lightly mysterious base, like that in Y by Yves Saint Laurent, deepening as time passes, mingled perfectly in one unified chord, while its murmur is only audible to those who come close by.

Vintage batches (the only kind, really, since Inoui is long discontinued) crop up sometimes online, for really huge prices somewhat unjustifiably. Those which retain a fresh, green floral and a tad soapy note have kept well. If your catch smells sour, you've been out of luck: the perfume deteriorated through the years. There is an eau de parfum version and an extrait de parfum in sparse, architectural bottles, both worthy additions to a distinguished perfume collection.

Notes for Shiseido Inoui :
Top: Galbanum, Peach, Juniper, Lemon, Green Accord
Heart: Pine Needles, Freesia, Thyme, Jasmin
Base: Cedarwood, Myrrh, Musk, Civet, Oakmoss

Since it's such a rarity, one sample out of my own personal stash goes out to one lucky reader. Please comment on what appeals to this genre to qualify.