Cool, Silken Fragrances: Like Snowcapped Trees in the Ringing Winter Air

In my mind there is a two-pronged approach to choosing personal fragrances for winter wearing: One is to go for traditional oriental elements, warm resins and balsams, rich florals and amber fragrance blends; creating contrast and invoking via perfume-magic warmer lands where the night is always warm and bodies radiate the heat of blood rushing to the skin's surface. Another, more unusual but perhaps more cherished because of it, is akin to homeopathy: inject a bit of cool silkiness to the routine, letting the outside cold enhance the silvery, metallic qualities of the perfume. Therefore throw in a mix of irises, artemisia, angelica and gentian essences, cool celebral notes, sour frankincense smoke that trails behind like the ashes off an extinguished censer...

photo by Johan Klovsjö

This is a capsule fragrance wardrobe for when the cooling touch of silk, with its shiny reflections reminiscent of drop of water on the icy pond, seems more sophisticated to you than the coziness of snuggly cashmere and wools.

GUERLAIN Aqua Allegoria Gentiana: The cool snowscapes of the Alps hide this plant, le gentiane. Its fresh and bracing properties are displayed in a simple composition that feels like icicles hanging from a thatched roof.

EDITIONS DE PARFUMS F.MALLE Angéliques sous la Pluie: Rained upon angelicas, a celestial gin and tonic on the rocks, refreshingly bitter with a cool edge of seeing snowcapped stone fences just across the road. 

RAMON MONEGAL Impossible Iris: Impossible Iris is like those beautiful raven-haired girls with big, sincere eyes that seem to engulf you and creamy, gorgeous skin that shines with the sheen of mother-of-pearl. Delicate, shy beginning with a cool touch, then comes wooly mimosa with its hint of warmth to smile into the proceedings, while the quiet, bookish woody tonality of the aftermath has a pencil shavings nuance.

TAUER Pentachord White: silvery, expansive imagescape. A fragrance of either the crack of dawn or the crepuscular drawing of a prolonged cool afternoon, the contrast between light and shadow. Orris, violet, vanilla, ambergris notes...

DIOR Homme: A fruity iris for men, a pretty boy with eyelashes a mile long to inflict "butterfly kisses" with. Supremely beautiful and sophisticated with a suprising note of....lipstick!

YSL Rive Gauche: Mysteriously "blue" floral, yet non- romantic English bone-china-pattern-style—it’s flinty! Absolutely classy, sparkling with aldehydes, like the spy who came in from the cold. 

ARMANI Bois d'Encens: A smoky incense that wafts from the forests on the cool wintery air, gloomy cedars silently silhouetted in the distance. The howl of wolves is heard from across the mountains.

GUERLAIN Après l'ondée: What is it that makes this so nostalgic, trembling with delight after the shower, which its name hints at? Is it its heliotrope soft powderiness married to melancholic iris and violet, like a smooth-faced Ophelia contemplating the joys of the river? No, it's probably what is more earthy: anise (and other herbs) give a glimpse of the sun forming a rainbow over still dewy petals. A 1906 classic.

Do you wear cool fragrances in wintertime? I'd love to hear your favorites. 

Fragrant Combinations to Lift the Winter Blues

It was a while ago I mentioned some fragrant combinations for autumn using Diptyque candles and room scents, promising to come back with more. Diptyque offers a small guide of scent combinations of its famous candles for scenting your space -a sort of olfactory landscaping- to create your own atmosphere, evoking a different mood than the one currently roaring and howling outside. Actually Diptyque have championed the art of scent layering since their very beginning. These below are of a different ilk than previously, less rust & gold and more a breath of fresh awakenings, like grains sprouting under the snow. But even if you're bent on the holiday spirit and enjoy the warming effluvium of the classic scents of the season, the new limited edition 2012 collection in its chic containers (below) brings on a smile to the lips.

via mercinewyork.com

Oliban and Sapin Dore are the very spirit of the holidays: the cool frankincense reminds us that there is a liturgical background to the festivities, while the warm and clean pine scent is complementing all the natural, outdoorsy smells of the season.

Gardenia and Santal are classic Diptyque candles and by combining the lush scent of the waxy-petaled white flower and the soft milky note of sandalwood you get a bridge from winter to spring, an optimistic reminder that good things lie awaiting.

 Verveine and Menthe Vert (i.e. lemon verbena and green mint) is a classic office and work desk combination that is mind-clearing. It helps me get my thoughts off the loom and gloom outside and into focusing to the projects I have to accomplish before dusk sets.

 Roses and Lierre when burnt together are delightfully reminiscent of an English garden by the river; the pink roses are dewy and trembling under the coolness of the approaching evening, the ivy leaves are reinforcing the vegetal, cool aspect.

 Maquis and Figuier is probably the combination I'm feeling most nostalgic about, reminiscent as it is of the scent of the Mediterranean countryside, filled with the burnished copper of immortelle, the sapling of the fig tree and its bittersweet smelling leaves. Summer will come, in the end.

Hug Me, Cashmere Wrap Fragrances for Wintertime

When the wind is howling outside, shaking the trees into a sweeping sound, and the logs in the fire crackle with gusto, perfume can play both a prophylactic role (reminiscent of its original purpose) and one of mental escapism. Winter-time brings on its own special slot for playing with fragrance, simply because we spend so much more time in close quarters noticing smells of the indoors (and on each other) and because the outdoors feels so quiet and silvery under the caps of snow reflecting the rays of a tentative sun.

Below is a capsule selection of tried and true warm, snuggly and devastatingly sexy fragrances to carry you into wintertime to make you feel like you're wrapped into your own portable hug.

punmiris.com

GUERLAIN Tonka Impériale: Wearing it on winter sweaters and scarfs (where it clings for days radiating seductively) is akin to getting caressed by a honey mink étole while smelling fine cigars in a salon de thé serving the most delicious almond pralines on panacotta.

CHANEL Bois des Iles: The most caressing sandalwood-rich floral feels like a cashmere wrap woven by angels. Beautifully supple, rich but restrained, it's a fragrance whose every drop denotes indoors entertaining in elegant interiors.

BOTTEGA VENETA Eau de Parfum: Subtly leathery goodness with warmth and coziness, underneath a fruity chypre mantle with a beating jasmine heart. What's not to like?

CARON Poivre: As warm as a fur coat, as arresting as pepper spray, a pas de deux on clove and carnation blossoms; or the scent of Cruella de Vil.

SERGE LUTENS Douce Amère: A bittersweet harmony of anise etched in opaline, singing in a warm contralto, melancholic and vanillic, borrowing something of the introspective mood of winter.

HERMES 24 Faubourg: A rich floriental resembling a Hollywood heroine dressed in a light beige trenchcoat, impecably coiffed hair under a heavy silk scarf of prestigious sign aure, wrapped on her precious little head, lipstick in deep coral, complexion in peaches and cream, driving a sports car on the dangerous slopes of Monaco under a heavy steel sky.

Which are your own "cashmere sweater" fragrances? I'd love to hear suggestions. 

Lady Gaga Fame: fragrance review

With the Fame fragrance we witness a grossly missed chance and a Shannon entropy in one: whereas we could have had a Maleficent or at the very least a Pippi Longstocking, we get Cinderella ("please make the good prince notice me"), all bets off in a mathematical variability into the consumer's collective unconscious. Fame by Lady Gaga operates on a false signal, emitting something else than expected, breaking the communication circuit in half (visual cues, olfactory profile) and redirecting half of the message into the void. No wonder the Gaga perfume is the no.1 best-seller at the local Sephora as of this moment; perfume briefs these days are directed with a slew of semiotics experts and communication analysts behind them.

Lady Gaga Lady gaga FAME

via fanpop.com

The official blurb mentions the structure being built on three main accords, instead of the classic fragrance pyramid: dark accord, sensual accord and light accord. The fragrance, though not at all unpleasant (I bet if it was issued by another less "controversial" celebrity, we wouldn't expect so much to begin with and might be pleasantly surprised), ultimately runs the gamut of predictability: Fame by Gaga begins fresh grape-berry-apricot with more sweetness than anticipated from such a menacing presentation (the bottle looks like it is caught in fangs or in the pliers of a lifting machine at some enchanted factory making human replicas, someplace, an idea reinforced by the commercial), segueing into a "clean" layer of "white flowers" we've smelled in our fabric softener and plug-in home fragrance.

There's even the parting hint of smokiness for the allusion to mystery, as if something pretty needs an injection of something else too to register as coming from the meat-dress wearing celebrity or it wouldn't fit at all.

The nifty detail of the black juice inside which doesn't stain clothes or skin, as it instantly vaporizes transparent, isn't totally new either: Boudicca Wode (and not Boedicea the Victorious as I had erroneously mentioned before!) had explored the path first with her blue-tinged eau de parfum.

On the whole: Color me unimpressed.

Cool artwork though by Steven Klein. Can't knock that.

Bertrand Duchaufour and the Enchanted Forest

Bertrand Duchaufour is the creator of a new perfume, called Enchanted Forest for the Vagabond Prince brand, the first perfume to focus on blackcurrant in a domineering and soli-fruit, so to speak, role. A perfume of the forest and one which celebrates the Kupala, a Slavic festive tradition, a homage to nature and the mysteries of the forest.

Enchanted Forest by *AlineMendes on deviantART

The perfumer explains: "The challenge was great: I had to magnify the raw material (blackcurrant), a material used very often in perfumery and sometimes overused inelegantly through notes of red fruits, and in this regard I made a sort of soliflore. Soliflores are generally constructed on floral bases such as jasmine, rose, tuberose, but for Enchanted Forest the intention was quite different… and I had the idea of working the blackcurrant throughout the structure (head, heart, bottom) of the perfume. To do this, I used no less than a blackcurrant CO2 (an extract obtained directly from the blackcurrant buds, which is free of solvent residues), an absolute of blackcurrant and two different blackcurrant bases, including one of my own creation, to build a sort of skeleton, a vertical structure on which the entire perfume would be built."

 The new perfume can be sampled through a sample opportunity that Fragrantica organizes on the page with a longer article by Duchaufour from which the above quote is taken.

Notes for The Enchanted Forest for The Vagabond Prince:
Top notes:
pink pepper, aldehydes, sweet orange (traces), flower cassis, blackcurrant leaf, hawthorn, effects of rum and wine, rosemary, davana.
Heart notes:
blackcurrant buds absolute (by LMR from Grasse), CO2 blackcurrant (by Floral Concept from Grasse), Russian coriander seed, honeysuckle, rose, carnation, vetiver
Base notes:
opoponax resinoid, Siam benzoin, amber, oakmoss, fir balsam absolute, Patchouli Purecoeur®, castoreum absolute, cedar notes, vanilla, musk