Alice in Wonderland: fragrance review

Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
`I don't much care where--' said Alice.
`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat. `--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.
`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'

From "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll



When passion for perfume meets a fertile imagination you can bet you’re about to see how deep the Rabbit hole goes. The literary association is completely relevant in the case of German based Konstantin Mihov’s Alice in Wonderland, a new ultra niche scent inspired by the immortal tale of Lewis Carroll and its flights of fancy into the world of surreal and grotesque and the first to come out of his line "Parfums d’imperfiction" (what a great name, combining imperfection with fiction!!)

Although the brilliant concept would predispose someone of an experience of really weird Magritte-like emanations that -as if they were fairies or genies- would escape their container to wreck havoc and mayhem, Alice in Wonderland is really meant to give us a glimpse only of the strange world and not a full-on vista.
Indeed, apart from the beginning which I personally thought was the weaker part of the creation with its curiously “blunt” gasoline Artemisia note that was not sour or bitter as expected from that sort of ingredient, the core of the fragrance is a fantasia of glorious violet that is never cloying or oversweet managing to convey a feeling of playfulness.
The top however is completely intentional as Konstantin reveals, meant to evoke a different experience of sipping mint tea without any sweetners.

Alice is an inquisitive little girl and her attitude is in many ways redolent of a curious nature eager to get to the heart of things. By the same token, young Konstantin has been delving in fragrance-making for quite some time, 7 years to be exact, even before his psychology studies at the University, exploring the building blocks of perfumery and combining the forces of natural essences with aroma chemicals to produce scents that would be inspired by his visions and memories.

Alice in Wonderland starts on bitter Artemisia with its tea-like drydown rather dulled and then mingles the herbal aspect of a cooling minty essence and some lavender (I think) with that most curious of perfume notes, violet. Now, that is an aroma that has two basic permutations: the sweet candied school of Guerlain’s Insolence or Malle’s Lipstick Rose (in the later married to rose) or the greener, drier verdancy of Jolie Madame and Ayala Moriel’s Viola. Violets have been making a comeback in recent years after a long absence in which they were considered old-fashioned and obsolete. I consider this a good sign.
Here the violet note tends to go for the sweeter path aided by some vanillic/ hay accord, but it does not go full force in that direction. Rather tentatively it explores the crystalline aspect of it, remaining a little cool but not aloof. Alice also does not powder herself profusely, as she is only a little girl; ergo the perfume is not using that element to achieve dryness and distanced sophistication but remains light hearted.
Konstantin divulged that his violet notes come in fact from synthetic ionones (gamma-methylionone, alpha-ionone), and not from orris root combined with something as I suspected at first (probably due to carrot seed essence). In fact Konstantin impressed me and revealed in one fell swoop his confidence when he revealed actual ingredients of the composition and not mere notes. Not what your average perfumer does and all the more power to him for doing so!
The absence of artificial colouring, glycerins and preservatives is also a plus.

The virtue of the composition lies in the interchange of the herbal and floral and their beautiful dialogue. The base does not differ much from the core and the theme of the perfume echoes like a leitmotif throughout, perhaps underscored by some restrained and austere wood as a backdrop to the mischievous protagonist much like the second characters in the fairy tale.
The lasting power of Alice in Wonderland is good for this kind of scent and the character of the perfume exploring masculine and feminine sides of the same idea makes it suitable for both sexes, if they feel a little adventurous and not firmly type-cast in predestined societal roles.

Last but not least, Konstantin uses his own bold and romantic handwriting on the labels of the apothecary style bottles, in heavy black ink, accounting for a visually very pleasing product.
I wish him many successful fragrant endeavours in the future!

A 50ml/1.7oz bottle of eau de toilette costs 28 euros on Konstantin's own site. Shipping per bottle varies depending on destination - to a European destination, it is 4 euros and to overseas destination, it is 8 euros.
SAMPLES: samples can be ordered at the price of 5 euro which includes shipping anywhere (the samples are 2-3 ml non-spray vials), through email containing a shipping address which will be answered with a Paypal invoice.
Visit his site here
Feel free to email him if you have any questions, requests, or concerns: konstantin.mihov@gmail.com

ADDED: You can also now get your bottle or sample at First-in-Fragrance/ Aus liebe zum duft.com


Top pic artwork by Arthur Rackham 1907 courtesy of bedtime-story.com. Bottle pic courtesy of Konstantin Mihov.

The death of Mitsouko

Those who have followed Perfume Shrine since it started on a previous host know that I have talked about what Mitsouko means to me. How my own words cannot convey what it stirs in my soul.

And here we get official confirmation from Guerlain that the rich base of it has been irrevocably annihilated, substituting oakmoss with treemoss. Of course various slight reformulations have been performed along the way in at least the last 30 years, since Mitsouko comes from the mythical age of 1919, a farewell to the old world that got terminated in the throes of the Great War.
Inspired by a tragic tale in the first place, it is an Andromache mourning for her lost Hector, her injustly killed son Astyanax and her looming future in degraded slavery.
Read how she had forseen her future and her most touching goodbyes to her husband as described in Iliad here.
Mitsouko ,much like the above excerpt, is all the sad and proud things imagination can muster...
And although I have not compared with the new current version in rotation at shops, my heartstrings are aching for the loss of the scent that more than anything else signifies imminent tragedy, loss and hurt to me.

The following piece of music best represents the foreboding feeling I get when I utter the word Mitsouko. It's the second movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony (Allegretto) performed by conductor Charles Latshaw and his orchestra to perfection. Click here to experience the awe and wonder for the very last time, listening "to the exquisite music of that strange procession, and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing".


Artwork is by Jean Louis David "La Douleur et les Regrets d'Andromaque sur le corps d'Hector son mari" 1873, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Glorious stink

The ebb and flow of human taste and its modus operandi is an undecipherable commodity. What is considered appealing and desirable and what is not doesn’t obey any quantitative measure. Which of course accounts for trends, market research and lost fortunes in wrong assumptions side by side with the successful lucky guesses.
The same applies to smell and fragrance. More pointedly so when the aromas emanating from someone are of a more intimate nature.

Ever since the dawn of humanity homo sapiens has shared the biological fate of his ancestors in the olfactory field. His sense of smell has primarily directed him to opt for the healthy game and fresh produce and avoid the stale and rotten. It is also possible that it has directed him via odorata sexualis to suitable mates through which procreation might be consummated with the imperceptible help of pheromones, aroma materials that are emanated by individuals to attract. For millennia man has been content to do just that.

And then civilization came into the picture. In the great civilizations of antiquity such as Egypt, Greece and Rome, the desire to distance oneself from the animal nature and embrace the humane, as manifested in science, philosophy and the arts, has made man take measures as to maintain a level of cleanliness that is beyond the mere necessity of survival. All those civilizations have been very hygienic indeed, if we take into mind that there was no running hot water and no bubble baths in a million permutations.
Yet Herodotus talks about how the ancient Egyptians of his time bathed regularly shaving their body hair and even their scalps as to not let perspiration nestle in intimate parts of the body and fester bacteria (OK, he did not use the word bacteria precisely). How they had inward lavatories for their needs and how they took pains to maintain hygiene there. How they used sweet scented oils and incense to accompany the dead to their last dwelling place on earth.
The Greeks were by no means less clean. They too -living in a warm climate- had been taking regular baths using silver and golden basins followed by massage with aromatic oils of thyme and basil at every possible occasion, cleaning their clothes in the rivers with ash and aromatic herbs as described in the Odyssey and equating hygiene with sanity and longevity. Numerous are the mythological tales of gods and goddesses taking baths while mortals gazed hidden. It was Galenos who invented the first bar of soap mixing crushed flower petals, olive oil and ash from burnt logwood.
Ancient Rome was the apex of public baths, in which people of all ages intermingled and talked about state matters in elaborate buildings divided in unctuarium (where they chose the unguents with which they would groom themselves), the frigidarium (cold bath) and the caldarium (hot bath) and then on to the labrum for the final cold shower.
Even lavender that clean smelling herb is named after the roman word for bathing, because of its ubiquitous use.
The tradition of the bath as a civilization index is no more apparent that in Tacitus’ opus Germania where he mentions with some disdain that Germanians, considered barbarians at the time, bathed in rivers. At least they did bathe! Which is more than can be said for the squalor and filth in which Medieval Europe lived for centuries after the fall of Rome.

While Islam reveled in the luxuries of bathing (aided by the religious prerequisite to clean one’s head, hands and feet before every prayer, a phenomenon that occurs with frequent regularity throughout the day), western Europe inaugurated a practice of not washing up one’s body at all, for which the church can be found to be a great culprit.
Maintaining that mixed baths (as were previously tentatively explored) were corrupting the soul and that tending to one’s genitals might lead to impure thoughts, they condoned the absence of bath as a means of chastity while at the same time they traditionally equated holiness with the sweet smell of myrrh and incense. How those two could co-exist is beyond me, but this is not the only paradox one comes up against if one explores the matter further.

It was as late as 1750 according to Alain Corbin and his book “Le Miasme and la Jonquile”, which explores the adventure of sanitation and the desodorisation of society, that the élite chose to distance itself from the foul stench of the gutters and disease that were abundant in the crowded -by then- cities of France. A taste for the aroma of deer musk or of catty civet and of pure country air mingled in what was to become the height of French perfumery. The impression of cleanliness underscored by the reminder that we are all human, full of smells that could be perceived as disgusting in their pure state.
However perfumes seemed to be necessary still to repel the germs and bacteria through their cleansing properties as the tradition of filth continued, albeit a bit subdued: at least the clothes were as freshly clean as possible.
Louis XIV was said to have only bathed two times in his whole long life despite asking his guests and courtesans to wear a different perfume every day and the mere thought disgusts us today, earning a reputation of filth for Frenchmen which sadly has not been totally shifted if I judge by the miniscule pieces of sanitary paper that come out - one at a time!!- through the automatic devices at French toilets today.
On the other hand there was also an allure of the animalic and forbidden in similar practices when Napoleon infamously wrote to Josephine: “Je reviens en trois jours; ne te laves pas!” (I return in three days; don’t wash yourself).
The pair of them began a vogue for heavier smells as Josephine was madly in love with the smell of musk, to the point that her boudoir at Malmaison still has an aura of the aromatic essence present. Napoleon on the other hand preferred her in violets.

The Victorian age reveled in pure and simple smells as a contrast to the more decadent Empire style, using single floral waters (soliflores) for men and women alike. But it was the Puritans more than anyone else that began the hysteria for cleanliness with their desire to eliminate all traces of animalic tendencies from man. Sadly this is an insurmountable task, as the human body has to produce bile and bacteria to break down food which accounts for a smell that cannot be completely eradicated however hard one tries.
Indoor plumbing and hot water at the click of a button made taking baths an easy and swift procedure that is as an automatic reflex for today’s men and women as brushing one’s teeth. Technological progressions made the manufacture of industrial strength deodorants to put under one’s armpits as a necessity of every day life that is a god sent if you’re ever stuck up in a crowded underground wagon on a hot day of August. Perfumed products in an array of mind arresting variety are manufactured to lure as in and buy more, more, more…

And yet in all that progress we seem to have lost what has once been ours in ancient years: the conjugation of mind and body, the clean with the human.
The examples of complete perfume bans in offices in latter days, the denial of the sensual and natural in favour of the sanitized and deodorized has permeated every single aspect of today’s life. Everything around us is artificially scented with a chemical aroma that defies every law of nature. We scrub fanatically to remove any trace of human smell from our bodies and then we apply perfumed products that would supposedly give us back what nature intended to give us in order to attract a mate. We seek to find “clean” but at the same time “sexy” smells. Above all we do not want to offend. Being accused of smelling of body odour is the height of mortification for anyone beyond infancy. (since kids do not really “smell”; there have to be sexual hormones at play to do that…)
In an overcrowded planet that has no room for any more bodies, this was to be expected.
And this is what accounts for the recent resurgence of perfumes that aim to regress in the stink and funk of our human condition: from the goat-y magnificence of Muscs Kublai Khan by enfant gaté Serge Lutens to the dirty smell of Kiehl’s Musk eau de toilette and from the soft caress of a slightly sweaty body that has been active in human activities of L’air de rien by Miller Harris (with the collaboration of Jane Birkin) to the gimmicky Sécretions magnifiques by état libre d’Orange which recalls semen and blood (sounds the recipe for some tabloid article)…

It is clear that one yearns for what one is denied of. And the reason why isn’t very hard to see.


Artwork by Patric Boivine for CGnetworks.com

Fragrance review: Avicenna by Annette Neuffer

Annette Neuffer is a multi-talented lady you have not come across associated with fragrance yet. But you sure will. Not only is she an accomplished jazz musician with a quintet after her own name, performing all around the world, she has also stepped into the perilous world of perfumery using all natural essences to render her wild imaginings palpable and tangible for us.
Her generosity in sending me her labour of love was astounding and I am honoured to have been at the receiving end. To tell you the truth, I begin all those samplings with no expectations at all (since I don’t want to be prejudiced one way or another), but usually they prove very pleasant and sometimes even gripping to my surprise.

Annette’s most accomplished foray into the art of composing perfume so far is Avicenna, a sumptuous oriental of a deep ambery golden colour like a monastic liqueur. A complex and dark mix of several expensive rose essences of various origin (Bulgarian, Turkish, Russian, Moroccan), jasmine, broom, pepper, honey, sandalwood, amber, vanilla and musks.
The name alone enticed me as soon as I heard about it: Avicenna or more accurately Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina (born in Isfahan, the legendary city in 980AD), was the famous researcher, scientist and philosopher of Islam who was responsible for cracking the secret of rose distillation in the 10th century. Islam is a culture stepped deep into the cult of the rose. For them rose is the essence of beauty, holiness and spirituality. It appears in many facets of everyday life and plays an important part in religious ceremonies. The thick plush petals that resemble velvet hold a fascination for the denizens of the anhydrous regions of the Middle East and its heavy narcotic feel lulls the mind into a reverie.
Annette Neuffer was inspired by these historical details and strove to create something with an ancient feel to it, something that would lend some small magical touch in our everyday preparation to face the perilous world out there, a fragrant talisman for our protection.

The spicy cascade Avicenna opens with takes you by the throat and forces you to pay attention as caustic pepper singes and swirls around floral essences, perhaps a tad too stringently. Ginger and cardamom are also apprarent, while cinnamon does not make a too noticeable appearence, certainly not what you're accustomed to from its ubiquitous use in pot-pourri. The garland of rose unfolds on the skin majestically, like a thousand petals crushed underfoot in a medieval palace in Tehran. Myriads of nuances of rose take on mellow hues lent by smooth saffron and the bracken and honey feel of broom as the progression of the maturing of the precious and quite potent essence is continuing. It is very apparent that those sensations have their feet firmly in the sensual world of the material world of Nature rather than the white-coat lab of an urban conglomerate technician. There is no sharp note or that high pitched aluminium and glass feel of modern perfumes that one can smell at a department store. It’s cobbled alleys and dirt instead.
The underlying mustiness has reminded me of the famous Caron accord that is so evident in most of the venerable firm’s offerings. Their Poivre, Parfum Sacre and Rose parfums all contribute elements that can be traced later on in Avicenna.
As I inhale deeply I am transported to Top Kapi, the Constantinople palace where draperies of heavy damask hide Byzantine secrets and languorous kohl-eyed sultanas take a break from their more carnal occupations to revel in the romanticized florancy of rose and the piercing sweetness of natural jasmine in the lazy hours of a never ending afternoon.
Aromatic resins such as erotic labdanum and mellow benzoin anchor the composition with restraint so that it never becomes too sweet, as one might fear judging by the notes; although they do lend tremendous fixation and staying power to it. The final phase recalls the deep and dull colour of large amber beads threaded together in a komboloi (playing beads), one ticking the other incessantly, as time elapses lazily until all aromas on skin very, very slowly exit with a sigh.

The official notes are as follows:

Head

Black Pepper, Cinnamon Bark, Cardamom, Ginger, Macis, Mandarin, Bergamot, Tunisian Neroli

Heart
Saffron Absolute, Tunisian Orange Blossom absolute, Turkish and Bulgarian Rose Otto and absolute, Moroccan Rose Absolute, Russian Rose Absolute, Jasminum Grandiflorum Egypt, Acacia Farnesiana, Indian Tuberose, Broom Absolute

Base
Beeswax Absolute Supιrieur, Oppoponax, Elemi, Labdanum, Benzoin, Vanilla Absolute, Mysore Sandalwood, Copaiva Balsam, Hibiscus Abelmoschus


Annette Neuffer might not be as experienced as some other established perfumers, but her passion and interest in the world of natural essences is at least engaging and worth exploring for yourself.
I highly recommend you visit her Perfume Page here, where you can get info, request samples and possibly order.
You can also contact her directly at: info@naturparfum.net



Pic is of Blue Mosque in Constantinople/Istanbul courtesy of pbase.com