Perfume Off the Titanic

"Thousands of authentic artifacts from the exhibition, pulled from the remains of the sunken Titanic, are destined for the auction block. The New York Times reports that 5,500 items, including fine china and old bottles of perfume, will be actioned off at Guernsey's on April 1st. Estimated value of the pieces? $189 million.

Rather poignantly, the results of the auction will be announced on April 15, exactly a century after the famous ship came to its legendary end. The artifacts, although long at sea, are the result of various expeditions over the years, as AP notes, including underwater excursions as far back as 1987.
While we're not as enthused about buying a hunk of plywood or other pieces of the ship, the notion of owning a still-fragrant vial of perfume is strangely intriguing. AP writes that the fragrance belonged to a manufacturer who was planning to sell his perfume samples in New York.
Now his bottles have finally made it."[source]

Please also remember that there is Night Star, perfume of the Titanic by company Scents of Time, produced by David Pybus in collaboration with Chris Sheldrake. 

photo via G Michael Harris

Coal Perfume by Sissel Tolaas: Would you Wear it?

Even if your answer to this question is yes, you have to allow for extremely limited production: only10 pieces are produced for inquisitive "noses" in the industry to smell. Sissel Tollas, the famous Norwegian olfactory researcher and artist, created a charcoal perfume for SHOWstudio.

Coal is nothing new to perfumery actually: several of perfumery's materials have been produced via coal and tar byproducts since the late 19th century. Tolaas, in her credo of "there are no inherently good or bad smells" tried to capture the sooty mineral of the coal mines of the North Pole intact into an olfactory project called "Coal Perfume".

"Scent artist Sissel Tolaas pushes the boundaries of the olfactory sense, inverting our preconceptions of how things should smell, how things can smell, and what a scent can say. With COAL Tolaas created a wearable perfume made from coal extracted from the deepest mine in the North Pole. Tolaas' perfume evokes a strange sense of deceit: the bottled Essence Absolue of fired carbon opposes our expectation of a floral fragrance, drawing allusions to the olfactory alchemy of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, antihero of Patrick Suskind's Perfume".


The 75 ml bottle in black dye with a pump atomiser is looks like a sensuous elixir of seduction....what irony!

Available at SHOWstudio for 200GBP. 

Balenciaga Cialenga: fragrance review & history

Some women float over the floor rather than walk on it. There's a sweeping elegance and drama about them that you almost think all motion stops when they pass under the doorframe. Cialenga by Balenciaga is like that: Classically beautiful, aloofly superior, it's arresting and mysterious, but never going for outright wiles of seduction. This isn't a hearty blonde to laught out loud at your joke, but an icy cool Hitchockian heroine. Possibly with thick arched brows and a grey suit, besides a shady past, to show. Don't let the smile fool you...

History
Cialenga was launched by Balenciaga in 1973, composed by perfumer Jacques Jantzen. The name is rather cryptic; his only other known credential is collaboration on another Balenciaga perfume, Ho Hang for men (1971). But his history spans decades of shrouded work: His is Helena Rubinstein's 1946 Command Performance. 
The green chypres with floral hearts signified a more assertive and sophisticated angularity than the curvier lactonic florals of the 1950s and early 1960s and ushered in the new woman, the one who worked, took the pill and wore the pants. The dry, somewhat acrid quality of this genre is expressed in a dark manner in Cialenga, manifesting itself as among the more noir of the lot with a balance of green, spice and wood, just like a well judged cocktail of Martini wits, kinky sex references and sharply-cut tailleurs.

Comparison with Other Fragrances & Scent Description
The most apt comparison of Cialenga with any well-known perfume would be with vintage No.19 by Chanel. The way No.19 used to be, before being somewhat declawed. In Cialenga the green harmony is more aldehydic (recalling that segment from Paco Rabanne's Calandre) and soapy, while the overall character is decidely mustier than the Chanel and with quite a bit of spice added (clove and coriander prominently to my nose). The jasmine takes on a nuance between creamy and soapy, with no sugar floralcy as in more familiar sketches of floral chypres; the aldehydes do not take center stage.
The angularity of the green notes recalls the top note of Vent Vert in the vintage parfum (so full of galbanum), while the spicy warmth with an added myrrh tonality is all dark corners of a Spanish monastery in the New World and dangerous brunettes turned blondes with a death wish.

The familiar sophisticated refinement of Balenciaga perfumes (I'm referring to the vintages, though the modern Balenciaga Paris and L'Essence aren't half bad) is there all right in Cialenga. Think of Michelle, that ultra aloof tuberose parfum by the same Spanish designer or La Fuite des Heures! Being highly in tune with its times, Cialenga vaguely recalls other fragrances in the genre of a similar retro time-frame: Y by Yves Saint Laurent, Coriandre by Jean Couturier, the first Jean Louis Scherrer. The citrusy and black-currant segment might even recall the refreshing facets of Amazone.

Availability 

A little goes a long way and it's trailing at least down the elevator doors, so a small quantity should last you a long time; good thing, as Cialegna, like all vintage Balenciaga perfumes, is discontinued and nowadays quite rare.  Few specimens crop up on ebay from time to time.

Notes for Balenciaga Cialenga:
Top: citrus, black currant,green notes
Heart: iris, jasmine, ylang-ylang, clove, tincture of rose and lily
Base: vetiver, sandalwood, patchouli, oakmoss and Virginia cedar.

photo still of Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo via the ace black blog 

This review is dedicated to Armani/Michael who introduced me to this fragrance and who had a thing for Kim Novak's brows in Vertigo :-)

Frequent Questions: What are Lace Benzoin Tears?

Lace benzoin tears are a puzzling "fragrance note" in Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Lovers Jingle G fragrance. (An unimpressive introduction; if it were a note in Fath's Iris Gris, I bet you're all be sitting up straight with a new found attention in your eyes. All the same...) Several people online have been furtively throwing sideways glances in understandable puzzlement over this. Let's present an answer today and hope that some official reply comes soon.

Most readers attuned to just how misleading fragrance notes lists can be might be assuming it's all purple prose imaginings of a feverish copywriter. Others might suppose it's a new aromachemical with a poetic name for a change.
"Lace Benzoin Tears"  is in all probability a misspelling of Gum Lacc.Benzoin which appears for the actual well-known benzoin resin in some literature (notably by the Royal Society of London). Because there’s a dot after the c, and it’s in Italic, people mistook it for e and reproduced it. It's now everywhere on the Net, but curiously ONLY in relation to Harajuku Lovers Jingle G (just Google "Lace Benzoin Tears") and NOT from Stefani's official site either.
Lac. comes from the Latin, meaning to lacerate, to tear. Benzoin also typically comes in "tears", i.e. drops of resin which solidify resembling little lumps, like crystallized tears.

Then there’s also “bois dentelle” i.e laget, .lagetto/ lace-bark tree (Lagetta of Jussieu). So there just might be a comma missing in the list [i.e. lace (tree), benzoin tears etc.]. That would also make sense, though I find it highly unlikely because bois dentelle is nearing extinction.

I don’t know if the Harajuku fragrance is using either, though, I've never smelled it. But it's an interesting hypothesis, right? If anyone has smelled it, please let us known if it has a benzoin note.

Related reading on Perfume Shrine: Resinous & Balsamic in Fragrances (with notes on benzoin)

Photo of Anna Karina in Jean Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie film (1962)

Amouage Gold for women: fragrance review

Someone famous in the music scene, with whom we've been emailing, has mentioned Amouage Gold as the fragrance fit for an Oscars night. Not just wearing it in the audience, trying to steady one's shaky hands by resting them on the posh couture gown, but presenting. There just isn't any stage fright or wavering about Gold; it wears itself like a grande-dame, assured, polished, dramatic. This is a regal fragrance for a cool blonde of another era.

History
Amouage, the Omani firm who cater for the Omani royalty and those with a taste for French fragrance structures in Middle Eastern settings, went out of their way to make Gold, their first fragrance, sumptuous and fit for a queen; not a princess. Top perfumer was ushered in (Guy Robert, who gave us Equipage, among the most perfect men's scents, and the once wonderful Dioressence which my own mother so loved); the best ingredients were specifically harvested; no budget restrictions were made whatsoever; no focus groups. You'd have to envy the lucky perfumer who worked thus unrestrained. The year was 1983. At the time Amouage didn't benefit from the creative direction it has nowadays and the fragrance circulated simple as Amouage for women. Robert considered it the crowning glory of his career and characterises its dramatic progression as "symphony".

Fragrance Description & Classification
You might have witnessed Amouage Gold for women uttered in the same breath as Chanel No.5. As you would expect, given Guy Robert's credentials (he's the creator of Madame Rochas and Hermès Calèche) and the general mad rush Middle East has for Chanel (they're mad about Chanel), this isn't far off the truth. Yes, Gold is an aldehydic floral, in the general ballpark of No.5, a tad heavy-hitting and old-school (in a good way), lush, opulent and very luxurious, which uses traditional Omani ingredients re-adjusted in a classic French blueprint. If I were to be more specific, I'd say that Gold for women more resembles the hypothetical child of Lanvin's My Sin (long discontinued) and Houbigant's Quelques Fleurs (now sadly reformulated).
But if you only know Robert's famous aldehydics I mentioned, you get an idea of how Gold smells: I need to stress that in order to like it, you have to like fragrances in the floral aldehydic family (refer to this article to see what aldehydes are and here for reviews of aldehydic fragrances). And you might be questioning why splurge (50ml/1.7oz will set you back 285$) on a bottle when there are other things smelling like it. Good question! But somehow God is in the details and Gold appears richer, more opulent than any of them. This thing radiates off skin for hours and hours on end, it just won't go away; a bottle will probably last you more than any of us is expected to make it in sane mind.

The Omani materials used enjoy a rich heritage: "Today, as in ancient times, the precious resin from the very ordinary looking frankincense tree is harvested carefully by hand, by a select caste of tribal herders. The frankincense trees that line the Dhofar landscape in Salalah are protected and the mysterious allure of their scent is blended with a host of precious natural oils and essences to form the unmatched perfume that is Amouage. The essence of an incredibly rare variety of rose called the Omani Rock Rose is extracted and also used in 'Gold Amouage.' This special variety of rose grows and flowers for the briefest period each year on the slopes of the remote Jebel Al Akhder mountains of Oman. Myrrh, another core ingredient in Amouage is also from the Jebel Al Akhder region." [source]

The start of Amouage Gold for women is all powdery-soapy floral, much like the archetypal aldehydics of yore; golden honey limbs, falling on a dozen silk cushions. There's a clean vibe with lily-of-the-valley green floralcy, while at the same time you're miles away from the modern "clean" scents of laundry detergent & fabric softener. The fruity aspects are intergrained like brushstrokes in an impressionist painting; from a little distance it all mingles into a composition rather than individual shapes.The floral part is built on the intense chord of jasmine & ylang ylang that we also find in Chanel No.5, boosted by rose and a tiny touch of tuberose; in fact this floral chord most reminds me of Patou's classic Joy, though the whole composition does not. The natural floral, velvety sweetness is complimented by a dab of creaminess, provided -from what I can smell- from a little vanilla and sandalwood. The creamy aspect is what makes Gold so lush, so nectarous, so very sinful.
As the fragrance dries down, you're suddenly face to face with the revelation that the core structure is really that of a graceful woody floral with oriental elements: the scent becomes noticeably woody, with a downy, elegant polish that is clean and smoothed out on notes of lightly astrigent frankincense and myrrh with no smoke whatsoever and the enduring note of (rich and -again- similar to the old parfum edition in No.5) musk.The lasting power and sillage are phenomenal.

Notes for Amouage Gold for women:
Top: lime, apricot, peach, lily-of-the-valley, neroli.
Heart notes: rose, jasmine, silver frankincense, myrrh, rock rose flower, patchouli, orris, cedarwood and sandalwood.
Base notes: ambergris, civet and musk.

Concentrations Available & Shopping
Amouage Gold currently circulates as Eau de Parfum (which is plenty really!) and extrait de parfum. Older versions included an Eau de Toilette. I find the EDP the most pleasing form.
There is also a men's Amouage Gold version, which leans into the woody musk category rather than aldehydic, even though stating almost the same ingredients.

Stockists include the Omani Amouage boutique, the boutique in London and online such as at Luckyscent.
Check the official site at Amouage.com

pic of Anita Ekberg